In the body camera footage, a police officer parks his black SUV on the grass, a rosary swinging from the rearview mirror. He exits his car, moves briskly past a pair of protesters, and points an accusatory finger at the suspect: a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis holding an American flag.

The alleged crime? Unclear. There’s no sound at first, only the silent spectacle of a person in a penis suit turning toward a cop with a stance that says, “Who, me?” A handmade sign comes into view in the person’s right hand. It reads “No Dick Tator.”

The scene in the video unfolded last fall, on a busy road just off a strip mall in South Alabama. The protester was Renea Gamble, an ASL interpreter who bought the penis suit at a nearby Spirit Halloween store.

“Featuring armholes, a sheer face panel, and an internal fan that keeps things erect,” a description on its website reads, “this costume is a guaranteed hit.”

Gamble was just shy of her 62nd birthday when she joined the October 18 No Kings rally in Fairhope, a small city on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Organized by the local Indivisible chapter, which launched in 2025, the rally attracted some 1,000 people in deep-red Baldwin County, a mostly white, largely rural stretch of the state and one of President Donald Trump’s most stalwart bases of support.

The turnout exceeded organizers’ expectations. It also flew in the face of neighbors and critics who might dismiss protesters as paid agitators. “When you show your face to people that probably see you around town and know you live here, it combats the narrative of, like, [George] Soros busing us in,” said Kayleigh Rae, who founded Indivisible Baldwin County.

Inspired by Portland’s anti-ICE “Frog Brigade” — which turned animal costumes into emblems of resistance — the protest included a couple of unicorns and a blow-up chicken. But the penis was new.

“Everybody was cracking up,” Rae recalled. “They just thought it was hilarious.”

“A Freakin’ Weiner”

Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb was less amused.

“I’m serious as a heart attack,” he tells Gamble when the audio begins to play on the 14-minute body camera video. “I’m not gonna sit here and argue with you.”

He demands to know how she could possibly justify such an obscene display: “I would like to hear how you would explain to my children what you’re supposed to be.”

Talking to a colleague over his two-way radio after the encounter, Babb described what happened. Gamble was dressed “like a freakin’ weiner,” he says on the tape, so he ordered her to remove the costume. She refused, invoking her First Amendment rights.

“I said, ‘That’s not freedom of speech,’” Babb continues. “‘This is a family town and being dressed like that is not going to be tolerated.’”

When she started to leave, “I said, ‘No, ma’am,’” Babb says on the tape. “‘Come here, I need to talk to you.’ She pulled away from me, so I grabbed her and put her on the ground.”

The body camera footage tells a different story.

“Am I being detained?” Gamble repeatedly asks Babb, who ignores the question and continues to scold her. “If I’m not being detained, I’m gonna go ahead and leave.”

When she turns to walk away, Babb steps forward and grabs her costume from behind, throwing her on her back. Angry protesters shout at Babb as he forces her to turn over. Two more cops help him pin Gamble on the grass and handcuff her.

“By the time I got there, the cops were stuffing an inflatable penis in the back of their car,” Rae said.

It was, on one hand, hilarious — a slapstick comedy bit brought to life. In the body camera footage, Babb tries and fails to fit Gamble into his own backseat, then hands her off to another officer, who escorts her to a different vehicle. Police wrestle with the oversized costume, ultimately failing to fit the unwieldy polyester penis into the car.

It was also disturbing. Gamble screams in pain in the video as the cops try to push her into the backseat, the handcuffs digging into her wrists. Babb asks where the zipper is and, as he peels off the penis suit, asks Gamble for her name.

She replies, “Aunt Tifa.”

Doubling Down

Gamble was one of only a small handful of people arrested at the nationwide No Kings protests last fall. She was briefly jailed and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, then released on a $500 bond.

Videos of her arrest went viral, taking off on TikTok and airing on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” A progressive Fairhope-based political cartoonist held a caption contest for his rendering of the arrest. In December, a Mobile-based talk radio station held a listener poll to choose its annual Alabamian of the Year, with “Inflatable Fairhope Protest Penis” receiving the most votes.

In Fairhope and around the country, many people were outraged at the cops’ manhandling of a grandmother in her 60s. But it also seemed obvious that the case would go away once cooler heads prevailed.

Instead, the city of Fairhope doubled down. Rather than dropping the case, the city attorney slapped Gamble with additional charges earlier this year: disturbing the peace and giving a false name to law enforcement. Her trial, first set to take place months ago, has been delayed multiple times. It is now set for April 15.

At a time when Trump and his allies have escalated attacks on dissent — prosecuting protesters as terrorists and punishing free speech — Gamble’s misdemeanor charges in small-town Alabama seem relatively minor. A conviction would most likely to result in a fine and a suspended sentence, according to her lawyer, David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who has spent decades representing people abused by police — and who called the whole thing “absurd.”

Nonetheless, Gespass did not expect the prosecution to get this far. “One would have thought at some point somebody would have decided to dismiss the case,” he said.

He was especially struck by the knee-jerk response by city leadership, which endorsed Gamble’s arrest before the facts were clear.

“This type of behavior or display is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in Fairhope,” Mayor Sherry Sullivan told reporters. “Protests should remain peaceful and free of profanity and obscene displays.”

Fairhope City Council President Jack Burrell said the costume violated “community standards.”

To Gamble, who has turned down media requests while her prosecution is pending, the case is about much more than her individual rights.

“What Renea has been saying all along is that it’s not so much about her,” said Gespass. “It’s the Constitution and the First Amendment that are on trial.”

