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11-05-2025
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American Psycho: An Oral History, 25 Years After Its Divisive Debut
American Psycho arrived in theaters 25 years ago this week. In honor of that we're re-sharing the American Psycho oral history we first ran in January 2020, with no edits or updates. Enjoy.—MM When director Mary Harron first sent Christian Bale the script for American Psycho, he didn't know much about it — except that it was based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel that made people mad. 'I had no idea what to expect. I had not read the book at that time. I had heard of the controversy, people calling for it to be banned, and I was not expecting what I read,' Bale told MovieMaker. 'As I read it, I was exploding with laughter. And I didn't know if that was Mary's intent.' Related Headlines 20 Behind the Scenes Stories of Airplane, Maybe the Funniest Movie Ever Made 12 Actors Who Held Their Breath Underwater for an Extraordinarily Long Time Dr. No: 12 Behind the Scenes Photos From the First 007 Film Bale proceeded with caution: 'I spoke with her on the phone, and I said, 'I've just got to get this over with, because this might end our conversation and insult you. But I find this to be one of the most ridiculous and hilarious scripts.' And she went, 'Bingo. That's it. Please fly out to meet me.'' Lots of people aren't sure, at first, how to take American Psycho. When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, almost no one was ready to accept it. It was released in theaters on April 14, 2000. 'The amount of hostility at Sundance really did take me aback,' says Harron. 'The audience just sat there and did not know how to react. Because this little group of us, the editor, me, Christian, a few other people—we were laughing away. We knew the scenes that are meant to be funny are funny.' Adds Guinevere Turner, Harron's co-writer on the film: 'I was supposed to have dinner that night with Kevin Smith. And I was listening to a message from him—he'd gone to the screening—and he said, 'I don't feel well, I'm not going to be able to make dinner.' And I was like, oh, that's weird. And years later he told me, 'I hated that movie so much that I couldn't have dinner with you. I didn't know what I was going to say. And then I saw it on cable and I realized it's actually genius.'' Ellis has always explained that his novel American Psycho is a darkly comic satire of the shallow, greedy men he too-often encountered as a young novelist in 1980s Manhattan. Wall Street serial killer Patrick Bateman, the lead character played by Bale in the film, delivers trite Top 40 critiques and catalogues his rapes and murders in the same disembodied tone. No one believes he's a killer because he looks just like everyone else in his coterie of well-dressed, handsome stock bros. He reveres Donald Trump. But long before the rise of cancel culture, the novel stood out for its capacity to divide and offend. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem and members of the National Organization of Women strongly objected to the book in part because of leaked excerpts—removed from the context of the satire that fills most of the pages—that depicted horrific violence against women. Ellis, disappointed in the film adaptation of his first novel, Less Than Zero, was surprised anyone wanted the movie rights to American Psycho, a book he considered potentially un-filmable. 'There was not a line, believe me, of people who wanted to produce this movie,' Ellis says. And yet the book eventually passed through many screenwriters, directors and stars, from Ellis to David Cronenberg to Oliver Stone. At one point, Leonardo DiCaprio was cast as Patrick Bateman. And Harron became perhaps the only movie director ever to quit rather than work with DiCaprio. Here is MovieMaker's oral history of American Psycho. , the novel Objections to the book led to its cancellation by its original publisher in 1990. But the attention helped it become a bestseller when it was published in 1991. Willem Dafoe, who plays Detective Donald Kimball: Everyone was reading the book among my friends… I liked the book very much. It was very postmodern, it was transgressive, and it walked the line between comedy and something very grave at the same time. Chloë Sevigny, who plays Jean, Bateman's secretary: I remember my brother, it was his favorite book, in high school and I think in college. … It was very much ingrained in my psyche, that book, the cover. I thought it was a really powerful story and I guess I wasn't afraid of the controversy. I'd already lived through Kids as my first movie, and after that, everything's kind of easy breezy. Bret Easton Ellis: The media latched onto this story and turned it into something that I knew it wasn't. What was initially unsettling was to be part of a scandal that was being created that