A woman who dumped a tube of glitter on the leader of Harvard University appeared in Cambridge District Court on Tuesday facing several felony and misdemeanor charges.
At a Harvard Alumni Day address given May 31 by interim president Alan Garber, Brittany Drake, 34, took to the stage to protest the treatment of animals in Margaret Livingstone’s lab at the university. Drake shouted “For the baby monkeys!” before emptying a tube of glitter over Garber’s head.
Drake was arrested and charged with three felonies and three misdemeanors for the glittering. Drake is a project manager and animal-rights activist from Los Angeles who received an award from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 2020. She has pleaded “not guilty” on all charges.
A charge of felony assault and battery has has drawn ire from animal-rights activists. In Massachusetts, there are three elements to the charge prosecutors must prove: that the defendant touched the victim, that the defendant did so intentionally and that the touching was either likely to cause bodily harm or was offensive.
Brandi Pharris, a representative of the Laboratory Investigations Department at Peta, said Garber responded to the protest by saying “I could use a little glitter” and “I hope that Harvard will always continue to be a place where free speech continues to thrive.” Pharris compared the charges being pressed following Garber’s statement to Harvard’s banning of members of the pro-Palestinian encampment from graduation after statements to the contrary.
Harvard referred questions on the charges to the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office, citing a long-standing policy of the Harvard University Police Department not to comment on open criminal cases.
Tuesday’s court appearance included a pretrial conference with prosecutors and Drake’s attorneys. Drake has retained two criminal defense attorneys from Swomley & Associates in Boston. Previously, she had hired a Cambridge attorney. A second pretrial conference is scheduled for Sept. 24.
Peta alleges that Livingstone’s experiments abuse test monkeys physically and psychologically, including forcible separation of mother and baby monkeys, sewing the eyes of baby monkeys shut for up to a year and performing surgery to implant rods in the head and electrodes on the brain. The monkeys in Livingstone Lab are also alleged to be more susceptible to alcohol abuse and display stress behaviors, such as pacing. Hundreds of scientists, including the primatologist Jane Goodall, have signed petitions to stop Livingstone’s work or retract previously published studies on ethical grounds.
A petition from Peta urging Harvard to “close Livingstone’s laboratory, get her a psych evaluation and release the remaining monkeys to a sanctuary immediately” has 119,934 supporters. The petition includes contact information for Garber and George Daly, dean of Harvard Medical School.
“Harvard Medical School remains deeply concerned about the personal attacks directed at scientists who conduct critically important research for the benefit of humanity,” a Harvard spokesperson on Tuesday, pointing to statements from 2022 about the research from Harvard Medical School and Livingstone.
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I was there. Garber didn’t break his stride and was entirely unfazed, cracking jokes immediately after the woman was dragged away. The audience assumed it was a pro-Palestine protest, at least the people I talked to. And yeah, if the labs are even a tenth as bad as PETA alleges, it’s animal abuse of the worst kind for few results, and they should be shut down.
It’s worth reading the Professor’s statement on why these animal studies were done. She sounds careful, and the results important.
https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/media/institutional-statements/professor-livingstones-personal-statement-about-recent-concerns-over-animal-research
Talk about thin skinned. Harvard is such a sore a loser.
As @Jake L mentioned, read Dr. Livingstone’s statement. Animal research is essential for curing human diseases. The food industry is far more cruel. It’s better to give up meat than medical research.
The experiments PETA is protesting are widely condemned as unethical in the scientific community. Baby monkeys are torn from their mothers and their eyelids are sewn shut for a year, or they are forced to wear goggles that simulate strobe lighting for 12 hours a day for 18 months. Others are raised by humans wearing welding masks so that they never see faces. Electrodes are surgically implanted in their brains. Many are killed and their brains dissected.
The experimenter has been tormenting monkeys in experiments for four decades and has received over $32 million in taxpayer dollars—yet not one treatment or cure for humans has resulted from this. It’s beyond time to end this madness.
If there’s a CVS bottle in your bathroom, or you have friends or family with cancer, HIV, diabetes, or other life threatening diseases, you’re using products made possible by animal testing to make sure those products are safe and effective before being consumed by humans. People with a moral objection to this might consider a boycott of the pharmaceutical industry.