I Was Attacked by a Gang of Old People at a Protest in Bucharest

Last week, Romanian conservative politician Dan Voiculescu (a billionaire media tycoon who's tight with the communist regime) was sentenced to ten years in prison for corruption. Voiculescu is the owner of Antena 3, an extremely popular TV station that is sadly also known for misinforming the public and promoting its owner's political interests.

Unsurprisingly, his arrest caused a wave of joy that swept Romanians in very much the same way Margaret Thatcher’s death delighted certain British leftists last year. A symbol of the former communist regime had finally fell, renewing people's faith in the local justice system.

That feeling was particularly reinforced after the judge blocked Voiculescu's bank accounts and impounded all his properties, including the Antena 3 headquarters. But according to Antena 3 employees, the truth is that President Traian Băsescu only arrested Voiculescu after hidden-camera footage showing the president's brother in deals with known criminals was exposed.

And so on Sunday, Antena 3's journalists rallied about 4,000 people to protest their boss' arrest outside the Presidential Palace in Bucharest. Most of them were retirees, fans of certain TV personalities that have been made famous by the channel, and people that suffer from communism nostalgia.

When I got there, it all felt a little too similar to Comic-Con. Some Antena 3 personalities showed up and people surrounded them asking for autographs and selfies. They seemed like regular fans, only instead of screaming “We love you” to their favorite stars, they proved their love by shouting “Perish, you spawn of Satan” at the Romanian president's doorstep.

In the photo above, the guy in the wife-beater is Mircea Badea. He is Antena 3's most coveted TV show host, a Romanian Bill O'Reilly.

I saw an old woman climb on the person in front of her, even though she was using a cane, just to get a glimpse of the stars. Some people had brought their pets to the protest in the hope of attracting the stars' attention.

An old lady said, “I will not sleep until I see Mircea Badea." A lot of people walking behind the star shouted, “Mircea, do the splits!” because he is famous for doing the splits between two chairs on live TV.

This old lady had brought a medal she received for getting a degree in Literature 50 years ago, to prove that “not all Antena 3 fans are illiterate.”

She left happily with someone's autograph.

The lady on the left got that Romanian flag at a past Antena 3 protest, which saw journalists handing out flags in front of department stores.

She told me that she keeps it in a cupboard and only pulls it out on special occasions to tie it to her balcony.

This guy is Mihai Gâdea, the manager of Antena 3 and host of the station's most popular talk show. The protest moved along with him—when his fans weren't ganging up to hug him that is.

Photo by Vlad Petri

Thank god that these old ladies were there to wipe the sweat of their favorite star's forehead. When he left the march, people grew silent and disoriented.

During these confusing moments after Gâdea left the protest in his town car, I tried to talk to this man dressed in traditional Romanian clothes. He said he was part of something called the Romanian Rebels, and had come from the town of Constanța on the bus.

When I asked who organized his bus trip, things went wild. An old man yelled that I worked for B1 TV, a rival television station of Antena 3. This got everybody on my case; they all started screaming at me.

First they surrounded me, and then they started booing. They said that I am an agitator, an instigator (which are expressions used in Romanian communist newspapers for people who speak out loud), and that I have been brainwashed.

Then they pulled me by my bra and told me to “Get the fuck out of here, you sleazy cunt.” It actually sounds worse in Romanian. You can listen to it here.

I think the only reason they thought I was from a rival television station was that I am under 50.

Somebody from the back tried to smack my phone out of my hand, and when that didn't work they tried prying it from my grasp. I kept asking why were they attacking me, and they said: “You are asking for it. People do not want you here!”

Then some crazy white-haired lady jumped on my colleague who is a photographer, and I tried to save him. It was like Night of the Living Dead, only with retirees instead of zombies. Maybe that's why they kept shouting “You're a walking corpse!” at me.

I was saved in true rom-com style by another retiree who also thought I worked for B1 TV. On the side of the road we showed our VICE press badges, and people calmed down a little.

But later on an old lady smacked me over the head with a flag because, as she said, she had seen me getting pushed around for being from B1 TV earlier.

I had barely escaped, when I met the former minister of culture, Daniel Barbu, who had just arrived at the protest with his wife. He told me Antena 3's employees were being evicted from the building. Then this man showed up with a bouquet of carnations, giving three to each miss and missus.

At the gate of the Presidential Palace in Cotroceni, in front of the riot policemen guarding the entrances, stood Stanciu Vasile Victor, “engineer, member of the Ruralist Party for 21 years, and member of the guard corps who defended former ministers.”

Being a true gentleman, he offered me some pickles from one of the two jars he kept in his saddlebag. In the other one he had some potato stew. I thought he had come a long way, but he lived a few blocks away.

He told me he was running for the presidential elections this autumn and I asked him what his views on communist collaborators were: “They are not humans, they are used by the Jews, because being communist is the same as being a gypsy.” I felt pretty mellow after having been given flowers and pickles, so I wished him good luck.

Still, it's quite vexing to see our elders behave like this. It felt like I had gone back in time by 25 years, when people would go to see dictator Ceaușescu and ask him to kill their enemies. These people took the streets to defend a TV station and freedom of the press, but what they did instead was abuse several journalists. One of them was a real B1 TV reporter, who got kicked in the back.