An Arsonist and an Architect: An interview with Darius Fullmer
By james b, Infoshop News, Vegans Against Moral Schizophrenia

J: Did you grow up eating meat?

D: I did. When I was 16 I went vegetarian and I didn't really have any particular impetus, I didn't know anyone who was vegetarian. It wasn't part of my experience at all. I just kind of woke up one day and decided I didn't want to do it anymore. I started doing a lot of reading, not so much for myself but more so to have more information for my folks. And in that process of trying to get information for them I started reading about factory farms and dairy production and egg production. That is what is what lead me to veganism and eventually to activism.

J: At what point did you get involved with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC)?

D: For a number of years I worked with an organization in New Jersey called The Animal Defense League. We were mostly working on fur issues, so we did a lot of fur store protests and a lot of educational tabling, talks at schools and things of that nature. In 2000 we were contacted by the folks of Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty in the UK, and they said essentially that they had this campaign they were working on and since Huntington Life Sciences has a laboratory in New Jersey they wanted us to get a few people together for a protest to correspond with the big HLS protest in the UK so they could say it was an international action. As we became more familiar with the campaign it became clear that it was a dynamic and successful campaign which was something that we were missing in the US. A lot of people had put in effort with campaigns like the ones against Macy's and Neiman's for their fur sales, but hadn't seen results. SHAC UK had already targeted different banking institutions involved with HLS and successfully got them to sever ties with HLS. It gave us a sense of momentum and success that we were desperately missing in the US at the time. So we decided based primarily on that fact that the SHAC model was something that the movement in the US needed. We started holding protests at their lab in New Jersey from 2000 to 2001, and in April of 2001 we planned a large national protest at the lab. At that point we started talking to other groups from around the country about how successful SHAC's strategies had been, and we tried to get them involved with the campaign. After the national protest in 2001 SHAC USA was formed, and they took over the national campaigning and we were able to return to operating on a statewide scale which is what we as a New Jersey group were more comfortable doing. So my involvement in the campaign was primarily during that interim period between the beginning of the campaign in the US and when SHAC USA was formed.

J: Tell me about your case?

D: The indictment came in in 2004 and basically there were the three individuals who actually ran SHAC USA, full time volunteers that ran the campaign on a nationwide basis, and three regional people, myself, Andy, and Josh, who didn't work specifically for SHAC but organized on a regional basis. The SHAC campaign wasn't my only focus, it was one of the many campaigns that I worked on.

J: You were convicted of forwarding an email, is that right? What did they get you on?

D: It's somewhat mysterious to me how the conviction actually happened. There were mountains of actual evidence, like 10,000 emails and 8,000 phone calls. The indictment is 52 pages long and my name comes up once as someone who was at a protest. Not that I organized a protest or did anything illegal.

J: You were tapped and they were reading your emails?

D: If my phones were tapped it wasn't used at trial. The phone of the house where the SHAC organizers stayed was tapped, so my phone calls to that house were recorded. There was a handful of really insignificant phone calls, questions like the spelling of the park that a barbecue was in to put on a flier they were working on. Maybe a half dozen of those really innocuous calls and a few emails, nothing of import. One was me asking for a ride to a protest. The one that was brought up at appeal was an email from SHAC that I had forwarded. Anyone who is involved in any kind of activist community knows there are endless emails being bounced around from one group to the next, so I forwarded on emails to the Animal Defense League of New Jersey from SHAC. The one that they specifically pointed out was one that mentioned black faxing. It was brought up at appeal, I don't remember that being an issue at trial. The larger issue at trial was an instant message conversation between myself and one of the SHAC organizers where they had received an email from someone inside HLS containing a list of all of the companies they were working with. Someone had leaked that information out. There was hundreds of companies, and they asked me for help finding contact information for all of them. So I was just sitting on a computer going to Roche's website, Bristol Myers Squibb's website, going to their contact info pages and looking up their phone numbers and addresses. The prosecutor effectively misrepresented that as though I was looking up people's personal information, like home addresses, but basically that was the extent of the evidence against me.

J: What was your friends' and family's reaction to this?

D: My family was very supportive, they have always been very supportive and it wasn't a big surprise. I have been an activist and an organizer for over a decade and I have been arrested 14 of 15 times. I have done time in prison before, so it wasn't anything terribly out of the ordinary. It was probably a little larger in scope than what they initially anticipated, but that fact that it happened wasn't anything shocking.

J: What was the prison experience like?

D: Incarceration itself wasn't too difficult for me. People have very different experiences based on where they end up; some places are a lot worse than others. The difficult thing about incarceration wasn't actually being there, it was the disruption to my life: what am I going to do with my apartment, my bills, my car? Am I going to lose my job? All these things concerned me, but just being there wasn't particularly difficult. It wasn't comfortable but it wasn't anything unbearable at all. I had clean water and three meals a day and a roof over my head.

J: What did you eat?

D: The food was surprisingly good: in federal prison there is always a meat free option at each meal. If nothing else I could eat all the rice and beans I wanted. At each meal there was always a second meatless option, which wasn't always vegan but usually was, like veggie burgers and veggie hotdogs.

