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Who/Why
My name is Madalena McNeil, and I am an organizer in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have created this fundraiser to ask for help with critical expenses related to my medical bills, mortgage, and emergency home repairs. This is a step I do not take lightly, and have avoided pursuing until this point — because I genuinely believe it is the responsibility of white activists to put themselves fully on the line in pursuit of justice, and to be prepared for whatever consequences are to follow. That said, the last few months have been more difficult than I anticipated, and have included a range of emergencies and unexpected costs that have left me with no alternative but to ask my community for help. My intent is to keep only enough funds to cover basic emergency expenses, and to donate any excess to mutual aid efforts in my area. The top priority will be catching up on the mortgage on my house at 746 Loveland Ave, which is currently being used as a community storage space for mutual aid supplies, and making my overdue October payments on my medical bills.
What Happened
I moved to Salt Lake City from Virginia in 2014, and since then I have worked within my community as an organizer, activist, and youth mentor. In March, when the pandemic hit, I become one of the original organizers behind the Salt Lake Covid-19 Mutual Aid Network, which to date has redistributed over $50,000 in groceries, PPE, household supplies, emergency cash, and other resources to families and community members across the Wasatch Front. When protests started after George Floyd’s murder, COVID-19 Mutual Aid volunteers started to offer protest support, providing free water, masks, hand sanitizer, snacks, and sunscreen to protestors for racial justice. A driver of the local protest movement was the murder of Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal. Bernardo, only 22 years old, was shot in the back by Salt Lake City Police on May 23rd. Regular protests were held across Salt Lake City, including in front of the District Attorney office, demanding justice for Bernardo family. Organizers and anyone seen regularly attending the protests were targeted by police.
On July 2, SLCPD arrested a Justice for Bernardo organizer when he was briefly separated from the group during a demonstration at the Salt Lake City and County Building. When I and a couple mutual aid volunteers got in my car to go provide jail support, we were stalked by SLCPD, who had several units circling the block where my car was parked waiting for a friend to lock her bike. SLCPD even went as far as to station an SUV at the gas station down the street, where it idled until we got in my car and started to drive away, at which point the unit peeled out and pulled me over. At this point, a friend listening to a police scanner texted me to say that police comms were talking about pulling over my car for expired registration and suspicion of involvement with protests. Sure enough, police cited me for expired registration, and went as far as to have my car impounded.
(This was only the beginning of issues with my car, which had to have the battery replaced after wear and tear from being driven as a supply vehicle during protests. It was also impounded a second time by Cottonwood Heights PD on August 1, when they attacked a group of protestors during a peaceful demonstration in memory of Zane James, murdered by Cottonwood Heights PD. That day multiple people were beaten and arrested, and I was pepper sprayed in the mouth and had my car towed.)
On July 9th, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill announced that he would not be pressing charges against the officers who killed Bernardo, and in fact praised their behavior and conduct. That night, community members gathered outside the DA’s office to protest this decision. After red paint was spilled in the street to symbolize the blood on the hands of the District Attorney, police moved in on protestors with brutal levels of force, attacking the crowd with riot shields, pepper spray, batons, and beanbag guns. Later, it would be revealed that the District Attorney texted the city mayor to demand “my police” to protect “my building” -- meaning the DA directly requested the use of force against protestors. Almost more disturbing is the clear way the DA self-identified as the victim in the situation, and yet went on to press charges against protestors rather than excuse himself from the case due to the clear conflict of interest.
July 9th was a brutal show of force by police. One of my co-defendants was shot in the leg with a beanbag gun, later charged with felony Riot even as the hole in her leg continued to heal. Bones were broken and blood splattered the streets as police attacked and stalked a small group of protestors, deploying low-flying helicopters, dozens of arrest vans, and scores of fully outfitted officers.
Police also stole my cell phone that day, knocking it out of my hand as I was live-streaming their attack. When my phone hit the ground, I didn’t have a chance to grab it before it was snatched up by officers, who took it to their command post downtown. SLCPD later justified this by categorizing the phone as “abandoned property,” and I still haven’t gotten it back despite multiple attempts.
In the weeks following the July 9th protest, my friends and I were subject to police harassment and surveillance at our homes and workplaces. I continued to participate in protests against police brutality, assuming the increased surveillance was the routine police surveillance of activists, not that I was being stalked in preparation for arrest. Several incidents of stalking were documented on my Twitter and Instagram account, including one instance where the official SLCPD twitter responded dismissively to my tweet about a marked car sitting outside my house. I then received an apology, on twitter, from both the department and the city mayor. This only served to deepen the attempted manipulation of myself and other activists, as it has now been proven that police were surveilling my home in preparation for an arrest.
On August 4th, police were again stalking my home. That afternoon, I noticed several squad cars driving back and forth in front of my house. When I stepped outside, they turned the corner, and at least three police cars remained parked just around the edge of my block for several hours. The roof of their cars were visible from my front porch. One officer even waved to my roommate as he biked by them. About four hours later, once the warrant for my arrest had been processed, the same officers walked around the block to my house and handcuffed me on my front porch. Despite having hours to prepare, these officers had not bothered to have a female officer on scene for the arrest. Instead, they had had me sit in handcuffs in my yard, in front of my neighbors, waiting for an officer to show up and search me. The skin around my mouth was still burning from being pepper sprayed just a few days earlier.
After being searched, I was taken to the Salt Lake County jail where I was processed and booked. I was one of the last of my co-defendants to receive my charges, but almost all of us had been charged with the same 1F and 3F counts. This was due to DA Sim Gill’s use of a “gang enhancement,” an antiquated statute that allows a prosecutor to enhance charges in 2 or more people are believed to be involved in a crime. Almost all of my co-defendants are under 30 years old, and about 50% are people of color.
