She's a climate activist, but was prosecuted as a terrorist

On Aug. 11, 39-year-old Jessica Reznicek will report to a federal women's prison in Waseca, Minn., to begin an eight-year sentence for damaging pieces of machinery involved in construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

She was indicted in September 2019 on nine federal charges related to her 2016 pipeline vandalism — or civil disobedience, as she prefers — pleading guilty eventually to one count of conspiracy to damage an energy facility. She did it, as she told the court, because she feared oil would leak from the pipeline and further contaminate Iowa's drinking water.

She was sentenced in June, four years after she and fellow climate activist Ruby Montoya publicly announced what they had done. (Montoya has also taken a plea but has yet to be sentenced.) After her release, Reznicek will live under federal supervision for three years. She and Montoya also have been ordered to make $3.2 million in restitution to pipeline owners Energy Transfer LLC.

You might think their honesty would have been sufficient to prevent the need for a massive, armed FBI raid of the Des Moines Catholic Worker house Reznicek shares with two women. That taking ownership also might have obviated any purpose for a private team hired by the pipeline owners to follow her around day and night for eight months. Reznicek says she learned who they were through a Freedom of Information Act request.

But the enforcement and espionage worlds, which build terrorism cases and use psychological tactics to break subjects down, are light-years from the world of a climate-change activist. Especially one who has, as she puts it, been living in the counterculture for 10 years, talking openly about what she does and why.

Her Iowa pipeline activism, as she told me, began on election night 2016 in Buena Vista County, where she burned five pieces of machinery, including backhoes and graders: "I got my own welder to weld them apart. When metal heats up once, it comes together. When it heats up again, it can come apart."

Prosecutors claimed that the fires had put first responders and construction workers at risk. But Reznicek insisted that no one was threatened or harmed, and that, had there been such a risk, "I'm such a peaceful person, I would have backed away."

The government claimed she and Montoya set 11 fires. "The government added four additional fires I had nothing to do with, but it increased my restitution and sentencing," she said. She takes particular exception to the domestic terrorism claim that enhanced her sentence, as did her prior criminal history related to activism.

An appeal filed by her attorneys contends her actions didn't constitute terrorism and that the sentence is too harsh. But that's expected to take a year to be heard.

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Despite years of protests over its potential environmental impact and incursion on Native lands, the 1,200-mile Dakota Access Pipeline began functioning in 2017. It carries oil through North and South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois. Here in Iowa, protesters challenged the use of eminent domain laws to require private property owners to allow a company to drill under their land.

Last July a federal judge ordered the pipeline shut down as an unlawful encroachment on federal land, in response to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's contention it endangered the Missouri River. But that part of the judge's decision was overturned on appeal. The Biden administration has allowed the pipeline to keep functioning while an environmental review is conducted.

In 2019, there were 614 reported U.S. oil or gas pipeline incidents, resulting in 10 deaths, 35 injuries and about $259 million in damages, according to the anti-fracking organization Fractracker.

However you feel about oil and gas pipelines, or about vandalism and property destruction to forestall them, Reznicek's sentence seems unreasonably punitive considering that: One Iowa man got 3⅓ years for fraudulently receiving more than $1.3 million in federal loans intended for COVID relief; a former police detective is in line for a suspended 10-year sentence for the repeated felony theft of meth from a police evidence locker; and a man who pleaded guilty to arson after pouring gasoline on a woman and her home, then opening a propane tank in it, got two years.

"Climate change is warming up the world and fossil fuel is contributing to the burning," said Reznicek of the currently raging West Coast fires. "And here I'm accused of terrorism for welding something."

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Reznicek's enigmatic quick wit, sense of irony, commanding leadership skills and belief in the power of individuals to effect better outcomes is almost enviable. Her life story could be the stuff of a Hollywood film plot, with its trajectory of rags to riches to activism to God.

She grew up working class in a small, rural Dallas County, Iowa, town where her father worked for the county sheriff's department. She graduated from high school in Perry, drove a forklift for the Hy-Vee distribution center in Chariton and took classes at community colleges. Later, working at a country club in Centerville, she met and married a member she calls a millionaire businessman, giving her access to "material resources I'd never been exposed to. … I was wearing Prada and driving BMWs."

She was also handing out $20 bills to people standing on food lines, and attending Simpson College full time. But far from repressing her political awakenings, which had begun through interactions with Latinx immigrants brought to Perry to work in meat processing plants, her college education fueled her radicalization. And when Occupy Wall Street began in 2011 after "the housing bubble burst," she left for New York to join the movement. She also left the marriage: "One day it was, 'This can't work.' "

She has done environmental canvassing for Public Interest Research Group in Buffalo, New York, protested in the West Bank and in Guatemala, and been detained and deported by the Israeli government after admitting to helping Palestinians plant olive trees in occupied territories. She has stood side by side with Native American tribes to protest the disruption of a sacred burial ground and treaty rights being broken, through the group Mississippi Stand.

For 11 years her base has been a house owned by the Des Moines Catholic Worker community, where she's currently under house arrest. Her pipeline protest work was with that community, but she says she has since retired from direct action: "I have huge respect for the work but I've outgrown it."

Three years ago, exhausted and depleted, she left Des Moines to live in a Benedictine monastery in Duluth and reconnect with the Catholicism she walked away from in her teens. She was at the monastery, working at an after-school program for poor children, when her arrest warrant was issued. Since her return to Des Moines, she has delivered pizzas for income and helped distribute food through the Catholic Worker community.

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Over the years I've followed Reznicek's campaigns and watched her lead a chant or a protest or make her body limp to be hauled off by police rather than move when ordered to. Even when I've disagreed with her tactics, I've admired her idealism and willingness to put herself on the line for what she thinks is righteous. I've heard her disavow terrorism.

She is no terrorist.

She'll be in prison, where phone calls are monitored and physical touch is barred. This one has housed such notorious offenders as Shelley (Rachelle) Shannon, convicted of trying to murder Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller in 1993, and Lisa A. Biron, a convicted child molester and child pornographer.

Reznicek saw irony that Waseca "is a Dakota word for fertile, rich earth."

At times she is tearful, imagining the deaths of those she loves while she's locked up. She has feared the isolation from society and alienation from others in her life. But lately, an outpouring of love and support from movement people has brought reassurance.

"As I grow into an old woman," she says, "I have this peace in my heart that I tried to effect change with utmost integrity."

But she's still Jessica Reznicek, adding, "I was indicted on malicious use of fire when the whole world's burning."

Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Readers may send her e-mail at rbasu@dmreg.com.