Biography
Priscilla Grim, age 48 of Brooklyn, New York, was a longtime media organizer with Occupy Wall Street in 2011-2012 and later a contributor to the National Lawyers Guild's mass-defense work. She traveled to Atlanta to support the Stop Cop City week of action in March 2023 and was arrested at the music festival on March 5, 2023. She was charged under Georgia's § 16-11-220 domestic-terrorism statute and held at the DeKalb County Jail for several weeks before bond was set and she could return to New York. She was subsequently indicted in the August 2023 RICO indictment along with 60 other defendants and now faces felony racketeering charges in addition to the original domestic-terrorism count. She has lost her job and reported severe financial and personal hardship as a result of the years-long pretrial proceedings. The RICO charge against her was dismissed on December 30, 2025 along with the charges against the other 60 defendants, after a judge found the Georgia attorney general lacked authorization to bring the case; the state appealed. Grim and thirteen other defendants separately sought dismissal of long-unindicted domestic-terrorism allegations at a hearing on March 6, 2026.
On January 18, 2023, during a multi-agency raid on the Stop Cop City forest encampment in the South River Forest near Atlanta, Georgia State Patrol officers shot and killed 26-year-old forest defender Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (Tortuguita). The killing — the first known police killing of an environmental activist on U.S. soil during a protest — accelerated and radicalized the multi-year movement against the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a 171-acre, $90+ million police and fire training facility in the South River Forest known to opponents as 'Cop City.'
Georgia and DeKalb County prosecutors responded with the most aggressive use of state-level domestic-terrorism and RICO statutes against a U.S. protest movement in modern history: 42 forest defenders were charged under Georgia's domestic-terrorism statute (originally enacted in 2017 in response to white-supremacist mass shootings) for activities ranging from camping in the forest to attending a March 2023 music festival a mile from the construction site. On August 29, 2023, an Atlanta grand jury returned a single 109-page RICO indictment against 61 of these defendants — the largest RICO indictment of a U.S. social movement in decades. Three Atlanta Solidarity Fund leaders were also indicted on 15 counts each of money laundering and charity fraud (charges later dropped in September 2024). The RICO case has remained largely stalled in pretrial proceedings; this database entry is for one of the small number of defendants who were denied bond or otherwise held in custody for meaningful periods before posting bail.
