San Francisco Bay Guardian
Dec. 26, 2001 P 16
Are these guys terrorists?
Sure, ACT UP San Francisco activists Davis Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis are infuriating - but is $600,000 bail really necessary?
By A.C. Thompson
Clad in county-jail orange, David Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis shuffled into court Dec. 13. A leader of ACT UP San Francisco, Pasquarelli looked gaunt and gray, his arms wrapped around a thick sheaf of documents. Petrelis, who heads a one-person activist operation called the AIDS Accountability Project, wore a slight smirk on his ruddy face.
Facing 38 felony charges for allegedly making a barrage of threatening phone calls to journalists and public officials, the two men have been caged in the Seventh Street lockup since Nov. 29 - and probably won't get out any time soon.
During October and November, the duo allegedly made lewd and intimidating calls to at least nine people, including San Francisco reporters David Perlman and Carl Hall, San Francisco Health Department spokesperson Eileen Shields and director of sexually transmitted disease prevention Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, and Michael Shriver, an AIDS adviser to Mayor Willie Brown. Petrelis is charged with repeatedly harassing Shields, at one point telling her, "You spread syphilis with your diseased snatch... we're coming to get you."
According to court records, he rang up Klausner's wife and talked about "fucking her with his syphilitic dick."
Petrelis also made calls to several reporters and editors at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "I understand your wife's pussy has syphilis," Petrelis said in a phone call to Bay Guardian editor Tim Redmond. "I was wondering how soon we can get you quarantined, Tim Redmond, for giving your wife's pussy syphilis. I will keep in touch, Tim." (Nobody with the Bay Guardian has filed civil or criminal charges against Petrelis or Pasquarelli.)
Pasquarelli is accused of the most serious offense: he supposedly threatened to blow up the San Francisco Chronicle. Needless to say, it's hard to be sympathetic with this vulgar, abusive, and downright creepy duo. Still, the case brings up an interesting legal question with particular salience in the post-Sept. 11 era: Are these two men terrorists?
Since the mid 1990's, David Pasquarelli has been a pariah in this town, reviled by most of the gay community and disowned by other AIDS activists - a recent San Francisco Examiner headline accurately described him as "Hated in S.F." Clinging to the discredited theories of U C Berkeley virologist Peter Duesberg, Pasquarelli and his cohorts in ACT UP S.F. use big-font stickers, posters, newspaper ads, and T-shirts to push the flat-earth notion that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. While other ACT UP chapters are trying to bring AZT to South Africa, Pasquarelli is trying to convince the world that AZT and other drugs are a nefarious plot by the pharmaceutical industry.
But Pasquarelli really isn’t loathed because of his beliefs; it’s his methods of communicating them that have made him so many enemies. Favored tactics include spiting on reporters – he described it as a “political tactic”: in a 1997 news story – and shouting “queer killer” and “Nazi” at ideological foes. During a public forum in 1996 an ACT UP S.F. member dumped 25 pounds of cat shit on an AIDS activist.
Michael Petrelis has a different agenda. He’s out to topple what he has dubbed “AIDS INC.” – the bloated, federally funded AIDS charity network that often wastes taxpayer money on excessive executive salaries instead of services for HIV-positive people. Many of his criticisms are right on point Take, for example, the avarice embodied by former Catholic Charities exec Frank Hudson, who during a two-year stretch blew $73,000 in donor money on lunches, plastic surgery, and other expense-account perks.
Both Petrelis and Pasquarelli declined to be interviewed for this piece, but from reading recent ACT UP communiqués, it looks like two factors set off the men’s alleged phone harassment jihad. The first was a series of October news reports on rising rates of syphilis among gays. The second was an idea floated in a Washington Monthly story – and apparently inaccurately attributed to Dr. Klausner. In a November 2001 article about rising gay STD rates and the resurgence of unprotected “bareback” sex, journalist Andrew Webb wrote that Klausner suggested “the possibility of quarantining those who cannot control their infectivity.”
Saying his comments were taken out of context, Klausner told the Bay Guardian he was simply explaining the measures health officials have historically taken during epidemics – not unveiling a plan to sweep up gay men and herd them into safe-sex concentration camps. “Unfortunately the writer made it sound like I was saying, ‘Quarantine HIV-infected people,’ which is ridiculous,” Klausner told us.
Webb acknowledged as much in a Nov. 7 e-mail to the Bay Area reporter, admitting that Klausner “did NOT specifically advocate any of the measures he listed.”
But Petrelis and Pasquarelli convinced they’d uncovered a modern Mengele in the top ranks of the city’s public health establishment, set out to expose Klausner’s evil designs – and force the press to cover the story. From the ACT UP S.F. website, they implored the faithful to phone Centers for Disease Control Prevention bosses at home and urge them to condemn Klausner. Not long after, Klausner – along with other local officials and journalists – began reporting vicious, middle-of-the-night phone calls from Pasquarelli and Petrelis.
They were arrested Nov. 28 and charged with felony conspiracy, stalking and making terrorist threats.
District Attorney Terence Hallinan is treating the pair like domestic terrorists. Bail for each man has been set at $600,000 – a sum far higher than for most rapists and armed robbers. Neither Pasquarelli or Petrelis has posted the nonrefundable $60,000 needed to bail out. Accusing the two of “mental terrorism,” D.A. spokesperson Reginald Smith told the Chronicle Nov. 29, “The defendants have been on a campaign of terror against these victims, who fear for their safety and their family’s safety.”
Peter Keane, dean of Golden Gate University Law School, doesn’t buy the assessment. “To label these guys terrorists is really to do an injustice to the memory of those people who were the victims of Sept. 11,” said Keane, a former public defender. “To use that language is really an exaggeration.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also been brought into the loop. According to a Dec. 11 Los Angeles Times story, “a researcher from UC San Francisco asked the FBI “to launch a probe of Pasquarelli and Petrelis, but the bureau declined. The D.A.’s office is unaware of any federal investigation, according to spokesperson Fred Gardner.
Representing Pasquarelli, attorney Mark Vermuelen is anxious to take the “terrorist” tag off his client. “These guys may have made some outrageous phone calls,” Vermuelen said. “But felony charges and talk of terrorism? No way. You throw that word around these days, and it creates an aura of fright completely disproportionate to the facts.”
Gardner points out that Superior Court Judge Julie tang granted the prosecution’s bail motion because of “the severity of the charges, the suffering of the victims, and potential for danger from these defendants.”
So are these guys terrorists or not? Legally, the answer may be yes. The state law regarding terrorist threats – Penal Code Section 422 – is apolitical and intentionally broad, covering anyone who threatens violence “verbally, in writing, or by any means of an electronic communications device.”
Federal law defines the T-word as an act that “appear[s] to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” As amended by the USA PATRIOT ACT, that amorphous definition has become even more vague.
We asked Michael Ratner, a liberal legal scholar and president of New York’s center for Constitutional Rights, to analyze The People v. Michael Petrelis and David Pasquarelli. Thanks to the PATRIOT Act, Ratner concludes, the pair could conceivably stand trial on federal terrorism charges – which would set a disastrous precedent for political repression.
He’s also critical of Hallinan’s guns-blazing approach. “We should be concerned by this case,” Ratner said. “Before September 11, this probably would’ve been a misdemeanor case… These guys wouldn’t be sitting on $1.2 million bail.”
Of course, given the pair’s vitriol-laden history, the masses aren’t exactly rushing to their rescue.
Email A.C. Thompson at ac_thompson@sfbg.com.