The charges I received were 1st degree felony Criminal Mischief and 3rd degree felony Riot. The 1st-degree felony was based on an allegation that I had bought the paint used in the July 9th protest. The 3rd-degree felony was based on an allegation by a police officer that I had “shifted my weight” in a menacing way while standing on the front lines of the protestors facing riot police. I was wearing a safety vest at the time and was there to provide emergency medical support to protestors who were being attacked by police. I’m still not sure how a 5’4” mutual aid volunteer in a tshirt and leggings can be menacing to a police officer in full riot gear, just as I’m not sure how any protestors surrounded by militarized police can maintain enough power to be menacing at all. There was never any threat to this officer’s life or safety, but there was — and continues to be — a desire to make a point to protestors at large: your very existence in opposition to police violence is a crime.
After spending most of the evening in jail, I was released on bond at around 2AM and allowed to return home. What I didn’t know is that the next day, my employer put together the paperwork to terminate me from my job as a Regional Network Director at United Way of Salt Lake. I took PTO on August 5th to rest after my detention and figure out a plan for moving forward. On August 6, I met with my supervisor and the head of HR. In that meeting, I was told that while my termination was not related to my charges, I would need to either resign voluntarily or be fired. The reason for my termination, as it was explained to me, were concerns about board member and donor complaints about my public statements on social media regarding key partners of United Way of Salt Lake. I can only assume this meant the police department. I was not given an improvement plan or an opportunity to address the issue, but told that there was no way I could be trusted to work with partners any longer and that there was no option except to terminate my employment. Naively, I chose to resign voluntarily. I was embarrassed that my social media account was cited as the main reason for my termination, and I hoped to maintain the relationships I had worked hard to build with community partners. HR assured me that they wouldn’t do anything to interfere with my unemployment benefits. What I didn’t know, and I assume they did, is that they wouldn’t have to *do* anything — the state’s Department of Workforce Services would deny me benefits regardless based on the information provided by my former employer.
After my termination, I was given ten minutes to write an email to my office before my Outlook and Slack were shut down. Once I no longer had access to my email, my department head sent out an all-staff email regarding my departure. This message was forwarded to me by several coworkers, who were confused by the implication from the department that I had left voluntarily to pursue activism. The email spoke of how much the company supported me — knowing they had just fired me for the activism they claimed to support. I was now without a job, without insurance, and effectively cut off from the nonprofit sector where I had built a promising career.
When I was asked to resign, I was offered two weeks pay in exchange for signing a termination agreement that would have prohibited me from speaking about my termination to anyone associated with United Way of Salt Lake, including volunteers, donors, staff, and board members; and included a non-disparagement clause that would have legally prohibited me from being honest about the circumstances of my termination. I chose not to sign the agreement in order to leave myself free to speak out about these types of predatory, exploitative practices, which are commonplace in the nonprofit industry and disproportionally impact disabled workers, queer workers, and workers of color. Offering severance in exchange for silence is an incredibly harmful practice to employ, particularly in an industry known for fostering unsafe work environments around racial issues in particular. I felt then, and still feel now, that firing an employee for racial justice organizing in the middle of a pandemic and then holding their severance pay as a reward for signing a non-disclosure agreement is egregious and unacceptable behavior.
Since my termination, I have been denied unemployment benefits and had difficulty finding work, due to the ongoing pandemic and consistent threats to my safety stemming from the story of my arrest going internationally viral. I have finally been able to find safe part-time employment, but over the last few months I have accrued large amounts of debt due to medical and home maintenance emergencies. These include costs related to my car being impounded twice by SLCPD and CHPD and security costs in response to threats and continued police harassment. I had two emergency oral surgeries in two weeks, and had a pipe burst in my house at the end of September, causing sewage water damage — and during the cleanup, maintenance workers discovered large amounts of mold in the walls that had not been disclosed by the seller. Luckily, insurance is covering most of the cost, but I am still on the hook for anywhere from $1000 - $4000. I also have regular medication costs totaling about $500 per month.
In the last few months, I have been beaten and attacked by police, surveilled at my home and in my neighborhood, been subject to international scrutiny and threats, lost my job, received multiple criminal charges, had my Venmo and Twitter account subpoenaed, and more. The state is engaged in a tactical, relentless effort to repress activists and organizers from continued work against their violence.
At the point of my arrest,
I had exhausted all of
my own financial resources on community efforts to support
people facing violence and discrimination from the systems of
oppression that characterize our capitalist, settler-colonialist,
unyieldingly violent country. This meant I was not able to respond
to the cascading consequences of losing my job, being harassed by
the state, and finding myself cut off from resources and
opportunities as a result. This is why I have made this fundraiser —
nothing more, nothing less. My commitment to dedicating my life to
the pursuit of justice is unwavering, and I have taken great
measures both before and after my arrest to sacrifice my own
privilege and institutional power in pursuit of a better world. I
believe in the power of the people above everything else and feel
incredibly grateful to be part of a community that loves and
supports me. It’s not easy to ask for help like this, but it is no
longer plausible for me to continue this way without being honest
and giving my community an opportunity to help me. Again, anything
donated to this fund will be redistributed to local families and
mutual aid projects in need once my basic, emergency expenses have
been covered. Thank you for your support and for all of the ways
that you show up for the people around you. I have boundless hope in
our capacity to show up for each other and in the world that we want
to build, together.
Also available —
venmo: @utahmads
cashapp: $utahmads
paypal: madalenamcneil@gmail.com
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