As Donahue shaped up, the routines grew harder — and so did the eventual fights. In D.C., he says, he'd train for competitions at Northern Virginia Mixed Martial Arts and Fitness from 5 to 8 a.m., then work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., then train again from 5 to 10 p.m. every day.
"You learn a lot about a person's inner character when they're getting the crap kicked out of them," Donahue says. "You'll never know more about another person than when you agree to put on gloves, get in the ring, and hit and kick the shit out of him without destroying each other. I just wanted to see what kind of person that would make me."
Denver police officers restrain Corey Donahue at Occupy Denver; he later smiled for a fresh mug shot.
Related Content
More About
The political world has yet to produce a struggle in which Donahue cannot mentally place himself. He remembers that his mother took pride in her role as the children's cook, and he took up that role at the Thunderdome. That's where his real rise to infamy started. Any able-bodied male who's had the combined fortune and misfortune of entering one of the incarnations of the Thunderdome knows to expect a nut tap from its prankster chefs; their female counterparts just earn R-rated flirting. To know Corey Donahue is to be sexually harassed by the man — and possibly press charges against him.
One Channel 4 news reporter did just that after a large police altercation at Civic Center Park on October 15, when, he claims, Donahue assaulted him sexually. Released from jail a few hours after his second Occupy Denver arrest, Donahue was already grinning wildly in response to a charge of unlawful sexual conduct — which could label him a sexual predator for life if he's found guilty. "It was just a bad nut-tap joke gone wrong," he told Westword at the time, describing how the fingers of his right hand "almost" touched the fully covered genitals of another man.
To this day, it's the only action that Donahue admits he wishes he could undo — not that he says he did it. "I feigned a nut tap at the photographer, and I was accused of groping him," he explains. "If you ask anyone who was around me, they will tell you that they never saw me do that — because it didn't happen."
The alleged nut tap wasn't the only charge involved in this arrest; Donahue was also charged with petty larceny (in connection with some paperwork he'd taken from the state's Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division in July) and disturbing the peace. Handcuffed, he was taken along with 25 others to the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Center, where he was arraigned the next morning. But the alleged nut tap cemented Donahue's image as an unofficial leader of both the local Occupy chapter and its anarchist kitchen. The title is not one of his choosing, but it is one of his own making.
"Everyone needs a scapegoat," Donahue says. "It's the cops' idea that the movement has a leader — that if I'm in jail, nobody's going to be out here doing anything important. Well, that's wrong to begin with, and I was still working on the occupation from jail."
Auernhamer hides the newspapers in her Longmont home from her father, Ron Sutherland, to avoid distressing the 77-year-old and guaranteeing another tense lecture on the subject of his grandson.
"I know it's his passion and he believes in it, but what do you do?" Auernhamer says. "He thinks Corey should have a regular job and should have an income and live a normal life. I just try to text him at least once or twice a week and say, 'I love you, and I hope you're not in jail.'"
Donahue says that his father has been upset with him on and off since his first occupation arrest, and right now it's on. "I don't want to get into the Corey situation with you," Tom Donahue says when the subject of his son is broached. "I have to go unload the back of my truck now. Goodbye." He does not answer the phone again.
******
The first time Corey Donahue ever smoked pot, it was set against the 8-bit background music of Super Mario Bros. 2. He and a few friends had just finished playing basketball up the street from his dad's house in Boulder; he was eleven.
"It was beautiful, and I loved it immediately," Donahue remembers. His second memory of marijuana was the discovery of his parents' one-hitter. In the years that followed, Donahue remained categorically unimpressed by lectures from visitors to his elementary school, DARE representatives who challenged his class to a life without marijuana or any other drug.
"There was this guy, at my school, telling me marijuana will kill you, will make your mother cry, whatever," Donahue recalls. "I went out to the playground and felt like I had been lied to. I hated to hear my mom coughing up a lung in the morning, and I knew that was so much worse."
His aunt says she became aware of her nephew's fondness for marijuana only two years ago, when he came home for Christmas. She saw the pipe, didn't approve, and has yet to change her mind. From her perspective, the hash oil that Donahue and his sister gave their mother didn't help Toni's condition. "You could tell the day she started taking it that she started to get worse," Auernhamer says. "There's a time and a place for that, and that wasn't it."