J: What was it like to be considered a "terrorist" in prison? How did people react to you?

D: People were very supportive. It is bad manners to ask about people's cases unless you are close to them, but some people did ask. Because it was something different and interesting word got around and a lot of people found out why I was there. There was a lot of support. I didn't get any negative comments at all and I actually got a lot of praise.

J: Talk about the SHAC method.

D: The HLS campaign is important, I believe, for a couple of reasons. Tactically, the idea of tertiary targeting - targeting the financial institutions and other businesses that allow a company to exist - has been proven incredibly successful, and other social justice movements have used it to good effect. So on a purely tactical level it set a good example, but it was perhaps even more important on a philosophical level. I think that you really have to look at where we were as a movement before HLS. When I began my involvement in the animal rights movement in the early to mid 1990s we had a lot of energy and enthusiasm but very little strategy. We would protest whatever was closest to us but had no long term strategy at all. We were very fiery and very angry but had no real idea of were we were going. And over the years we fell into the trap of worrying too much about what people thought, thinking, "Oh, well if we say this people aren't going to like that unless they want to be involved." We got very over-concerned with our image and with pleasing everybody to try and get more people involved, as if that was the key to being successful. We would have fifty people protest, but if we had a hundred people then magically were going to get what we want. You know, Macy's is going to stop selling fur or something, so we would bend over backwards to try and please as many people as possible. But the folks who started the SHAC campaign in the UK took the opposite view of just doing what works and not making apologies to anybody. They weren't doing what they were doing for the media, they weren't doing it for their member base, they weren't doing it for donations, they weren't doing it to please other activist groups, they were going to do exactly what works, and if it's popular, great, and if it's unpopular, it doesn't matter. The only thing that mattered is that they were successful and that they saved lives. And there's certainly truth to that in that you can have fifty wishy washy people or you have five effective people who are willing to do whatever needs to be done. You'll have more success with the five. But what happened was actually the opposite. The campaign spread like wildfire, so many people wanted to be involved, so many people got involved because they saw that it was successful. It wasn't that were too aggressive or too mean or too confrontational that was keeping people away, what was keeping people away was that we weren't winning. But as soon as people saw that we were winning, that we had this attitude of "we were going to win," people flocked to it because that's something people wanted to be a part of. So I think that's the biggest take away. A lot of people have protests to have protests. They have a campaign to have a campaign. The SHAC model is to have a campaign to win a campaign. That's the lesson that can be drawn from the HLS campaign model.

J: Now that you're out, are there restrictions on what you can do or what you feel like you can do? Are you still active?

D: I'm mostly focusing on less confrontational activism these days. Not because I believe one is more effective than the other; I believe you need both ends. There are two ends to campaigning: there is destroying and there is rebuilding, and neither can exist on its own. You need an arsonist and an architect. You have to get rid of the old before you can build the new. Either one on its own is useless, and there are certainly both ends to that in the movement. There is protesting what is wrong and trying to close down abusive businesses and industries, but there is also creating the better world that we want to see take its place, and I see equal value in both.

Since our case is still under appeal, since it is an ongoing process and because winning this case is important not just for ourselves but for activism as a whole, I am focusing on non-confrontational activism, on building vegan communities and creating something new. That is where my focus is these days, not because I see it as more effective but because it is a better place for me to be right now.

J: What have the effects of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act been? Has it instilled fear in people?

D: Unfortunately it has instilled fear in people. After our arrests there was a sharp decline in the amount of HLS related activism, and more militant grassroots activism fell off in general. It has had a significant chilling effect. I hate to say that it has worked but to some degree it certainly has. There are still people who buck that trend and soldier on regardless.

J: What would you do differently?

D: There is not much I think I would have done differently. The HLS campaign was so successful that the pharmaceutical industry was demanding action.

J: Did you anticipate backlash from the government?

D: Yes and no. I know the folks that were organizing the campaign definitely anticipated it. There was a two year investigation, and I was called to a grand jury. I didn't think I was going to be one of the defendants because I wasn't that important in the campaign. That was a surprise, but the fact that the case was coming wasn't; the pharmaceutical industry generally gets what they want and clearly they wanted action. That is why the senate judiciary committee met, to figure out how to stop the SHAC campaign. Clearly someone had to pay the price. Whether it was me or someone else didn't really matter.

J: What was it like to be a part of such a high profile case? did you feel like you got adequate support?

D: In a way, being a part of this case has been an honor. I have the highest respect for Kevin, Lauren, Jake, Josh, and Andy. To be mentioned in the same sentence as them is something I am proud of.

The support we have received throughout has been overwhelming. So many people around the country and beyond, both within and outside the animal rights movement, have done what they can to help us out. Clearly a lot of people have seen what the government has done in our case and are not willing to remain silent about it. As much as we appreciate all that has been done, the best way to support us and to take a stand against government repression is to do what you can to fight the industries who abuse and exploit animals in whatever way you feel is most effective.