Biography
Pam Fadem (Pamela Fadem) is a white anti-imperialist activist and a founding member of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. In 1984, while living in Austin, Texas, she was charged with criminal contempt for resisting a federal grand jury investigating the Puerto Rican independence movement and allied clandestine organizations — part of a wave of subpoenas that targeted John Brown Anti-Klan Committee members and Puerto Rican solidarity activists. Ordered to appear before the grand jury in Brooklyn on February 16, 1984, she went instead to the United Nations to challenge the investigation and was arrested leaving the UN building; after telling the court she would not appear, she was jailed. Convicted of criminal contempt and facing a three-year prison term, she saw sentencing postponed because of her serious medical condition — and on April 19, 1985 Judge Eugene Nickerson, after hearing medical testimony, suspended the prison sentence and placed her on three years of probation. She served only that brief initial detention. Fadem went on to decades of movement work, including as a longtime organizer with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and its newsletter The Fire Inside, focused on prison abolition, women prisoners' rights, and disability justice.
