A veteran activist joined Columbia protesters. Police call her a ‘professional agitator’

As pro-Palestinian student protesters took over a Columbia University building early Tuesday, one person in the crowd outside stood out — a gray-haired woman who delivered orders to young people helping to barricade a door.

“Tie it right to the lock,” she told two masked protesters holding zipties, according to footage posted on social media. The protesters did as they were told, using the ties on a metal table pressed against the door of Hamilton Hall.

“Let’s give them a little cover,” the older woman said to the crowd. “Cameras back. Cameras back.”

The woman was not a Columbia University student or faculty member. She in fact has no known affiliation to the school at all.

She is a 63-year-old veteran activist named Lisa Fithian, or what the New York Police Department described as a “professional agitator.”

The takeover of Hamilton Hall marked a significant escalation in the strategy employed by students demanding Columbia divest from corporations that could be profiting from the war in Gaza. Both New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Columbia University President Nemat Shafik blamed the action on outside actors with no ties to the school.

So far, Fithian is the only outsider to have been identified by city officials as playing a part in the seizure of the building.

New York Police officials believe that Fithian could be one of the people responsible for training the protesters in the tactics they used to occupy Hamilton Hall, according to two senior New York City officials. The officials did not provide further details, and the full scope of Fithian’s involvement in the takeover of the building was not clear.

An NYPD spokesperson said she was not one of the roughly 50 people arrested at Columbia University when police officers stormed Hamilton Hall late Tuesday night.

Lisa Fithian speaks during an Occupy Wall Street protest (Erik McGregor / LightRocket via Getty Images file)

Fithian is no stranger to high-profile protests. For roughly 50 years, she has participated in demonstrations for a dizzying array of causes at home and abroad, racking up scores of arrests.

“In my years as an anti-racist organizer, I have shut down the CIA, disrupted the World Trade Organization’s first major meeting during the Battle of Seattle, and helped launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots organization that supported communities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” she wrote in her book, “Shut It Down: Stories From A Fierce, Loving Resistance.”

“I have camped in a ditch with Cindy Sheehan, the Gold Star mom who protested the Iraq War. I have stood my ground in Tahrir Square and set sail on the US and Women’s Boats to Gaza.”

Fithian did not immediately respond to messages left on her phone. In an interview on Tuesday, she told the New York Times that she was “absolutely not” organizing the protests.

“It’s actually quite absurd,” she said. “I know with these videos, it’s hard for some people to believe that. But it’s the truth.”

In a Tuesday press conference, Adams called out “external actors who attempted to hijack this private protest.” Before releasing a video that appeared to show Fithian outside Hamilton Hall and that identified her by name, he also referred to an “outside agitator with a history of escalating situations and trying to create chaos.”

Shafik, the Columbia University president, said in a letter to the NYPD on Tuesday: “We believe that while the group who broke into the building includes students, it is led by individuals who are not affiliated with the university.”

Shafik did not provide a basis for that assertion.

Supporters of the student-led protest movement at Columbia have bristled at the suggestion that outsiders were directing it.

A total of 280 people were arrested late Tuesday after police moved in on the protesters at the City College of New York and Columbia University.

It’s unclear how many were non-students or faculty, but one of those taken into custody has an arrest history dating back to the 2005 G8 summit when the person allegedly assaulted a police officer in the United Kingdom, said Rebecca Weiner, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism.

In a video posted on her Facebook page in April, Fithian described herself as a “nonviolent direct action trainer.” “There’s no room for violence in these missions, and in trying to build the world that we want,” Fithian says in the clip.

Over the years, her activism has garnered attention from a host of media outlets, including the New York Times, the New York Post and the Miami Herald.

“It looks like we’ve already gotten the CIA’s attention,” Fithian was quoted as saying in an April 1987 Miami Herald article on the march she led outside the agency’s headquarters to protest U.S. policy in Central America and southern Africa.

Mother Jones profiled Fithian in 2012, describing her as a “streetwise radical who’s teaching kids who want to be badass to be smart.” The story noted that unions and activist groups pay her $300 a day to conduct demonstrations and “teach their members tactics for taking over the streets.”

There’s no indication that she was getting paid to attend the Columbia University protest.

In the video footage released by the NYPD, Fithian is seen glaring at two students who were trying to prevent the protesters from barricading Hamilton Hall early Tuesday.

“We’re trying to document them being assholes,” she says to somebody recording video of the encounter.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com