(Newser)
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Stunned feminist author Naomi Wolf says she was busted in an evening gown for "standing lawfully on a sidewalk" outside an event she was invited to. Cops cuffed the writer after she explained to Occupy Wall Street protesters they had a legal right to use the sidewalk outside an awards ceremony for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as long as they didn't block pedestrian traffic. Wolf was on the scene because she was invited to the event, sponsored by the Huffington Post, which she writes for. "Then a phalanx of perhaps 40 white-shirted offices descended out of seemingly nowhere and, with a megaphone, one said: 'You are unlawfully creating a disruption. You are ordered to disperse.'"
Wolf didn't "fall back," and that's when cops slapped on the plastic handcuffs. When supporters marched to a precinct stationhouse to protest her arrest, the entire area was cordoned off, apparently by orders from the Department of Homeland Security, she writes. "If DHS now has powers to simply take over a street because of an arrest for peaceable conduct by a middle-aged writer in an evening gown, we have entered a stage of the closing of America," Wolf writes in the Guardian. "First they come for the 'other'—the 'terrorist,' brown person, Muslim, the outsider; then they come for you—while you are standing on a sidewalk in evening dress, obeying the law."
