The fired Hunter College professor who held a machete to a New York Post reporter’s neck founded a group behind “f–k police” protests that trashed subway stations in a spree of anarchic vandalism.
Shellyne Rodriguez, 45, is a founder of Decolonize This Place, an anarchist group that vandalized the city’s subway in 2019 with anti-cop graffiti, and occupied the Whitney Museum of American Art for several months in 2018 and 2019.
Rodriguez was fired as an adjunct by Hunter College on Tuesday just hours after she was caught on video holding the blade to Post reporter Reuven Fenton’s neck while threatening to “chop” him up outside her Bronx apartment.
Foul-mouthed Rodriguez held the machete to Fenton’s neck and ranted: “Get the f–k away from my door or I’m going to chop you up with this machete!”
And after he left her building, she followed him and The Post’s photographer, waved the weapon and kicked Fenton in the shins.
She was under investigation Tuesday night after a complaint was filed for possible assault charges, a law enforcement source told The Post.
Her astonishing attack on Fenton unfolded after footage surfaced online that showed Rodriguez unleashing a profanity-laden attack on anti-abortion students who’d set up an information table at Hunter College earlier this month.
But The Post can reveal that Rodriguez has a long history of outrageous conduct.
In 2016, she founded Decolonize This Place with New York University professor Amin Husain, artist Nitasha Dhillon and NYU PhD student Marz Saffore.
It describes itself online as a grassroots social justice organization that seeks to raise awareness of the struggles of Native and African Americans, Palestinians and other marginalized groups.
But in 2019, Decolonize This Place urged its radical followers to “f–k s–t up” in a violent assault on the city’s transit system that concluded with $100,000 in damage and 13 arrests.
“We encourage you to link up with your friends, your family and think of the ways you can move in affinity to f–k s–t up on J-31 all day long,” a masked man said in a video posted to the Twitter page of Decolonize This Place.
The agitators held emergency gates open with bike locks, zip-ties and violin strings and rendered turnstiles useless with glue and spray paint.
They sprayed buses, stations on the A, B and C lines from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights, as well as at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, and trains with ““F–k cops, f–k MTA,” “Free transit” and other anti-cop, anti-MTA messages.
And they targeted rush hour at Grand Central, surrounding the ticket booth to try to stop sales, waving placards saying “From the A to the Z, public transit should be free.”
The goals of the group included “no cops in the MTA, free transit [and] no harassment.”
Police busted 13 people, including nine men and four women, in the protests — some for violent offenses, one against a cop, while a 20-year-old man from LA, Jasper Skelton, allegedly pointed a laser pointer into an officer’s eye.
It is not known if Rodriguez participated in the day of vandalism. She was not arrested, according to public records.
Then Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “repulsed” by the hooliganism.
Around the same time as the subway protests, one of Decolonize This Place’s first acts was to target the then-vice chairman of the Whitney, Warren Kanders, by posting his address on social media and holding protests outside his Manhattan home.
The group was angered at his role as head of Safariland, a company that manufactures military and law enforcement equipment.
Rodriguez often led the anti-Kanders protests, shouting “Warren Kanders, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” a witness to the demonstrations told The Post Tuesday.
“You will not rest easy … because everybody knows now where you live,” she continued.
Kanders, an art collector and philanthropist who had been on the museum’s board since 2006, resigned in July 2019.
“There’s no surprise,” said a former target of Rodriguez’s and Husain’s protests who did not want to be identified Wednesday. “This type of protest will lead to violence. What amazes me is that the administrations of universities are so woke that they won’t stand up to this kind of behavior.”
Decolonize This Place merged with other disaffected groups including movements to defund the police after national outrage over the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020.
Her co-founder Husain, an adjunct faculty member at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, has spoken publicly about attacking Israeli soldiers as a teenager during the first Palestinian intifada, a four-year-long uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip which began in 1987.
“I was throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, the like,” he said at a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square in July 2016 captured on a YouTube video.
In addition to Decolonize This Place, Rodriguez is active with Take Back the Bronx, which describes itself as “a radical grass roots collective organizing for community control of the hood since 2011.”
The Post has reached out to Rodriguez for comment.