NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) — Four years ago, New York City firefighter Tim Rivicci sued the city after he was fired for refusing to take the COVID shot. He won his case in court and was one of the few conscientious objectors who was fired to be reinstated. Since then, the city has stonewalled providing him his court-ordered back pay.
In a Brooklyn courtroom on Friday, NYC attorneys once again appealed to overrule paying Rivicci the money he is owed.
The scheduling of the hearing on 9/11 was seen by those seeking justice for FDNY workers fired due to their decision not to bend their knees to the city’s tyrannical COVID jab mandates as a spectacular scheduling misstep at best and an insulting, offensive slap in the face at worst.
The 25th anniversary of 9/11 was a solemn day for the city’s first responders when most would be attending memorial services for their fallen colleagues, precluding them from attending the trial.
“There is a painful irony in Tim having to walk into court on September 11,” said Rivicci’s attorney, Christina Martinez, in advance of the hearing. “September 11 is a sacred day to New York’s firefighters and their families. Tim has given more than enough to this city. It is long past time for the city to stop fighting him and honor the judgment he already won.”
“Tim Rivicci has already fought this battle and won,” Martinez continued. “A court annulled his termination, ordered him reinstated, and awarded him the back pay that he lost. The City should have honored that ruling instead of forcing him to spend years continuing to fight for what the court already determined he was owed. Tim and his wife were both City employees who lost their livelihoods because of the vaccine mandate, and the financial consequences to their family were devastating — they could not even pay their mortgage. And now, nearly four years after Tim prevailed, he has to walk into an appellate courtroom on September 11 and continue fighting the City he served as an FDNY firefighter.”
Nonetheless, scores of supporters showed up for Rivicci’s hearing, filling the large courtroom. Seeing the large crowd of supporters, the panel of four judges chose to move his case to the front of the line.
“The city owes him his back pay, and they’re forcing him to go on and on in court,” Mary Holland, president of Children’s Health Defense, told LifeSiteNews.
“The city is forcing him to come here on 9/11, which is a solemn day of remembrance for his colleagues that died in the line of duty,” Holland said.
“This country is built on freedom of conscience, freedom of religion,” Holland explained. “When you deny people that, there’s something fundamentally wrong.”
Asked if she thought the scheduling of Rivicci’s hearing on 9/11 was merely a coincidence, Holland spoke out boldly, turning the tables on the city. “OK, you want to do it on 9/11? Then we want to do it on 9/11. These people are heroes. They were there on 9/11.” Holland said that Rivicci and his colleagues selflessly served the city’s residents throughout the pandemic, only to be mistreated by the city government.
Feminist Naomi Wolf, who famously found herself shut out by her liberal peers for questioning COVID tyranny and was banished from social media, attended the court proceeding and called the hearing a “travesty of justice.”
“I just feel sick. It’s surreal,” Wolf told LifeSiteNews immediately after the hearing.
Wolf noted that the city’s attorney had argued that FDNY employees had been fired because their requests for exemptions from the mandated COVID-19 jabs would have placed an undue hardship on the NYC fire department, “ironically because there were so many requests for an exemption.”
“So you start out with this crazy, surreal situation in which the fact that so many firefighters didn’t want to take an experimental injection into their bodies, violating their constitutional rights, was used as a reason to say that it was an undue hardship to accommodate a single firefighter,” Wolf said.
“It seemed like two of the justices were reading from talking points that were based on fantasy or a group hallucination that not only was it an undue hardship, but that if you did accommodate 1,700 firefighters, you’d be disabling the firefighters, and that the reason you would be disabling them is because they couldn’t go into people’s houses to save their lives from a fire because they might infect them (with COVID) if they weren’t vaccinated.”
Wolf noted that Pfizer was aware as early as November 2020 that its vaccine did nothing to stop transmission or infection of COVID. Because this was acknowledged years ago and recognized by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the judges’ assertion was not rooted in science and had “no relationship to material reality.”
Justice denied: The great @naomirwolf spoke to @LifeSite after today’s NYC court hearing where an FDNY firefighter —previously fired for refusing the COVID jab and reinstated after winning his case against the city— has again been denied his court-ordered back pay. https://t.co/ADpUqMNPjt
— Doug Mainwaring (@doug_mainwaring) September 11, 2026
“The city wasn’t stupid about dragging him into court on this day,” declared outspoken conservative artist Scott LoBaido, who is famous for his patriotic-themed paintings and sculpture.
Standing outside the courthouse, LoBaido said that Rivicci is a hero. He reminded the crowd of supporters that first responders who had turned down the city-mandated COVID vaccine had quickly gone from “heroes to zeroes.”
“They were there. We loved them. And then all of a sudden: ‘You’re not getting the jab? You’re out of a job,” recounted LoBaido, including “teachers, nurses, bus drivers, sanitation workers, firemen.”