Chris Smalls, the labor activist who made history by leading the first successful unionization drive at an Amazon warehouse, was reportedly arrested Monday night outside the Met Gala in New York City after allegedly jumping a barricade near the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The NYPD confirmed that a 37-year-old man was taken into custody outside East 82nd Street and 5th Avenue, though officers declined to officially confirm his identity.
Observers on the ground and a Reuters photographer at the scene identified the man as Smalls, whose age matches the description provided by police.
The arrest came on one of fashion’s most glamorous nights, an evening already thick with controversy.
This year’s Met Gala is sponsored by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sánchez, a decision that lit a fuse among labor organizers, pro-Palestinian activists, and critics of billionaire excess. Smalls had made no secret of his intentions.
When asked before the event whether he planned to attend if given an invitation, he said plainly, “Yes, I’m going. It’s been four years since we unionized and they refused to negotiate a contract with our union, which is 30 minutes away.”
Video circulating online shows a group of officers wrestling a man to the ground near the barricades, tossing aside what appears to be a black protest sign.
That sign, according to witnesses, bore the same message Smalls posted to his Instagram earlier in the day, calling out Amazon for refusing to bargain with its union and for its cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus.
That contract, valued at roughly 1.2 billion dollars from Amazon alone as part of a broader 7.2 billion dollar deal, has drawn sustained criticism from activists who argue it enables surveillance technology and military infrastructure used against Palestinians in Gaza.
The protest outside the gala was not an isolated act. In the days leading up to the event, demonstrators projected images onto buildings across Manhattan, including onto Bezos’s own apartment near Madison Square Park.
One projection read “If You Can Buy the Met Gala, You Can Pay More Taxes,” a direct reference to a ProPublica investigation that found Bezos paid no federal income tax across several years.
British activist group Everyone Hates Elon claimed responsibility for leaving hundreds of bottles of urine inside the museum, a pointed reference to long-standing complaints from Amazon warehouse workers who say grueling productivity quotas leave them no time for bathroom breaks.
The tension runs deeper than one night of demonstrations. Last month, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Amazon to recognize and bargain with the Amazon Labor Union, following years of legal battles.
Amazon has pushed back, claiming the union’s original certification was invalid and that the NLRB improperly influenced the outcome of the election.
Workers and organizers see the Met Gala sponsorship as a provocation at the very moment when those negotiations remain unresolved.
Bezos himself did not walk the red carpet steps. Sánchez attended without him.
Inside, celebrities posed for photographers while outside, the man credited with cracking open Amazon’s labor practices reportedly sat in police custody, charged pending further review.
Whether or not the night’s most striking image belongs to the fashion world may depend entirely on which side of the barricade you were standing on.
