Statue of Liberty climber covers face in tape at sentencing

NEW YORK—A woman who climbed the base of the Statue of Liberty last July 4 to protest the separation of families at the Mexican border came to her sentencing Tuesday with her face entirely covered with clear sticky tape, irritating a judge who refused to proceed until she removed it. After she did so, U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein spared Therese Okoumou from prison for her conviction on multiple misdemeanor counts though he berated her for what he thought was a lack of concern for rescuers whose safety he said she jeopardized. As she stood before him with a white headband across her forehead scrawled with the phrase “I care!” he ordered her to perform 200 hours of community service and five years of probation, leading her attorney, Ron Kuby, to suggest the judge might be seeing a lot of them in the future. “I think there’s hope” otherwise, the judge responded, saying he would be willing to shorten the probation term at a later point if Okoumou did not commit more crimes.

Given a chance to speak in court, Okoumou called the case against her “a fraud against injustice,” an explanation for her continuing protest and the tape she had earlier painfully pulled off her face. “I’m not a criminal,” she told Gorenstein. When Gorenstein took a break from the bench before announcing the sentence, Okoumou stood and turned around to face several dozen supporters before raising her fist in the air. The gesture silenced the supporters, who raised their fists in return as everyone stood for a moment before Okoumou blew a kiss to them and turned around to await her sentence.