NEW YORK — A federal jury has awarded $2.56 million to a protester who says she was left brain damaged after NYPD cops slammed her head to the pavement during a 2020 Black Lives Matter George Floyd demonstration in Brooklyn.

Before talking to the streets on June 3, 2020, Brigid Pierce, then 37, held a director of marketing job, had written eight unpublished novels, including the “first-ever second-person lesbian zombie romance,” and was engaged to be married to her girlfriend, her lawyer said.

That changed after NYPD officers threw her to the ground during a protest at the Barclays Center at the height of the mass demonstrations sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Pierce suffered permanent brain damage that affects her vision and her ability to focus, causes migraines and numbness and will likely result in early dementia, her attorney said.

“The Brigid who wrote novels, ran marathons, performed aerial circus all the time — that person’s gone,” her lawyer, Ilann Maazel of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel, told the Brooklyn Federal Court jury in his closing argument. “Brigid’s low energy, she gets confused, forgets things.”

On Thursday, following a two-week trial, the jury found the city liable for assault and battery against Pierce.

“I’m very, very relieved to have a victory. It’s not something that’s normal to be able to take on the NYPD in the city of New York and it feels a little bit of a kind of David vs. Goliath situation,” Pierce told the New York Daily News on Sunday “I’ve been dealing with this brain injury and the fallout in my life for 5 1/2 years now so this verdict is a really, really long time in coming.”

The jury found one officer, Joseph Ryder, who Pierce says started the violent encounter when he knocked her down after she started filming police, liable for neglecting to get her medical treatment. But the jury did not find Ryder himself used excessive force, failed to intervene in the excessive force of other officers, assaulted Pierce, falsely arrested her or violated her First Amendment rights.

They did determine that one or more “John Doe” officers assaulted her. Footage shown at the trial shows several officers, not named in the lawsuit, holding her to the ground and forcing her head to the pavement.

“While we believe the verdict was incorrect we are pleased the jury recognized the plaintiff was not falsely arrested and her First Amendment rights were not violated,” said Nick Paolucci, a city Law Department spokesman. “We are evaluating next steps.”

Ryder, now a detective specialist assigned to the NYPD’s press office, testified that Pierce grabbed his shield “and that’s when I decided to affect the arrest.” He said Pierce kicked her after he brought her down and she was “actively resisting” arrest.

After she was zip-tied, Ryder tried to talk with her as he led her away. “I was trying to tell her that what happened to George Floyd was unequivocally murder and that I was very happy (Derek Chauvin) was arrested,” he said.

The NYPD declined to comment on the verdict.

Maazel argued at trial that Ryder, at 6-foot-2, towered over the 5-foot-5, 135-pound Pierce. Another officer pushed a protester to Pierce’s right with his riot shield so Pierce, her phone out, yelled, “I’m watching you, I’m f---ing livestreaming” — and that’s when Ryder grabbed her and threw her to the ground without warning, and without an order to disperse, according to her civil lawsuit.

A group of officers pinned her to the ground after that and one of them — she never learned who — “ground her head into the concrete,” Maazel told jurors at the trial’s start. The officers ziptied her hands and corralled her into a city bus with other protesters, keeping her there for hours despite a bleeding head wound and her requests for medical attention, Maazel said.

“I thought that this was a very horrifying moment that I was going through,” Pierce told the Daily News. “I had no idea as it was happening that this was going to change the rest of my life.”

Her injuries cost her her career, she said. She lost her job as a director of marketing for a music and arts organization because she couldn’t focus on task management or look at a screen for an extended period of time. Her marriage fell apart. She wound up moving to France and studying to become a luthier, repairing violins for a living.

“The tragic irony of this case is that Brigid was protesting police violence and at the very protest, and at that very protest she as brutalized by the police,” Maazel told the Daily News. “For doing nothing more than protesting, the NYPD changed her entire life.”

The jury awared her $553,000 for pain and suffering, $946,000 for past and future loss of income and $763,000 for life care costs.

The city’s lawyers argued at trial that Pierce was exaggerating her condition, with attorney Jonathan Hutchinson telling the jury that she initially didn’t complain of any serious head injury.

“All this information changes after she decides to sue and she starts to craft her narrative,” he said. “You watched her testify for three days. Ask yourselves, did you see a person crippled by anxiety or cognitive decline? No. You saw a person who is sharp, articulate, total command of the facts, correcting me on my French pronunciation, deservedly.”

Hutchinson also portrayed her career change as her lifelong dream.

“Nobody is forced to become a luthier,” he told the jury. “The fact that plaintiff is claiming that she had to leave her job to move to France because of these officers — France, where her fiancé lived, where the best lutherie school in the world is located — shows you just how much they are willing to bend the truth.”

Pierce said she wasn’t particularly fazed by that argument, noting that she was going back to vocational school in her 30s and 40s. “For them to pretend that that was something that I did for pleasure is just so ridiculous to me that it didn’t even feel hurtful to be accused of that,” she said.

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