A judge said the owners of a Bellmawr gym who were in violation of Gov. Phil Murphy’s executive order to remain closed can continue to keep their doors open.

Atilis Gym owner Ian Smith announced on an Instagram post Tuesday that the judge ruled that his business was not in contempt of court.

 

Smith and co-owner Frank Trumbetti made headlines by reopening the gym in May, in violation of the order. They said that the state issued them another violation over the weekend for operating and stated that the doors would be locked if they continued to operate.

In response, Smith and Trumbetti took the doors off the gym.

“We’ll stay here 24 hours a day, seven days a week until something happens. But they will not lock us out of our building,” Smith said on Monday.

“You can’t change the locks if there aren’t any doors. At this point, we are a 24-hour gym. Ian and I both will be there…until either they back off or arrest us,” Trumbetti said.

Members continued to show up to work out and acknowledged the risk of being fined or worse.

“If my gym just opened up and they didn’t have any safety precautions coming in here, I probably wouldn’t come, but they make you get your temperature checked. They make you fill out a questionnaire and as always, you wipe your stuff when down you’re done,” said member Joseph Logue.

Smith and Trumbetti appeared before the judge via phone for a hearing on Tuesday.

Smith and Trumbetti emphasized that they were not only standing up for their business, but for other gym owners as well.

“The hardest part is we’re two guys standing here for an entire industry, right now. Some of these gym owners are blaming us because some of them actually have the guts to stand up and they’ve had to sit down because they didn’t want to put their employees at risk…Bottom line is if we all stand up together, they can’t shut us all down,” Trumbetti says.

Murphy has repeatedly stated that the state “is not there yet” on reopening gyms.