you knew wasn't true… To have The New York Times have 14 or 15 stories that are negative about you, that are painting you in a light that is simply not true and are dispensing information that is simply not true—that's a problem. Mary Harron: I was living in London, working for the BBC when it came out. And I was working on an arts show and it was a bit of a scandal… one of the producers wanted to do an item on it. I bought it and started reading it on the subway on the way to work, and as soon as I started reading it, I felt like, this has really been misunderstood. There's a kind of dark satirical work here that reminded me of Evelyn Waugh. Then when I hit the real violence, I had to stop reading for a while. Continue reading our American Psycho oral history on the next page... A Really Subversive, Feminist Movie' Producer Edward Pressman and Muse Productions, founded by Chris and Roberta Hanley, obtained the rights and sought out a team to make the film. They eventually contacted Harron, who had recently directed the 1996 Valerie Solanis biopic I Shot Andy Warhol. Mary Harron: They had had a couple directors attached before. Cronenberg had been attached, Stuart Gordon, the one who did Re-Animator had been attached, someone else had been attached. What occurred to me is that just enough time had passed to make a period film about the '80s, and say things about the '80s, and bring out the satire. And that was interesting to me. When I had my call with Ed Pressman to discuss it further, I said, 'I don't know if you can make a film of this book. But if you'll give me the money to write a screenplay, I'll try.' Because they had sent me another screenplay and I wasn't interested. I could only do it if I did my own version. Also Read: Willem Dafoe Loved Having Nowhere to Hide in The Lighthouse (Podcast) I can't remember when Guinevere came up, but pretty early, because we were already working on what became TheNotorious Bettie Page. I felt it would be a lot more fun to work with her on this. And because I had just done I Shot Andy Warhol, which was about a radical feminist, and she had just done Go Fish, an indie lesbian romantic comedy, no one could tell us what was and was not misogynist. Guinevere Turner: I had never heard of it, even. … She said they keep trying to find writers to adapt this book, and we were the sixth team to be hired. And she said you're gonna hate me—because she knows I don't like scary things—but I think we can make a really good movie out of this book. So I read it, and I was like 'Ewww, I hate you—but I see what you mean.' It's actually really funny in addition to being horrifying. And with the right spin it could be a really subversive, feminist movie. Bret Easton Ellis: I never saw it as a feminist book. It was definitely a criticism of male values that were around me, and it was easier for me, I think, to witness those male values clearly because I was gay—I am gay. And I think that gave me a distance and a perspective as to noticing them more than if I was heterosexual and participating in the society at that time. I was definitely participating, but being gay really is a distance. You are four percent of the population. You do not share a lot of the same feelings and experiences that straight men do. Certainly not in late '80s Manhattan. I think I was watching a lot of this behavior on the sidelines, and I wanted to criticize it. And a lot of it had to do with money above all else. Greed is good, the ethos of that era, that was bothering me. And just the attitude of the cocky young stockbroker, which really had spread among so many men. It was really apparent to me as a young man, struggling with the notion of becoming an adult finally, and not wanting to become an adult in that society. And then where else was there to go? Guinevere Turner: Bret, when I first talked to him about it, he seemed genuinely hurt. Like it was a big surprise to him that there was any kind of outcry, and like he felt misunderstood. Bret Easton Ellis: Hardly hurt. That is not true. I do think enough people understood the satirical element of it, and I always knew they would. … I always thought there was an audience that was going to get it. Believe me, there's plenty of people who don't. I've lived with someone for 10 years who can't finish that book. Casting Patrick Bateman Guinevere Turner: Billy Crudup was attached before Mary met Christian. He was attached for about a month and a half. And then he called Mary one day and said, 'I don't feel like I can get this character.' Which I just think is so incredible for an actor, to be that honest. Mary Harron: I sent Christian the script and then he didn't respond for ages. And then I talked to Christine Vachon about it because she was making Velvet Goldmine with him. … And so she called him and said, 'You should really read this,' and he did and he was like on a plane right away. Our oldest daughter was