Punched by a cop at a pro-choice rally, Jennifer Rourke pushes forward
An exclusive conversation with the Rhode Island activist and candidate
Welcome to a special Sunday edition of Progress Report.
Tomorrow, we’ll have a story on our post-Roe world and what can be done over the next few years to mitigate some of the damage. In today’s edition of the newsletter, we talk with an organizer and legislative candidate whose experience this weekend offers a preview of what’s to come as we grapple with reactionaries emboldened by a vicious minoritarian government.
By the way, we’ve raised well over $50,000 for abortion funds and providers since Friday. Thank you all for your generosity.
In a statement released less than two hours after the Supreme Court handed down its calamitous decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden solemnly acknowledged that an incalculable number of Americans will suffer from the loss of abortion rights, and noted that Republicans are likely to attack other rights, such as marriage equality. Then, in a preemptive appeal, Biden asked outraged protestors to keep their pickets and marches peaceful and free of violence, intimidation, and verbal threats.
At the same time that the statement was being drafted and released, heavily armed riot police marched across Capitol Hill to stand guard against protestors at the Supreme Court, which had already been walled off by barbed wire fencing. By that evening, police officers, both on and off duty, were assaulting pro-choice demonstrators and members of the media at protests all across the country. Not even cast members of Full House were safe at this weekend’s protests.
Biden had nothing to do with the attacks, nor would he condone them. But the contrast between the president’s explicit request of a vast majority of Americans, his urging that they do not strike fear into the heart of fascists, and the violence deployed against anyone that dares challenge injustice, are indicative of how American oligarchs intend to maintain their illegitimate grip on power as they further persecute Americans.
The looming threat of state violence is nothing new to Jennifer Rourke, a political organizer and reproductive rights activist in Rhode Island. Still, Rourke, who is running for state senate in Warwick, did not expect to be assaulted by an off-duty police officer at a protest she organized Friday night in Providence.
“I had just gotten off stage from speaking, and there was a verbal disagreement, so as one of the organizers, I went and I successfully deescalated it,” Rourke tells Progress Report. “I was escorting the counter-protester out when Officer Lugo punched me multiple times.”
Rourke wasn’t sure what Lugo, an anti-abortion Republican, was doing at the pro-choice protest; she hadn’t even noticed him there before the assault, and he fled the scene in its immediate aftermath. But the altercation likely wasn’t just some random assault by a thuggish, misogynist cop — Lugo, a Republican, was running in the Republican primary in SD-29, the same state senate district that Rourke is vying to represent.
It also wouldn’t have been hard for him to pick Rourke out of the large crowd, given her role as a speaker and organizer at the rally. Still, Rourke was stumped as to why Lugo decided to lash out, at least at that moment.
“I have never had any intimate interaction with him until he decided to punch me in my face,” she says. “But these acts of violence aren't anything that's abnormal.”
Lugo, a three-year veteran of the Providence Police Department, has been placed on administrative leave with pay pending internal and criminal investigations; he also dropped out of the GOP primary. Rourke, who underwent a CT scan on Saturday and is suffering from symptoms of a concussion, an ongoing ringing in her ear, and bruises on her face, would like to see him removed from the force altogether.
“If you are a sworn officer of the law, you're supposed to protect, you're not supposed to harm, and he is someone who obviously harmed me,” she says. “I don't think he is in he has the capacity to be on the street, so I hope that he is no longer a police officer.”
As shocking and violating as the attack was, Lugo is hardly Rourke’s biggest concern or political rival. As a co-founder of the Rhode Island Political Cooperative, a progressive nonprofit that empowers people of color, LGBTQI+, and working-class candidates for elected office, Rourke is part of a movement to overcome a conservative elite that has had a stranglehold the Ocean State’s politics for years and years.
Spurred by a quartet of major primary upsets, including one that took down the powerful conservative state House Majority Leader, the RIPC officially launched in 2019. Its first slate included 24 candidates, of which 16 wound up winning office.
Rourke took on the biggest challenge, running an uphill primary against state Senate Majority Leader Michael McCaffrey, and while she fell short, she came close enough to expose him as eminently beatable. Her second race against him has taken on a new urgency; McCaffrey is so anti-abortion that he was endorsed by the Right to Life Foundation in 2020 after he worked diligently to block the codifying of reproductive rights the year prior.
McCaffrey was ultimately forced to cave — more than 70% of Rhode Islanders are pro-choice — but was still able to rig the legislative process to prevent state employees and Medicaid recipients from having abortion care covered by insurance. Passing the Reproductive Privacy Act, which would fix those cruel exemptions, is one of Rourke’s main focuses as an organizer, and would be a priority should she take down McCaffrey in the September primary.
Same-sex marriage, another policy that McCaffrey opposed, would also be high up on the list; Rourke has a gay son who recently asked her who would protect him if Republicans on the Supreme Court made it difficult or even illegal for him to start a family with the help of IVF or other assistance.
“The people that are in office right now don't understand that perspective, because they are usually cis white men who are lawyers, who are married to cis white women,” Rourke says. “So they don't understand that there is a whole community of people out there that don't have the rights that they should be entitled to.”
McCaffrey has served in the Rhode Island legislature for nearly 30 years, and some people protective of his reign hurled racist insults at Rourke during their 2020 face-off. Now, she’s been assaulted by a cop. What would understandably overwhelm some candidates has only made her more defiant and determined to change the political power structure in the state.
I'm just a Black and Puerto Rican chick from the projects, but people in power] don't understand what it's like to say, ‘hey, my food comes in a box or I have food stamps to survive,” Rourke says. “And that's why having more working-class people like myself up there is so important and I'm okay with having to battle the racists. They’re just loud — they're like small dogs with a big bark.”
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