West Cook News

Since graduating from Northwestern journalism school last year, Radio Flyer wagon company heiress Helen Pasin has been pursuing "social justice storytelling," hunting so-called "white privilege" in west Cook County.

The self-described "feminist documentary filmmaker" has made "artistic videos" on the #MeToo movement and reported on Black Lives Matter rallies, calls for "diversity and inclusion" and claims of racism in her hometown.

Now, Pasin, 26, who still lives with her parents in a six-bedroom mansion on one of Oak Park's most exclusive blocks, is also reporting on herself.

Last week, Pasin took to Youtube in three separate videos to accuse a veteran teacher at Fenwick H.S. of "five to ten encounters" that "made her feel uncomfortable" more than a decade ago at the school.

Pasin accused history teacher John Quinn-- who has worked at Fenwick for four decades and is an Illinois Hall of Fame Basketball Coach and the brother of former Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn-- of hugging her too aggressively in the school hallway in 2013.

"I was terrified and thought something much worse was going to happen," she said.

Pasin said she told her mother, Muriel, and her father, Radio Flyer CEO Bob Pasin, but that they didn't feel the alleged incidents were important enough to tell the school about it.

Quinn, who a Fenwick alumnus told West Cook News is "a hugger who hugs everybody," denies the accusations.

He issued a statement Friday to the Chicago Tribune stating he has “never abused a Fenwick student, at any time or in any place" and that he “looks forward to continuing in the profession to which he has devoted his entire career.”

Pasin said she demanded Fenwick fire Quinn. When it didn't do so, she decided to go public.

"He needs to be fired, and I am committed to seeing that through," she said. "That's the moral standard that I hold myself and that I hold myself to and that I hold my community to." 

 "President Trump, the man who threatened to send Black people back to Africa..." 

On her personal web site, Pasin says she is "passionate about social justice storytelling."

On her TikTok channel-- the "Chicago Racism Report"-- and in a news story she authored, Pasin reported on what she described as a "racist verbal attack" in May 2021 on the staff of Johnnie's Beef in Elmwood Park by a customer who refused to wear a mask.

The customer called the staff member a "Mexican."

In a Pasin report on a Nov. 2020 Oak Park rally by the pro-Black Lives Matter "Revolutionary Oak Park Youth Action League," she wrote that members "highlighted the racist record of President Donald J. Trump and drew attention to the discrimination and marginalization they face in their own community, including racial profiling by Oak Park police."

Pasin quoted 16 year old Ray Longstreet, who led the rally.

“President Trump, the man who threatened to send Black people back to Africa and said that our Black youth have nothing to lose and that we are uneducated and unemployed and useless," he said. “Is that who people want in office?” 

In 2020, Pasin won the Virginia Tech Univ. "Virginia Dares" Cinematic Award for Decolonizing and Re-indigenizing Media for her documentary, Feed 'em All, "exposing food insecurity on the West Side of Chicago through grassroots efforts." 

In it, she argues black communities like Maywood and Chicago's Austin neighborhood don't have enough restaurants and grocery stores because of racism.

Pasin's great grandfather, Antonio Pasin, was an Italian immigrant who created Radio Flyer out of a one-room workshop in Chicago's Montclair neighborhood in 1917. Her father, Robert, took over the company in 1997.

In 2018, Robert Pasin told Forbes Magazine Radio Flyer expected $120 million in sales. 

He's been a major supporter of Democrat political candidates, donating $68,700 to Hillary Clinton's presidential run in 2016 and $55,000 to President Barack Obama, according to Federal Election Commission records.