about three weeks old, I think, and Christian came to our place in the East Village to audition. My husband, John, had to take our daughter into the next room so that I could do the audition. Christian Bale: I couldn't finish the scenes because she was laughing and shaking the camera, and I was laughing as well. Mary Harron: It was a summer's day and the windows were open and I made him do the Paul Allen axe murder over and over. Oh my God, the neighbors. What must they have thought? This crazy yelling. Christian Bale: I think the thing that united us on it is I had no interest in his background, childhood—and she didn't either. We looked at him as an alien who landed in the unabashedly capitalist New York of the '80s, and looked around and said, 'How do I perform like a successful male in this world?' And that was our beginning point. And we didn't want to talk about why was he this way, what happened in his childhood—there was none of that between Mary and I. Mary Harron: He saw the part the way that I did, and he got the humor of it. He didn't see Bateman as cool. I sort of had the feeling a lot of the other actors kind of thought Bateman was cool. And he didn't. I met with a lot of actors about it but Christian was the only one who was right for it. Even though it was a gamble, because he hadn't done anything at all like that before. The first time I'd seen him was in Little Women. But at one point I talked to [Velvet Goldmine director] Todd Haynes about him, and Todd Haynes said, 'Christian Bale's the best actor I've ever worked with.' So I had a lot of faith in Christian. When he did the audition, I felt like he hadn't quite got the right energy, because I think he was having trouble with doing the accent because he'd been doing a different British accent—he's British and he'd done a different British accent for Velvet Goldmine, so he wasn't quite getting that coiled kind of American energy. But I thought, he's a great actor. He'll get it. Christian Bale: I don't know if you're familiar with how bloody long it took us to get this film made? I had a lot of time to practice. Dinner With Bateman Christian Bale: There was a dinner in L.A.—certainly Mary, Bret and myself. I believe Guinevere as well. Bret Easton Ellis: He was in full Patrick Bateman mode in terms of the hair, the suit and the way he was talking. And it was incredibly distracting. And amusing, but then it became less amusing as he kept it going… I told him, at a certain point, you know you can stop this. It's unnerving me. But jokingly. It was kind of like—it was unnerving in a way. I felt he didn't need to keep it up, though I think he's just that kind of actor. Christian Bale: I don't recall doing that, but I wouldn't put it past me. It does sound like that would have been fun. Mary Harron: He might have been doing the American accent, yeah. Other British actors I know do that. It's just too hard to switch back and forth, so you start in it and stay in it for a long time. That was the problem I had initially: You've got to get that American rhythm. I don't remember being unnerved. Bret Easton Ellis: If I was completely, adamantly against Christian Bale, I really hope she would not have listened to me. Because really no one knew what Christian was fully capable of, and the great performances hadn't come yet. He was still the kid from Newsies and Empire of the Sun. … This was the pre-Batman Christian Bale. He was sort of a well-known Welsh actor who I'd seen in a couple things. It wasn't like it was Leonardo DiCaprio, who was a giant international star from Titanic. Speaking of Leonardo DiCaprio In May 1998, Lionsgate (then called Lions Gate) agreed to pay DiCaprio more than $20 million to star as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. Guinevere Turner: It was announced in the trades before anyone told us. And then Mary, amazingly—I always will be impressed with her for this—she's just like, if they want it to be Leo DiCaprio, I'm not doing it. I was like, you're not? He was the biggest movie star in the world. Continue reading our American Psycho oral history on the next page... Christian Bale: She really threw herself on the sword for me. I will always appreciate that, so much. She has incredible integrity and just stuck with me throughout. Mary Harron: Obviously, I think DiCaprio's a great actor, but I thought he was wrong for it. I thought Christian was better for it, and I also thought, and I think my instinct was right on this, he carried enormous baggage because he had just come off Titanic and I thought you cannot take someone who has a worldwide fanbase of 15-year-old girls, 14-year-olds girls, and cast him as Patrick Bateman. It'll be intolerable, and everyone will interfere, and everyone will be terrified. It would be very bad for him and very bad for the movie. Because everybody will be all over it. They'll rewrite the script and all the rest. And I knew I could only