Judith Beatrice Bari (November 7, 1949 – March 2, 1997) was an American environmentalist, feminist, and labor leader, primarily active in Northern California after moving to the state in the mid-1970s.
While those charges were dropped, in 1991 the pair filed suit against the Oakland Police Department and FBI for violations of their civil rights during the investigation of the bombing.
In 1986, Houston millionaire Charles Hurwitz acquired Pacific Lumber Company, with assets in Northern California, including in redwood forests.
Earth First!, which at that point still promoted "monkeywrenching" as part of its tactics, was blamed by the company and some workers for the spike because of incidents of equipment sabotage that had taken place in the vicinity where the log was harvested.
At this time, environmentalists were backing their legal suits against timber overcutting by staging blockades of job sites in the woods and tree sitting.
[22] While recruiting, Cherney was kept at a distance, so that his reputation for advocating sabotage and propensity for hostile outbursts toward timber workers could not damage the campaign.
[28] In the early afternoon of May 23, 1990, Bari started a road trip to Santa Cruz to organize for Redwood Summer and related musical events.
In late July 1990, the Alameda County District Attorney declined to press charges against Bari and Cherney, claiming insufficient evidence.
But Bari and Cherney filed a civil rights suit in 1991 for violations by the FBI and Oakland Police because of the arrests and search warrants carried out on their properties.
When the Oakland police and the FBI initially accused Bari and Cherney of knowingly carrying a bomb for use in an act of terrorism, the story made headlines nationwide.
For example, a KQED news report, entitled "Focus: Logjam", used the term "radical" to describe Earth First!, blamed them for having sabotaged loggers' equipment and conducting tree spiking, and tied Bari's bombing in with such actions.
[28] On July 6, a new search warrant for Bari's home was granted, as investigators sought exemplars of typewriting to compare to the typewritten The "Lord's Avenger".
"[35] It said the writer had been outraged by Bari's statements and behavior in December 1988, when she opposed an anti-abortion protest at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Ukiah, California.
[36] Based on content of the letter, law enforcement investigated Bill Staley, a self-styled preacher, Louisiana Pacific mill worker, and former professional football player who had been prominent at the 1988 anti-abortion demonstration.
During the production, he discovered circumstantial evidence and heard suspicions expressed by acquaintances of Bari that her ex-husband Mike Sweeney should be considered a suspect.
Talbot also had reported a 1989 letter signed by "Argus" that was sent to the Chief of the Ukiah Police Department, offering to be an informant against Bari regarding marijuana dealing.
[40] In 1995 Ed Gehrman, a teacher and publisher of Flatland, a small magazine (now defunct) in Fort Bragg, California, had also participated in Redwood Summer protests.
Anderson was incensed by the possibility that Bari had tried to smear an innocent man in order to promote her narrative that the timber industry and/or the FBI were involved in the bombing.
Anderson suggested that Bari and Sweeney each had sufficient guilty knowledge to destroy the other - a legal mutual assured destruction scenario.
[30] Years before, in 2002, at the conclusion of the Bari/Cherney civil rights trial, Stephen Talbot had already publicly reported on Salon.com that Bari had confided in him about her suspicions of Sweeney and the car bombing, as well as her knowledge that he had firebombed the Santa Rosa airport in 1980.
Before they got underway, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors was considering legislation to regulate the size of protest signs and standards, in order to curb violence by demonstrators.
[44] On May 29, representatives of Redwood Summer were pleased to reach an agreement with some of industry: they signed with small local logging companies to support nonviolent and non-destructive protests of timber harvesting.
Following the 2002 trial and award of damages, Cherney and supporters sought access to the remains of the partially intact Cloverdale mill bomb held by the FBI.
leadership because of dealing with inoperable cancer, by the end of 1996, Bari was working as a para-legal and hosting a weekly public radio show.
[37] In 1994 Bari was part of a congressional advisory committee, chartered by Congressman Dan Hamburg (D-CA), trying to develop a proposal for a Headwaters Forest Reserve of 44,000 acres.
[55] The bill based on the "large reserve" proposal died in Congress after Hamburg lost his 1994 re-election bid; during a midterm upheaval, he was defeated by the Republican former incumbent of his seat.
[58] Bari and Cherney had filed a federal civil rights suit in 1991 claiming that the FBI and police officers falsely arrested the pair in relation to the bombing of her car in May 1990.
Also on October 15, federal judge Claudia Wilken dismissed former FBI supervisor SAIC Richard Wallace Held from the case.
As part of the jury's verdict, the judge ordered Frank Doyle and two other FBI agents, and three Oakland police officers, to pay a total of $4.4 million to Cherney and to Bari's estate.
Mark Hertsgaard wrote a critical review in the Los Angeles Times entitled, "'Too many rumors, too few facts to examine eco-activism case".