STAY UP TO DATE WITH THE LATEST NEWS AT BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2019 18 pages • Vol.Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint 42, No. 15 • April 12–18, 2019
Dominatrix unchained!
Movers help Bed-Stuy woman fl ee her BDSM-hating neighbor
19
Mayor declares public health emergency after measles cases spread OUTBREAK POINT
Brooklynite brings his crusade to D.C.
Park Slope resident heads to capital to spread awareness about deadly infection
CITI FIELD
MAY 18 & 19, 2019
theworldSfare.nyc
Photo by Colin Mixson
100+ Global CuIsines
International
Beer Garden
Music, Dance,
Art & More
Sign of summer
Fun-lovers enjoyed an inaugural ride on the famous Cyclone roller
coaster during the first ride of the year at Luna Park in Coney Island
on April 6.
Photo by Steve Solomonson
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
Mayor de Blasio declared a public
health emergency at Brooklyn Public
Library’s Williamsburg Branch on April
3 in response to the growing spread of
the measles virus in Brooklyn’s Orthodox
Jewish communities, where nearly
300 people have fallen ill with the potentially
fatal disease since October.
“We cannot allow this dangerous
disease to make a comeback in New
York City,” said de Blasio. “We have
to stop it now.”
The mayor’s emergency declaration
mandates that residents of four Williamsburg
zip codes — 11205, 11206,
11211, and 11249 — must seek vaccination,
or face Department of Health
violations and fines totaling as much as
$1,000 per unvaccinated person.
The emergency declaration follows
a previously announced Department of
Health exclusion order barring unvaccinated
children from attending schools
and day cares within both Williamsburg
and Borough Park, and demonstrates
a shift in the city’s focus to combating
the disease in the northern Brooklyn
neighborhood, where the majority
of new measles cases have been
discovered, according to de Blasio.
“It is now much more a Williamsburg
problem than a Borough Park
problem,” said the mayor.
De Blasio also touted the city’s authority
to temporarily close schools
found in violation of the Health Department’s
exclusion order as an option
of last resort in combating the spread
of measles.
“That is not a tool we want to use,
Health inspectors traced 40 measles cases back to Williamsburg’s
Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov, which allowed unvaccinated kids to attend
class.
but it is one we will use if we have no
choice,” de Blasio said.
And throughout the press conference,
city officials reiterated the safety and
effectiveness of the measles vaccine,
with the city’s chief physician describing
an annual national death toll that
reached into the hundreds before the
measles vaccine was invented.
“Getting vaccinated is far safer than
getting the measles,” said Department
of Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot.
“The vaccine has been proven safe
and effective in preventing the spread
of measles.”
This is the first time the city has issued
a public health emergency mandating
vaccines, according to Deputy
Mayor of Health and Human Services
Dr. Herminia Palacio, who attributed
the need for the extraordinary measure
to the combination of both a large scale
anti-vaccination movement and the outbreak
of the potentially fatal illness.
“The combination of a large anti-vax
movement... with a large outbreak has
not happened in the way that its happening
right now,” said Palacio.
Officials traced the borough’s measles
outbreak to a Brooklyn resident traveling
from Israel — where a similar spread of
the disease infected more than 1,000 people
last year — in October, and the infection
has since afflicted 285 people within
the borough’s Orthodox Jewish Community,
the vast majority of whom are
under 18 years old, according to Health
Department statistics.
So far, 21 people have been hospitalized
with the measles, including five
people who required intensive care, according
to Barbot, who noted there have
been no fatalities.
Since the Health Department issued
its mandatory exclusion order in December,
numerous schools violating the
city’s emergency mandate played host to
mini outbreaks of the extremely virulent
disease, including one Williamsburg yeshiva
that inspectors have connected to
more than 40 cases since January.
This is the largest outbreak of
the measles that New York City has
experienced since 1991, according to
Barbot, and its spread represents a
major spike over the two infections that
plagued New Yorkers in 2017.
The highly contagious airborne pathogen
produces symptoms including fever,
cough, and a runny nose, and can cause
diarrhea, ear infection, pneumonia, encephalitis,
and death — with about 1 of
every 1,367 kids infected dying due to
fatal complications from measles.
Symptoms can appear anytime from
seven to 21 days following exposure, according
to the Health Department.
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
This dominatrix got hooked
up!