make this work if I had complete control over it, over the tone and everything. The other thing is, a lot of the plot depends on people mistaking Bateman for someone else. Not a lot of people look like Leo DiCaprio. They called me and said we're going to offer him $20 million, but the budget of the movie will remain $6 million. You're giving the star enormous power over this project, and basically taking it away from the director if you're making it that disproportionate. So that just didn't interest me. I'd only done one movie, so it was a big thing to do. But I'd seen lots of movies that have gone awry because they cast a huge star that they shouldn't have cast. I thought people would respect that and say, oh wow, integrity. But actually I think a lot of people thought I was crazy. So I went through a period after they fired me, of thinking, God, my career's really ruined, because everyone's going to think I'm out of my mind for walking away from this. 'There's Other People Making the Film Now' Oliver Stone came in to direct, and Cameron Diaz briefly joined the cast. Harron and Turner heard that there were plans to take a Jekyll-and-Hyde approach to Bateman, which would have allowed DiCaprio to be sympathetic in at least some scenes. Bale, meanwhile, was certain he would somehow get the role back. He kept calling Harron with ideas, and working out to maintain Bateman's ripped physique. Christian Bale: I had to. I'm English. I had never gone to a gym in my life. You lose that quicker than you gain it. I said to her, 'I'm still gonna make this, and I'm still gonna keep prepping on it.' And I would call her to talk about scenes, and she would be on a family vacation and she'd say, 'Christian, please, I'm trying to have dinner. And I don't know if you've noticed, but there's other people making the film now.' And I'd say, 'Mary, just stop being so negative. We're gonna do this.' Everybody thought I was crazy, but it became a crusade for me. Bret Easton Ellis: I think I would have regretted it if Oliver Stone had made it with him. I don't think Oliver Stone would have been the right director for this at all. Something about Mary's style—the restraint she showed—is what makes the movie effective. I don't think Oliver Stone is good at restraint. … And I don't know if Leo, who is the greatest screen actor of his generation, would have survived it. And I know that Leo really, really wanted to do it and I know he was talked out of it. Guinevere Turner: Gloria Steinem… as legend would have it, took him to a baseball game and said, 'Please don't do this movie. You're the biggest movie star in the world right now, and teenage girls are living for you, and I really don't want them all to run to the theater to see a movie where you're a man who kills women.' Also Read: Quentin Tarantino: Things I've Learned as a MovieMaker Ironically she later married Christian Bale's dad. I always wondered what those Thanksgivings were like. Bret Easton Ellis: Ultimately I think Christian Bale, in that moment, was the better choice. And of course Leo got to play a version of this as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, and he was spectacular. 'The Potential to Be Iconic' When DiCaprio and Stone opted out, Bale and Harron returned to American Psycho. Shooting began in Toronto and New York, with a cast of stars and soon-to-be stars that included Dafoe, Sevigny, Matt Ross, Reese Witherspoon, Jared Leto, Justin Theroux, Josh Lucas, Samantha Mathis and Cara Seymour. Christian Bale: I had the book with me all the time on-set. Mary stayed true to a majority of the dialogue within it, so every scene I would kind of be skimming through it and looking at it and finding little bits and conferring in the corner with Mary on it. Chloë Sevigny: I remember us shooting things that were more extreme so they could have that in the film to take out, and being like, 'Hmm, that's cool, that's good. That's a good strategy.' The '90s were a constant battle with the censors, the ratings board was such a big thing then—or it was just the movies I was making. Sex vs. violence. And of course American Psycho has both, so. Willem Dafoe: When I entered the movie I remember they were already in production. … When I arrived for my first scene with Christian Bale, he was fantastic. And I think he's excellent in the movie. It's one of his best roles. He was like a machine. And I mean it in the best way. … His rhythms, his clarity, his control were just incredible. Mary Harron: We were filming the business-card scene and I remember that Josh Lucas and Justin Theroux came up to me after one of the takes and said he breaks into a sweat at the same time… every time. Matt Ross, who plays Luis Carruthers: With the business-card scene, I think we all knew we were participating in something that had the potential to be iconic. Christian Bale: Josh Lucas and I did a film together recently and he opened my eyes to