By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2025-03-07 00:47:44 | Updated at 2025-03-09 01:09:24
2 days ago
The nine agitators arrested during Wednesday night’s takeover of a Barnard College academic building were all released with desk appearance tickets, as it was revealed none of them were actually students at the elite women’s college.
The disruptors taken into custody included several from privileged backgrounds, including one whose family founded the popular Hampton Jitney bus service in the 1970s — and one rabble rouser who had been busted at two other protests and has called for the “overthrow” of America.
The nine were cuffed after more than 200 protesters swarmed the Milstein Library at Barnard College, many of them from nearby schools including Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, a source told The Post.
Among those arrested was Alexander Nanci-Marr, 20, whose family, from tony Sag Harbor in the Hamptons, started the Hampton Jitney, which in its heyday shuttled Hollywood royalty like Lauren Bacall and George Plimpton to their oceanside estates, and even once appeared in an episode of “Sex and the City.”
She was taken into custody after refusing cops’ orders to disperse while trying to clear the area following a bogus bomb threat that prompted an evacuation of Milstein Library. According to sources, Nanci-Marr locked arms with fellow protesters and pushed back against police lines.
Christopher Holmes, 26, is a serial troublemaker who was previously arrested when the NYPD stormed Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall last April after a violent and chaotic occupation by anti-Israel demonstrators.
The protesters smashed glass, barricaded the building from the inside and draped a large flag calling for “intifada” from the building named for Alexander Hamilton. Holmes, who officers saw smashing glass windows, was charged with reckless endangerment, burglary, criminal mischief and conspiracy.
Cops eventually got inside and arrested 44 people including two professors.
Holmes was featured in a video on X filmed at Columbia in which he blasted the university curriculum as “imperial in nature” and flippantly said he was “fighting for the total eradication of western civilization,” adding, “except for African civilization.”
Also arrested was Columbia class of 2025 president Gabrielle Wilmer, a medical student at Columbia University’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons from Westport, Connecticut, on the Nutmeg State’s “Gold Coast” — one of the wealthiest suburbs in the US.
She’s an active member of White Coats for Black Lives at the university, and Students for a National Health Program, according to her social media posts.
Others hauled off campus by police included Hanna Puelle — whose Instagram identifies her as publisher of Columbia Law Review — and Yunseo Chung, a Columbia women’s studies junior, former high school valedictorian and social media editor for Quarto, the university’s official undergraduate literary magazine.
The bomb threat that came in at the height of Wednesday’s protest at Barnard was apparently meant to intimidate the rowdy mob of masked students and interlopers, a source told The Post.
An unknown individual sent the school a vulgar email through an anonymous dark web messaging service claiming to have placed a 1-inch by 8-inch pipe bomb in the Barnard College library, specifically targeting what the sender referred to as “anti-white f—-t terrorist communist (sic).”
A staff member called 911, which prompted the police to come in and evacuate the library, the source said.
The chaos at Barnard on Wednesday spilled into Thursday, when a fresh crop of some 200 student protesters gathered on the steps of Low Library at Columbia in the afternoon. The NYPD set up barricades and was checking student IDs before allowing them on campus in an attempt to maintain order.
Some anti-Israel protesters outside the campus, all of whom refused to speak to The Post, held signs reading “CUNY faculty member says: Down with McCarthyite witch hunts against pro-Palestine protesters!” and “CUNY students in solidarity against the witch hunt — cops out!”
Another protester handed out flyers from Bob Avakian’s New Communism group, Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, comparing President Trump to Hitler.
“Trump’s fascist rule, like Hitler’s before him, is a regime of horrors — and is completely illegitimate,” it read in part.
By mid-afternoon, some students from the Columbia protest, most wearing masks and keffiyehs, marched to Barnard, chanting “Barnard College we know you, you arrest our students too” and “Laura Rosenbury we know you, you arrest students too,” in a reference to Barnard President Laura Rosenbury.
This week’s protests, which followed another campus building takeover last week, were sparked by the expulsion of a pair of students who barged into a class on modern Israel to distribute hateful literature, including a flyer featuring an army boot stomping down on a Star of David.
Rosenbury and other Barnard administrators drew most of the protesters’ ire, who were even featured in an Old West-style “wanted” poster and a hastily rigged effigy outside Milstein Library.
There were signs calling for Rosenbury’s removal, and even suggesting Wednesday’s bomb threat was fabricated to have students removed.
“Lyin’ Laura must resign, we will fight for Palestine,” one chant repeatedly rang out.
Just before 3 p.m. the protest at Columbia ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, but the protesters vowed they would return.
“We will be back, f–k the police. Buddy up, mask up, stay safe,” they chanted before departing in an uncharacteristically orderly fashion.
