When the viral video cooled off, people thought the case against the 62-year-old would be dropped. Prosecutors doubled down.
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.
“Everybody was cracking up. They just thought it was hilarious.”
“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.”
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Grandmother Faces Trial in Alabama for Wearing Penis Costume to No Kings Protest
