Jenica Igoe, is suing for her rights to ‘bare breast’

A topless gardener says the cop who busted her for public lewdness is a boob.
Jenica Igoe, 30, says she didn’t do anything wrong while working in her own yard last summer without a shirt on, even if another woman driving down Igoe’s rural Hudson Valley road took offense and called cops.
Igoe, a restaurant cook, shed her shirt because it was so hot, she claims in a lawsuit she filed against authorities for violating her civil rights.
Cops who had fielded previous complaints about Igoe’s topless yard work simply advised her to cover her nipples, so she bought pasties.
She was wearing them when the priggish passerby snapped a picture of her watering her plants, according to the federal lawsuit.
Before long Village of Red Hook police Officer Travis Sterritt, showed and  arrested Igoe.
“Like many people, including millions of men, I prefer to be topless in the summer heat while performing work outdoors,” Igoe claimed in court papers filed in White Plains federal court against Red Hook, where she lives, and Sterritt, over the August incident. She seeks unspecified damages.
A judge dismissed the charges against Igoe.
Significantly, it’s been legal in New York state for woman to be topless in public since 1992, when two female activists, Ramona Santorelli and Mary Lou Schloss, challenged the state’s public lewdness law in court, ass part of a group of nine women who among nine ladies who ditched their tops at a picnic in a bid to get arrested. Both were convicted for public lewdness. Both convictions were subsequently overturned.
In another landmark case New York City artist Phoenix Feeley was arrested for going bare-breasted during an August art show promotion, in 2005. She sued and later scored a $29,000 settlement from the city.
Jenica Igoe wasn’t looking for exposure when she tended her yard, attorney Christopher Watkins said. – Her neighbor in the multi-family building where she lives do not mind Igoe tilling the soil with a nude torso, Watkins said.