Image via Instagram/ dawllyllama

This was bound to happen. Lower Manhattan’s ballyhooed “Fearless Girl” statue, positioned to confront the Wall Street Charging Bull, enjoyed only a few short days of her residency in Bowling Green Park before she was desecrated by a finance bro. Angry as it is, that bull is nothing compared to the horrors that befall the Financial District after 6 p.m., after the bros have been released from their pens and unleashed on the streets of Manhattan.




“Fearless Girl,” while superficially charming, was placed there by asset management firm State Street Global Advisors, ostensibly to urge the companies in which it invests to increase the number of women on their corporate boards. But as Nick Pinto at the Village Voice points out, State Street itself has only three women on its own 11-member board of directors, a total of just 28 percent.

And State Street’s gross hypocrisy is just the beginning of its issues. From the Voice:

In 2007, State Street was at the center of a mortgage-backed collateral debt obligation scandal. The company managed a portfolio of shaky mortgage derivatives that had been structured to make money for a hedge fund when the underlying mortgages went belly-up and the derivatives cratered. But State Street didn’t tell the clients who were actually buying the product that was the plan, and as a result pension funds and other investors lost nearly half a billion dollars. In 2012, State Street paid a $5 million penalty for its part on the scam.


Just last month, the firm paid $32 million to settle charges that it was cheating its customers in what the Acting U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts called “an elaborate overcharge scheme.”

Maybe Sebastian or Damian or whatever is humping the female CHILD in protest of State Street’s craven malfeasance. But probably, he’s just an asshole.