something that I had been unaware of. He informed me that all of the other actors thought that I was the worst actor they'd ever seen. [Laughs] He was telling me they kept looking at me and talking about me, saying, 'Why did Mary fight for this guy? He's terrible.' And it wasn't until he saw the film that he changed his mind. And I was in the dark completely about that critique. Chloë Sevigny: Working with Christian was pretty hard because I didn't know this whole Method thing. I was pretty fresh. I hadn't done that many films before, and that an actor would lose himself to such a degree and was so consumed by the part, I was having a hard time kind of… just wanting to socialize with him, but feeling that he didn't, and then my ego being like, 'Does he not like me? Does he think I'm a terrible actress?' Guinevere Turner: He was just so 100 percent committed as an actor to being this character, to a disturbing point. He never spoke in his real accent and he never socialized with anyone while we were shooting. Christian Bale: Yeah. I start laughing if I know people too well. I start laughing in the middle of scenes. Especially with a character like that. Matt Ross: I also remember that after every day he would go work out for hours and hours and hours to get into that incredible shape. I remember Mary and I talking about just what an incredible work ethic he had. Chloë Sevigny: I remember as a wrap gift I gave him a 45 of 'Psycho Killer' by Talking Heads, which I thought was the greatest wrap gift, in the world, ever. But then when we went to festivals and stuff after, like Berlin and whatnot, he was very friendly then. When we were not shooting, doing press and stuff, he couldn't have been a nicer guy. In addition to co-writing the film, Turner played one of Bateman's victims, Elizabeth. Guinevere Turner: When you do a sex scene with someone and they kill you, actor-wise, you learn a lot about them. There's so many ways that that could suck. And he was so incredibly great to work with. He's not a diva actor. Decisions Chloë Sevigny: I remember Mary and the DP fighting a lot, and I remember feeling really empathetic for her. … I just remember it was tense. My coverage was always kind of held for last. So I felt kind of bitter, because I was like, of course it's Christian's movie, and they should focus on his performance, but I wanted an opportunity as well, and sometimes I felt like I got the short end of the stick. And I felt like I was hyper-aware of what was going on with the camera because I was always watching that, because I was always like, are they gonna give me my due time? Which is a very actorly thing to do. Mary Harron: The date scene might be my favorite scene, when Chloë comes over to Bateman's apartment. I remember she was so upset that she only got one take for her close-up. I felt really bad for her. But she was so great in that scene. She's so beautiful and vulnerable. Chloë Sevigny: Aww, god bless her. She's so sweet. Matt Ross: The DP shot Reservoir Dogs… He seemed to be a relatively kind of gruff, tough guy. My memory of it was that I think he was setting up shots that in Mary's mind may have been cool shots, pretty shots, but didn't tell the story she wanted to. Guinevere Turner: A cool thing that Mary told me relatively recently is that in the scene where the detective that Willem plays and Christian are having lunch at Smith & Wollensky's—and it's really tense, and Bateman's sort of losing his mind—she directed Willem to do several takes where he was sure that Patrick had done it and then several takes where he absolutely didn't think he'd done it. And then she intercut the two styles. That, I think, is genius. Willem Dafoe: I remember her telling me to play it those different ways. And then she cut it together in a way that was ambiguous where she kind of had her cake and ate it too. … That lifted up the scene. Mary Harron: I've done that with a few other things… when you're really on the edge of ambiguity, when you're not sure what a character's motivation is. Guinevere Turner: There's a little thing that Reese Witherspoon does in the movie that always makes me laugh because she just invented it on the spot. They're in a restaurant where Patrick breaks up with her and he's saying I kill people and I'm losing my mind, and she's like Whaaa? But then she just looks across the room and she waves at someone and goes like this [pointing at her wrist]. She's just telling some woman all the way across the room that she loves her bracelet. Matt Ross: I asked if I could wear adult braces, and Mary very intelligently said no. President Bateman? Following the logic that Bateman is like an alien, Bale reasoned that he would have been inspired to imitate both Tom Cruise and Donald Trump. Christian Bale: I mean, look, if someone had landed at that time and he was looking around for cultural alpha males, business-world alpha males, et cetera, than Tom