“Mayberry on the Bay”

Gamble’s prosecution has moved forward as state and local governments are pushing to clamp down on free expression and expand censorship all over the country. Battles over speech have been especially heated in schools and public libraries across the South.

Just this week in Tennessee, a contentious library board meeting culminated in the firing of the library director over her alleged refusal to move scores of children’s books with LGBTQ+ subject matter to the adult section.

It was a similar fight, over the Fairhope Public Library, that set the stage for tensions that erupted after Gamble’s arrest. Over the past few years, the Alabama Public Library Service, which disperses federal funds, has remade its board and rewritten the rules around material considered offensive or obscene. In a controversy that made national news, the state agency stripped funding from Fairhope’s library over its refusal to move books flagged by right-wing activists.

The efforts were spearheaded by a “Moms for Liberty” activist who now heads a group called Fairhope Faith Collective — and who decried the No Kings protest where Gamble was arrested as a failure by local politicians.

“If they were doing their job by upholding conservative values in our city these people wouldn’t be attracted to Fairhope,” she complained on Facebook.

In a separate post, she applauded Gamble’s arrest: “It looks like the ‘Penis Perp’ may be connected to ANTIFA,” she wrote, adding that Gamble’s conduct was “typical ANTIFA behavior.”

Beyond social media, however, locals do not seem to share such rigid views. Although the city overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the last election, residents of Fairhope have vocally opposed the defunding of their library. Many see it as a betrayal of the city’s cherished identity as a haven for literature and the arts.

Fairhope was founded as a utopian experiment in the late 1800s: a “single tax” settlement modeled on a belief that land ownership should serve the greater good. The image of a place founded by independent thinkers has imbued Fairhope with an enduring sense of civic pride.

Its natural beauty and small-town charm — nicknamed “Mayberry on the Bay,” after the town in “The Andy Griffith Show” — has also made Fairhope a popular destination for retirees from northern cities. Today, the fast-growing city is predominantly white and more affluent than its neighbors, while its origin story remains a badge of honor — “a colony built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” as JD Crewe, the progressive political cartoonist, put it last year.

Rae, the Indivisible Baldwin County organizer, said that, in addition to other issues like aggressive immigration enforcement in the area, the library controversy has drawn people to their cause. At a Fairhope city council meeting earlier this year, activists stood outside holding signs that read “Ban bigots, not books.”

Meanwhile, the claim that the Fairhope Police Department is the arbiter of family values has been met with a wave of scorn and derision. Babb, a K-9 officer who regularly represents the police force at community events, brought a flood of criticism to the department’s social media accounts after Gamble’s arrest.

“I would NOT trust this clown around elderly people anymore,” one commenter wrote on an old Instagram post showing Babb at a “Coffee With a Cop” event held at a local senior center. “What if they happen to somehow offend him?”

Long-Term Gamble

In an email to The Intercept, Sullivan, the mayor, declined to say more about Gamble’s prosecution. “I cannot comment on pending court cases,” she wrote.

The city attorney, Fairhope Police Department, and city council president did not respond to requests for comment.

In his statements to the press last year, Burrell, the city council president, said he wanted to be sure that people’s constitutional rights were respected.

He added, “And I hope the police have enough evidence that they stand behind the charges.”

More than five months later, however, the evidence against Gamble remains a mystery. There are no witness accounts or recordings that show her breaking the law.

According to the official statement by the Fairhope police after the arrest, Babb arrived at the scene due to complaints over “traffic hazards in the area,” not anything Gamble had done. In a more recent filing ostensibly meant to clarify the charges, Municipal Court Prosecutor Marcus McDowell, who is also the city attorney, wrote that “members of the public called police concerning traffic safety issues and a person dressed as a giant penis thereby created a substantial traffic and safety hazard.”

Gespass, the civil rights lawyer, maintains that the city is seeking to punish his client simply for exercising her right to free expression. In a motion to dismiss the charges filed last November, he argued that Babb arrested Gamble based “solely upon his own prejudices.”

“No provision of Fairhope’s disorderly conduct ordinance applies to what she was doing or wearing when she was arrested,” he wrote. “Both her costume and her actions were protected First Amendment speech.”

In a one-line order, Municipal Judge Haymes Snedeker denied the motion.

More recently, Gesspass sought to subpoena the records from the radio station poll that elected Gamble as “Alabamian of the Year.” Although Gamble has not been charged with obscenity, her arrest was based on the accusation that her costume was obscene. Under prevailing case law, the question of whether something is obscene turns in part on “contemporary community standards.” While city leaders claimed that Gamble violated community standards, the radio poll showed the opposite, Gespass wrote. Snedeker disagreed, granting McDowell’s motion to toss the subpoena.

As her trial approaches, activists are preparing to show up at the courthouse to show their support for Gamble, now a minor celebrity known as Fairhope’s “Penis Lady.” In the meantime, more Fairhope residents joined the most recent No Kings protests on March 28, growing the number of participants to just under 1,200 people. This time, police set up barricades between the street and the protest.

The protest maintained its sense of humor, advertising itself as the “Official Site of #PenisGate.” On the Indivisible chapter Facebook page, Rae added photos of homemade signs in advance of the rally. One made creative use of a cartoon banana next to the words, “Free Speech is A-PEEling” and “Fuck ICE.” Another, featuring a wide-eyed hot dog, read, “Don’t Be a Meanie, It’s Just a Weenie.”

Gamble has tried to keep a low profile since her arrest. At the No Kings protest last week, though, the “No Dick Tator” sign appeared in the hands of a masked woman who wore dark sunglasses and a bandana over her face.

It was Gamble, again wearing an inflatable costume.

She was dressed as an eggplant.