Meet the vigilante poet exposing pervs in Washington Square Park
Washington Square Park has a sleaze problem.
Women just trying to enjoy some fresh air at the West Village park are being increasingly bombarded by pickup artists. The problem’s gotten so bad, a vigilante street performer has been intervening on behalf of the unsuspecting women.
And this modern-day white knight is, fittingly, a poet.
Peter Chinman has been busking literature in the park since March 2017, when he quit his job to write poems for strangers full time. But recently, he’s been disturbed by the influx of men hitting on women, and is confronting the issue as a nonviolent vigilante.
“The park is my community, it’s where I am every day,” Chinman, 29 tells The Post. “I felt like this was something bad happening in my community and I needed to call it out.”
The skirt-chasers are rampant, and their ranks are growing, in part due to seven-day, $2,500 “dating skills” bootcamps where a man named Todd Valentine — who Chinman tells The Post is the king Casanova — teaches up to 15 “students” at a time how to hit on random women.
“I’ve had the privilege of guiding thousands of students on the path to massive success with women,” Valentine writes on his website, “Winners aren’t born . . . they’re built.”
The guy guru describes his courses as “the ultimate no-excuses immersive training program” that “[gets] you the girls you want.” The classes appear to be popular, too: According to his upcoming class schedule, he currently only has one slot left for an “immersion” program in Miami later this month.
Chinman says he’s seeing tactics like Valentine’s being used in the park more and more. He’s not the only one noticing, either.
“Watching it from afar it clearly looks like some kind of class is happening,” says Phil Boucher, the “Serial Farter” of the West Village and another Washington Square Park regular.
Boucher said he witnessed Valentine coaching his pupils in the park and asked what was going on: “He said he was a ‘life coach’ and offered me his services.”
The offenders usually employ what he calls a “cold approach,” Chinman says, “which is just going up to woman after woman in public and trying to find one your strategy works with.”
Valentine has not responded to The Post’s requests for comment. And the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation tells The Post that “Everyone should feel safe and welcome in our parks and harassment of any kind is not acceptable. If you feel threatened in a park, please report it to 911.”
Chinman has been doing his poetry work in the park for three years, and noticed the street harassers starting about a year ago. He almost immediately began taking action to cull their ranks, he says.
The best strategy he found over the past six months of holding “interventions” is to approach the looming lotharios and say, “Hey, I’m doing a documentary about pickup artists,” before trying to “interview” them about it. The Boston native estimates he’s done it some 50 times.
“It completely derails what they were doing,” says Chinman, who boasts over 12,300 followers on Instagram and shares a Crown Heights townhouse with nine roommates. “By the end of this summer, no one was doing it in front of me.”
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