Cruise certainly would have been one of those that he would have looked at and aspired to be and attempted to emulate. And he's still a leading man now. So yeah, I had pictures of him inside the trailer, as I did other people, and '80s models that Bateman probably would have looked at and tried to imitate. And certainly that megawatt smile with the perfect teeth. Likewise, Donald Trump would have been somebody he would have looked at and said, 'Ah, right. I need to have a little bit of that as well.' … If Bateman were around today he'd probably be inspired to run for president. Continue reading our American Psycho oral history on the next page... The End People still ask Harron and Turner if Bateman's murders really happened, or take place in his imagination. Mary Harron: I would never answer that. As Quentin Tarantino says, 'If I tell you that, I take this movie away from you.' I will say there's a moment where it becomes less realistic, and that's the moment when the ATM says Feed Me a Stray Cat. Guinevere Turner: To me and Mary, the book left it up in the air, too, what was real and what was not real. We didn't think that everything was real because some of it is literally surreal. But we just decided, together, that we both really disliked movies where the big reveal is that it was all in someone's head or it was all a dream. We just both find that annoying. We just said we're going to make a really conscious effort to have it be real, and then at some point… he's sort of perceiving things differently, but they're really happening. Like he shoots at a cop car, and it just bursts into flames, and she just directed him to look at the gun like, Hmmm, how did that happen? But we did want it to be, at the end, that you really did think that he did these things. '? American Suck-o' Harron said a friend overheard someone on the ski slopes in Park City, during Sundance, proclaim: 'American Psycho? American Suck-o!' After the premiere at the festival, and a fight with the ratings board over the film's three-way scene, American Psycho made its way into theaters on April 14, 2000. Mary Harron: The tone just completely confused people. When you do something that mixes genres, in this case you're mixing social satire and horror… people don't know how to take it at first. I think it took years for people to think it's okay to find these scenes funny. Christian Bale: I was totally oblivious to any reaction to the film. I didn't notice. I was happy. Mary Harron: The New York Times review had a huge impact on the reception, I think. And Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman's review, that was a big thing. There were certain key reviews that were very favorable and that really helped. Times critic Stephen Holden wrote in his review of American Psycho:'In adapting Bret Easton Ellis's turgid, gory 1991 novel to the screen, the director Mary Harron has boiled a bloated stew of brand names and butchery into a lean and mean horror comedy classic.' He and added that the film 'salvages a novel widely loathed for its putative misogyny and gruesome torture scenes by removing its excess fat in a kind of cinematic liposuction.' Bret Easton Ellis: I think that could be the flourishing of woke-ness in the culture—me being the dark prince of literature, and I write this book that upsets so many people, I need to be put in my place. And what better narrative is there than that two women did it? That's very appealing. …When I first saw the movie, and whenever I see parts of it now, I like it. It's about half an experience for me, because I wrote the novel. And it's not the full American Psycho. It is kind of the greatest hits. … It's in some ways a complicated movie for me. But overall I like it. Willem Dafoe: Years before branding and recognition by your average person about how things were being sold and how society was becoming so obsessed with surface reality and consumerism… here was this strange movie about this psychopath businessman that really touched upon that. And also the ugly aspects of capitalism. So it had real politics to it, in a very present way, but not in a didactic way. … It was a movie that was weirdly entertaining and disturbing at the same time. I think the movie is a scathing critique of a certain kind of lifestyle, a certain kind of society, a certain kind of point of view, and that includes attitudes towards women. Sometimes in depicting those lives you have to show things that are ugly. It's not enough just to say, oh, this is a forbidden image, we can't show it… Sometimes we have to show negative behavior to see other possibilities. Christian Bale: Everyone had told me it was career suicide, which really made me want to do it. And I guess I was a little bit disappointed that it didn't end up being career suicide. I kind of hoped that maybe that was it, and I'd have to find something else to go do… I'm perverse. They told me I shouldn't, so of course—that's human, isn't it?