Activist and Divergent star Shailene Woodley was arrested while protesting the Dakota Pipeline?
We all remember the Dakota Pipeline protests.
There was national outcry over threatening the water table of Native Americans — especially after everything that the US government has done (and continues to do) to the Native American population.
There were also broader environmental concerns, as oil pipelines are notorious for leaking.
Protesters were numerous and passionate, and came from people of different ages and backgrounds, from military veterans to optimistic young people to the Native Americans directly threatened by pipeline’s construction.
Unlike the passive responses of police to torch-bearing Nazi protesters in Charlottesville that included a weekend of violence against racial minorities and a vehicular terrorist attack against counter-protesters, both caught on video, the police responded to the pipeline protesters with a show of force and violence.
Protesters were sprayed with firehoses in freezing temperatures. Rubber bullets, which can injure and even kill, were fired into the crowd.
In the end, of course, President Obama — who had likely postponed any decision in order to avoid making it an election issue, back when there was still hope in the world — fixed it. Temporarily.
Doing his best impression of President John Adams’ infamous Midnight Justices, President Obama effectively brought progress to a halt on the Dakota Access Pipeline at the 11th hour.
That didn’t change the way that peaceful protesters had suffered during the ordeal.
And it changed nothing for Shailene Woodley, who is now sharing exactly what the experience of being arrested was like.
Shailene is bravely opening up, now, about her ordeal being arrested.
In an interview with Marie Claire UK, Shailene Woodley describes her traumatic experience at Morton County Jail.
“I was strip-searched. Like get naked, turn over, spread your butt cheeks, bend over.”
She was a peaceful protester who should not have been arrested (we’ll get to that in a moment), so this should not have happened.
“They were looking for drugs in my a–.”
Awful. We don’t care if it’s standard procedure. It’s awful.
“When you’re in a jail cell and they shut that door, you realize no one can save you.”
There are so many good police officers in the world, and many people look at police as there to help by default.
(I know that I do)
But it is haunting to be aware that there are police individuals and even entire groups who are willing and eager to abuse their power.
“If there’s a fire and they decide not to open the door, you’ll die. You are a caged animal.”
Terrifying.
Shailene describes how she turned off her phone for three months due to her PTSD symptoms.
Most of us are unwilling to go without our phones for three minutes (and with good reason), so you know how deeply she was impacted by her ordeal.
“There was so much trauma.”
Clearly.
“Mine was like, ‘What do I do now?’ Kind of like a little bit of depression.”
Very understandable. Different people cope in different ways.
As we said, Shailene should never have been arrested in the first place.
At the time, she spoke out about how heavily armed officers were waiting to arrest her as she returned to where she was staying.
She believes that she was specifically targeted because she had tens of thousands of followers keeping up with her posts about the protest.
We don’t know if the men who arrested her believed that they were making an example of her or shutting her up, but it was inexcusable.
Maybe overeager police could save some of that aggression for the next nazi rally, huh?