An embattled Bedford-Stuyvesant
dominatrix fled her BDSMhating
neighbor to another Brooklyn
dungeon on April 6 with help
from some big-hearted movers,
who assisted the cash-strapped
kinkster transport her bondage
gear free of charge.
It wasn’t the first BDSM
dungeon the movers have
relocated, but it was one of the
nicest, according to the owner.
“I’ve been moving for 12 years
now in the city, and it happens
here and there,” said Dan Heydebrand,
co-owner of Lift NYC
Movers. “This one had some of
the nicer stuff we’ve seen.”
Heydebrand decided to donate
his company’s time and moving
expertise to sex educator Charlotte
Taillor after reading news coverage
about her trouble with kink-shaming
neighbor Laurie Miller, who
successfully perpetrated a onewoman
harassment campaign in
an effort to force the dominatrix
off her Quincy Street block.
During the move, Heydebrand
and his crew transported a small
torture-chamber’s worth of custom
made bondage furniture, including
a cross affixed with numerous
attachments, a throne fit for a
goddess, and a bed that probably
wasn’t made for a good night’s rest
in mind, the mover said.
“It was all in leather,” he said.
“It’s probably not too comfortable
to sleep on, but then it’s probably
not for sleeping.”
Taillor, who operates an adultsonly
classroom called The Taillor
Collective, moved from a Crown
Heights dungeon to the residential
Quincy Street block in December,
where she offered paid workshops
catering to the erotically intrepid,
including lessons on bondage and
paddling, cross-dressing events
for guys, dirty drawing workshops
featuring tied-up models,
and pegging classes for women —
a class which attracts an unlikely
amount of Jersey house wives, the
kink maven claimed.
But the dominatrix announced
her plan to flee Bedford-Stuyvesant
after Miller discovered that
the men and women filing into her
neighbor’s apartment were exploring
the less orthodox side of human
sexuality, and the Quincy Street
resident could be heard screaming
at neighbors regarding their sexual
proclivities from the street outside,
as Taillor and her colleagues
held class from within.
Taillor — who asked that the specific
location of her new dungeon
be withheld to protect her clients —
said having to relocate so soon after
moving to the Bedford-Stuyvesant
location put a serious strain on her
finances, and said Heydebrand’s
generous offer to help free of charge
came as huge relief.
“They were amazing,”
Taillor said. “I’m going to be
forever grateful.”
Photo by Ale Fruscella
Dominatrix Charlotte Taillor moved from her Bedford-Stuyvesant dungeon with the help
of some kind-hearted movers.
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
He’s making a C. diff-erence.
A Park Slope man took his crusade
against a deadly infection that
annually kills tens of thousands of
Americans to Washington, D.C.,
on April 9, where he and more than
two dozen other advocates lobbied
legislators to pass new laws in the
hope of saving lives.
Christian Lillis became a leading
figure in the fight to spread awareness
of the bacterium known as C.
diff after his mother fell ill with the
infection following a routine dentist’s
visit, and within days perished
due to fatal complications caused
by the ill-understood germ.
“It was horrific,” said Lillis.
“From the time that we took her
to the hospital until she was gone
was probably 36 hours.”
C. diff — a bacterium that can
be ironically activated by anti-biotic
— afflicts about a half million
people every year , of whom
an estimated 29,000 perish 30
days after their initial diagnosis,
reaping an annual death toll
on par with motor-vehicle collisions,
according to the Center for
Disease Control.
After Lillis’s mother died in
2009, the Slope resident created
the Peggy Lillis Foundation to
spread awareness to the littleknown,
but lethal infection.
Now, the Kings County man
works with other organizations
to host an annual C. diff summit,
where experts share potentially
life-saving information about the
deadly microbes.
The first two summits were
hosted in New York City, but the
event moved to Washington, D.C.,
last year, and was followed up by a
day of intense lobbying, where approximately
two dozen advocates
met with nearly 50 lawmakers in
both houses, many of whom had
never heard of the illness.
“Only three of them had every
heard of the disease,” the Sloper
said.
And this year, they went back
to ask Congress to approve new
programs to spread awareness for
the obscure killer, enhance regulations
around reporting the illness,
and increase funding to study and
fight the illness.
“All these advocates have appointments
with their Congress
members and senators, who will
be gong to offices sharing their
stories, and things congress can
do to make a tangible difference,”
said Lillis.
Christian Lillis, right, became a leading advocate spreading
awareness for C. diff, a deadly infection that killed his
mother Peggy, middle.
Christian Lillis
/BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
/BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
/Vol.Se