Reverend Billy very ‘hoppy’ as charges reduced in toad case

BY SARAH FERGUSON | Earthalujah! Looks like the Manhattan district attorney is not throwing the book at Reverend Billy after all.

Last week The Villager reported that performance artist William Talen (a.k.a. Reverend Billy) and Nehemiah Luckett, musical director of the Stop Shopping Choir, were facing up to a year in jail and a whopping $30,000 bail for staging a protest romp through a JPMorgan Chase bank in Midtown in September.

The pair were charged with riot in the second degree and menacing in the third degree after Talen and Luckett led choir members dressed in papier-mâché hats depicting the golden toad — a now-extinct amphibian of Central America — up an escalator and into the third-floor lobby of the Chase branch on Sixth Ave. and 56th St. to evangelize about the threat of climate change.

JP Morgan is one of the top financers of mountaintop removal coal mining and other fossil fuel projects around the world — industries that are the main engines of climate change.


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http://thevillager.com/2013/12/12/billy-very-hoppy-as-charges-reduced-in-toad-case/