‘Occupy’ Defendant Takes the Witness Stand

By REBECA IBARRA

The tensions between authority and protest that marked the Occupy Wall Street movement  played out in Manhattan Supreme Court Tuesday as a 25-year-old graduate student and activist accused of assaulting a New York Police Department officer during a protest two years ago took the stand in her own defense.

Cecily McMillan, a part-time nanny and member of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2010, testified that she was  at first reluctant to join a movement with no clear mission statement and a potential to turn violent. “They called me a liberal,” she said to her attorney, Martin Stolar. “I didn’t know that was a backhanded term.”

Even McMillan’s elegant clothes set her apart from the other activists. “I was published on Mother Jones as the ‘Paris Hilton of Occupy Wall Street,’” she said.

McMillan elbowed NYPD officer Grantley Bovell in the face as he attempted to arrest her during a demonstration at Zuccotti Park on the night of March 17 2012 and was charged with second-degree assault on a police officer, a crime punishable with up to seven years in prison.

Martin Stolar, McMillan’s lawyer, argues that the volunteer union organizer and New School student swerved around and accidentally struck Bovell as a reaction to having her breast grabbed from behind.

Over two dozen McMillan supporters attended the trial yesterday. Many chuckled at her comments and scoffed whenever the prosecution objected, thinning the patience of an already irritated Judge Ronal A. Zweibel.

“There is to be no laughter in this courtroom during testimony,” Zweibel told the audience.

Stolar attempted to stress McMillan’s reputation for being an advocate of non-violent protest through the testimony of various former Occupy activists. He grew visibly irritated with Assistant District Attorney Erin Choi, who objected over 30 times during the testimony of Marissa Holmes, a graduate student at Hunter College and former activist peer of McMillan.

“I’ve known her to be non-violent in all her activities,” Holmes said of McMillan. “She had no problem with the state. She had no problem with the police.”

Stolar brought in frame-by-frame images of a pixelated, 53-second videoclip of the encounter between McMillan and Bovell the prosecution presented last week as proof of the alleged assault. The dark and unclear images showed Bovell behind McMillan amid dozens of riled up protesters and police but did little to provide definite answers of what happened that night.

“They see what they want to see in the video,” Stolar told a group of supporters outside court after the trial. “We see what we want to see.”

McMillan was slated be questioned by the prosecution when she was expected to return to the stand the following day.