An artist erected an obscene statue of Hillary Clinton in downtown Manhattan Tuesday morning causing a heated fight between defenders of the profane piece of protest art and women trying to tear it down.
The grotesque caricature of the Democratic candidate appeared outside the Bowling Green station during morning rush hour on Tuesday and shows Clinton with hoofed feet and a Wall Street banker resting his head on her bare breasts.
The statue was up for less than three hours before an enraged woman toppled it over and started yelling at the statue’s creator.
“This is obscene!” shouted the woman, an employee at the nearby National Museum of the American Indian who would only identify herself as Nancy.
“To put something up like this in front of my work place…I shouldn’t have to see this,” she later told the Daily News, fighting back tears as she gestured toward the crude figure.
Video of the dispute shows the museum worker struggling with the artist who erected the statue, who identified himself as 27-year-old Anthony Scioli, as he tried to prop the structure back up. At one point during the tussle, the woman sits down on the statue to prevent Scioli from picking it back up.
A woman in a hijab steps in to help Nancy and stomps her foot on the statue’s face, yelling at Scioli: “Don’t! Leave it alone!”
A small crowd of morning commuters hovered around the scene with their phones out, some of whom started hurling insults and picking sides in the debate over the statue.
“This lady shows up and tips it over and starts assaulting anyone who tried to put it back up!,” Gene H., 39, an IT worker, told the News, citing his belief in freedom of speech as a reason the statue should stay up.
A sign on the statue credited Mini Master and Boogie Night Production with its creation and witnesses said it went up sometime before 6 a.m.
Around 8:30 a.m. officers with the counterterrorism unit arrived to the scene and ordered Scioli to dismantle and remove the statue because he failed to get a permit for the demonstration. No one was arrested and no one received a summons, according to police. The statue was taken away in a van moments later, cops said.
In August, an unrelated anarchist collective called INDECLINE, put up a naked statue of Donald Trump in Union Square. The political group also erected statues of the GOP nominee in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Seattle.
With Graham Rayman
