Why Enron pie-thrower sees herself in The City's Israel-Hamas protests

When Francine Cavanaugh pelted Enron’s then-CEO Jeff Skilling with a tofu cream pie 23 years ago during a speech in San Francisco, she was one in a long line of activists using comically disruptive acts to draw attention to her cause.

“People see it as a violent act because it’s an object and in someone's face” said Cavanaugh, who now lives in Atlanta. “However, it is also an American tradition. So I think anytime you see that, it's very humorous. There's a lightness about it.”

However, that lightness appears to have dimmed for the current generation of young activists who have overtaken college campuses , tech companies and their representatives’ office over Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. In this current climate, universities and institutions are walking a fine line between upholding First Amendment rights and cracking down on perceived public-safety concerns.

This backlash, especially by universities that highlight their histories of student activism as positives, troubles the now 56-year-old Cavanaugh.

The key point, she said, is that young people are able to see the world in ways older generations cannot. While those in power might say that young activists aren’t properly informed or haven't lived enough in the “real world,” Cavanaugh said she believes the only thing that truly matters is that this generation understands right from wrong — and are willing to put their bodies on the line for it. She added that the older generation would do well to remember that it’s the younger generation’s future. “It’s not ours past a certain point,” she said.

Cavanaugh, a Chicago native who moved to the Bay Area at age 18, came from an activist family. As a child, she participated in feminist protests with her mother, who worked for an organization that helped women through domestic violence. Cavanaugh attended one of the earliest Take Back the Night marches — which are now part of a global movement to end sexual violence — demonstrated to pass the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s.

She moved to Berkeley in 1986 with her sisters to work before eventually graduating from San Francisco State University. Cavanaugh said she was immediately influenced by the politics of her new home and started participating in protests throughout The City, beginning with the 1991 Gulf War.

“Pre-internet, cell phone, everything — I'm not sure how we did it, but we shut down the Federal Building the day that the war began,” Cavanaugh said, calling it “a very significant time. It was the first time I really felt the power of the community coming together and coming up against the establishment.”

Unlike today’s protests, which have the benefit of gaining widespread attention via social media, these anti-war protests weren’t as formally organized. While Cavanaugh said she wasn’t involved in the organizing of these demonstrations, seeing all the other people who showed up to collectively voice their displeasure was a significant moment in her activist life.

She said it taught her that if there was a cause she believed in strongly enough, no matter what opposition might come, “it's OK to disrupt things and stand up for what I believe in.” The most important part needed for change is to have a large enough group behind you, she added.

In the early 2000s, California was in the midst of an electricity crisis as demand for electricity outpaced supply. With the price of electricity skyrocketing, periodic rolling blackouts were instituted in order to avoid uncontrolled, state-wide blackouts. On June 14, 2000, a day when San Francisco reached over 103 degrees, 97,000 PG&E consumers in the Bay Area went without power .

Many factors contributed to the electricity crisis : droughts in the Northwest, government price caps, the failed promises of a deregulated energy sector, market manipulation. When California embraced deregulation in 1998, many utilities sold their power plants and became consumers. Rather than directly supply households and businesses with electricity, they bid for it from energy producers like Enron.

It was during these blackouts and rising electricity bills that Enron’s then-CEO Skilling came to San Francisco to give a speech at the Commonwealth Club’s former Market Street location. Cavanaugh received an email from one of her activist connections explaining Enron’s predominant role in the ongoing energy crisis.

“[Enron] were making millions off of it,” she said. “So I just had a thought, ‘Well, they're going to be at the Commonwealth Club, and maybe this would be a good opportunity to put a pie in the face of the CEO.’”

Cavanaugh arrived at the Commonwealth Club on June 21, 2001 with a tofu cream pie hidden in her book bag. She managed to snag a front-row seat by telling the organizers she was a student writing a paper on electricity and needed to sit up front because she forgot her glasses. With heightened security and media presence due to other planned protests, Cavanaugh said she knew wasn’t going to make it out of the building.

Once Skilling was introduced on stage, Cavanaugh recalled that she thought it was now or never.

“You can't hesitate at all,” she said. “So I did it in one fell swoop and got him on the side of his head. And then I just sat back down.”

Cavanaugh said the pieing was her fourth attempt at throwing a pie at someone in protest. She took inspiration from the Biotic Baking Brigade , a loose cell of underground activist bakers famous for throwing pies in the face of political figures who they wanted to give their “just desserts.”

When three police officers immediately came to arrest her, Cavanagh said she repeatedly told them if they hurt her, she would sue. She said she was no stranger to being placed in handcuffs, by this time, having been arrested five times in one month while protesting the Gulf War.

“I figured that would maybe slow it down a bit, which they did,” she said. “So they handcuffed me and took me out down the aisle. And that's when I was able to speak to the camera. My message was about all that Jeffrey Skilling had made ... off of the backs of the working people.”

While she was initially charged with a felony, the charges were later dropped. And any negative criticism she received was soon drowned out in the revelations that Enron had manipulated the energy market, inflating prices and even triggering blackouts. The different trading strategies even had ominous nicknames such as “Death Star,” “Fat Boy” and “Get Shorty.”

Cavanaugh isn’t involved in front-line activism these days, but she said she’s inspired by the young people who continue to use disruptive protests as a means to enact change. She stressed that disruption is a necessary part of successful protests. Cavanaugh herself was part of a group that shut down the Bay Bridge protesting war in the early ’90s.

“Anything that has really created change in society is because of disruption,” she said. “We all know the history of civil disobedience, which is inherently disruptive — that is the whole point of it ... to go up against the legal system. And it's key to be able to come face to face with it and say, ‘No, we don't agree. And we are going to intentionally break the law to create change. Because the legal system is failing in some way.’”

Cavanaugh said she believes that the youth of every generation are able to see what older, authority figures are unable — or unwilling — to. While older people might belittle the work and tactics of young activists, she stresses that the future is for young people, not for those who are in charge.

“I think when you see people willing to risk arrest, willing to give up their own personal rights, there's something that is inspiring about that,” she said.