—you want to even more. Harron and Turner have made two more films together: The Notorious Bettie Page, released in 2005, and Charlie Says, released in 2018. Guinevere Turner: What happened recently is our film Charlie Says premiered at the Venice Film Festival, a year ago, and our out-of-the-gate, next-day reviews were not particularly good. And Mary and I were in Venice sort of pouting in the lobby of the hotel and Mary's husband was there, and he's like, 'Hey you guys—Google, Google, Google—I'm gonna read you a review of American Psycho when it first came out.' And he read one of them and it was so similar that we were like, 'Oh! We're just ahead of our time. We have to get used to being misunderstood.' This story was originally published in January, 20 years after the Sundance debut of American Psycho. It was updated on April 14, 2020. Related Headlines 20 Behind the Scenes Stories of Airplane, Maybe the Funniest Movie Ever Made 12 Actors Who Held Their Breath Underwater for an Extraordinarily Long Time Dr. No: 12 Behind the Scenes Photos From the First 007 Film
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Tampa Bay anti-Trump protesters keep showing up. Here's why
Tampa Bay's anti-Donald Trump contingent is fired up. Hundreds of demonstrators flocked to downtown St. Petersburg Saturday afternoon, waving signs, chanting and voicing their disapproval for America's 47th president. And they promised to keep showing up. 'There's a desire among the people to have a way to express their frustration with what's happening,' said Helen Amburgey, a lead organizer of the St. Petersburg event. It was the second major protest in April for a coalition of groups led locally by the Pinellas chapter of the National Organization of Women. On April 5, hundreds more came out in similar demonstrations that were part of the nationwide 'Hands Off!' protest movement that saw millions of Americans take to the streets. More protests happened around the region Saturday, including one at Cypress Point Park in Tampa and another near the University of South Florida. About 1,000 registered to show up to the St. Petersburg event, Amburgey said. The crowd didn't appear quite that large, but demonstrators still packed around the perimeter of Williams Park. Just like two weeks ago, the St. Petersburg event was part of a nationwide day of action. Among the protesters' grievances: The Trump administration's move to slash the size of the federal workforce; its apparent disregard for due process when deporting people it says are in the country illegally; and Florida's six-week abortion ban, which many attribute to Trump's appointment of the conservative Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. 'Why hold this event?' read the webpage distributed online to protestors ahead of time. 'This offers a way to collectively express our outrage.' One attendee dressed like a character from 'The Handmaid's Tale' — a story about an extremely oppressive male-dominated society. Another came in a full orange jumpsuit and Trump mask, alluding to Trump's felony conviction. A man walked down the sidewalk on the west side of the park proudly holding aloft toilet paper with Trump's face on it. Mellina Jennings stood on the corner of 3rd Street and 2nd Avenue North waiving a sign that read, 'Eggs are expensive because all the chickens are in Congress.' As a large speaker nearby blared 'American Pie,' Jennings said she came to the protest because she wanted a way to voice her feelings about Trump's consolidation of federal power. Particularly alarming to her is the Trump administration's immigration policy. Around the country, officials have revoked the legal status of numerous immigrants here legally. 'They're totally disregarding everything that this country stands on,' Jennings said. Michael Sanford of Largo, an Air Force veteran of 25 years, stood on 3rd Street holding a sign protesting the Trump administration's planned cuts to the Veterans Administration. Sanford said he's heard about nothing but good experiences at the local VA health system at Bay Pines. He worries the Trump administration will jeopardize the care offered to veterans who only served a short time. 'To go at it the way they're going at it, it's not to cut waste,' Sanford said. 'It's to destroy.' There was no unifying theme to the protestors' message. Some waved signs packed with paragraphs of text. The Trump administration has so angered its critics, it can be difficult to find a theme to the resistance. As one sign put it: 'Too much for 1 sign!' But logistically, the event was tightly organized. Leaders handed out free bottles of water to those roasting in the April sun. Volunteers worked to keep the crowd from disrupting traffic or pedestrians. 'Please keep all cross walks clear! Thank you!' said Jo Weddleton from the sunny corner of 3rd Street and 1st Avenue N. 'We are not above the law!'
