The fired Hunter College professor who held a machete to a New York Post reporter’s neck organized “f–k police” protests which led to mass arrests.
Shellyne Rodriguez, 45, is a part of Take back The Bronx and helped organize “FTP” protests in the Bronx in the wake of George Floyd’s death, one of which was advertised by the group with images of a burning NYPD ban and the words: “We talking about a revolution.”
Shellyne Rodriguez, 45, is also a member of Decolonize This Place and played a leading role when the anarchist group targeted the Whitney Museum. The anarchist group also vandalized the city’s subway in 2019 with anti-cop graffiti.
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 June 2020 she boasted to the Mott Haven Herald that she had been zip-tied by police during anti-police protests in the Bronx in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The aim was “to incite people to react, respond and self-determine,” she said.
The group promoted the march on its Instagram. The account also calls police “pigs” and refers to Italian Americans as “goomba eyetalians.”
Gothamist named her as a leader of the “FTP4” march on June 4, 2020. Her co-organizer, Shannon Jones, the co-founder of Bronxites for NYPD Accountability, told the outlet she was charged with resisting arrest.
The march was also promoted by Decolonize This Place, another anti-police group. It was founded by New York University professor Amin Husain and artist Nitasha Dhillon.
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.
Rodriguez played a key role in one of Decolonize This Place’s most high-profile acts in 2019.
The group targeted the then-vice chairman of the Whitney, Warren Kanders, angered at his role as head of Safariland, a company that manufactures military and law enforcement equipment.
Rodriguez often led the anti-Kanders protests outside his Manhattan home, 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 would shout. Decolonize This Place had posted Kanders’ home address on social media in 2018.
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.”
Rodriguez also led a protest in 2018, occupying part of the Brooklyn Museum. It was reported by art publication Hyperallergic, which said she “helped lead the event” which wanted the museum to “create a decolonization commission.”
And in 2020, she took part when Decolonize This Place urged its radical followers to “f–k s–t up” in a Twitter video fronted by three masked radicals advertising “FTP3.” It led to 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.
She boasted to WBAI that it was “easy to get up” that morning and said that the aim was “to clog the arteries” of the transit system. She was not arrested, according to public records.
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.
Then-Mayor Bill de Blasio said he was “repulsed” by the hooliganism.
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.
The Post has reached out to Rodriguez for comment.