A New York City art professor who threatened a reporter with a machete was heard chanting about “slitting the master’s throat” at an anti-Israel rally. Shellyne Rodriguez, a former teacher at Hunter College and the Cooper Union School of Art, delivered a speech to a crowd at the Brooklyn Museum saying “our ancestors dreamed of us slitting the master’s throat” while wearing a t-shirt declaring that “Police Murder People.” She went on to claim that non-white people horrify their ancestors when they join the “slave patrol” New York Police Department (NYPD).
Hunter College fired the leftist activist in 2023 when video footage emerged showing her threatening a journalist who sought to question her about trashing a student group’s anti-abortion display. Rodriguez later pleaded guilty to menacing and was ordered to undergo 13 months of behavioral therapy.
The art teacher has a long and antagonistic history with NYPD, and in 2021, she filed a lawsuit accusing police of launching a “brutal assault” on demonstrators during the 2020 George Floyd riots. That case is still winding its way through the judicial system, but in August, text messages between NYPD officers were published, including one encouraging them to kick the protestors’ a**.
Following the frightening run-in with a New York Post reporting team, photographer Reuven Fenton spoke with Sean Hannity and described the encounter. He said she threatened to “chop them up,” and when they saw her machete and left, she chased them through the street – an incident caught on nearby CCTV and dashcam cameras.
Hunter College fired Rodriguez when her altercation made headlines, and she later went to work for the private Cooper Union School of Art. The art teacher was subsequently fired again for making anti-Israel remarks at a rally, including a recommendation that people boycott the Jewish state. In a subsequent Instagram post, she accused the school of “fascism” and of firing her because she disparaged “Zionists” on social media.
A spokeswoman for the college would not comment but some student pro-Palestinian groups backed her up, saying her sacking was an “escalation of McCarthyist repression meant to intimidate and punish those in support of a free Palestine.”
