BY COLIN MIXSON | Law have mercy!
Reverend Billy, the activist and performance artist, is suing the Metropolitan Transit Authority, claiming its officers ran roughshod over his God-given rights as an American by arresting him for a peaceful, legal protest at Grand Central Station earlier this year.
“My First Amendment rights to freedom of expression were completely violated,” said Billy Talen, who takes on the persona of a Southern preacher to sermonize against the many-horned demon of consumerism and other social ills.
Talen, who currently lives in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, got his start in the East Village and is a well-known figure on the Downtown activist scene. He filed a federal suit last Friday, claiming the transit authority not only violated his constitutional freedom by silencing his protest, but also falsely arrested him and then defamed him by publicly suggesting he had assaulted authorities first.
The hellfire-and-brimstone dissident said he was two minutes into a sermon at an anti-police-brutality rally inside the concourse of Grand Central on Jan. 6, when transit cops — alongside officers from the New York Police Department and Homeland Security — descended on the gathering and took him away in cuffs to spend a night behind bars.
As a political activist who often engages in civil disobedience, Talen accepts spending time in the slammer as part of his job description. But this was not an act of civil disobedience, said his lawyer — Talen was merely exercising free speech in a public place, and authorities targeted him as a high-profile rabble-rouser.
In fact, Talen’s sermon came near the end of a 24-hour vigil commemorating black people killed by police officers that kicked off at 5 p.m. on Jan. 5, and it wasn’t until the following day at 1 p.m. that cops swooped in to silence the firebrand, his attorney said.
“[Grand Central Station] is a modern-day public square. He was engaging commuters, engaging citizens, and not blocking anybody,” said lawyer Wylie Stecklow. “This is a very well-protected First Amendment activity and for no other reason than it was Reverend Billy they decided to take him away in cuffs.”
After the incident, a transit authority spokesman told the media that protesters at the event had “got physical” with police — which Talen believes falsely implied he had acted violently.
“There was nothing violent from me, no bad words, no tension in my arms or my hands,” said Talen, who ran for mayor in 2009 but garnered less than 1 percent of the city’s vote.
Footage of the arrest appears to show the performance-artist preacher complying peacefully as police handcuff him.
The incident occurred shortly after a crazed gunman killed two police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was a particularly bad time to have a reputation as someone who violently attacks authorities, said Stecklow.
“To claim he is a threat, when the police are on edge and he deals with police all the time, you are putting that figurative target on his back, and that is just not O.K.,” he said. “The M.T.A. needs to be more responsible.”
The transit authority declined to comment.
