Teen Vogue: Charlottesville Residents Are Suing Neo-Nazis, KKK Members, and Alt-Right Extremists

By LUCY DIAVOLO, Teen Vogue

“It's fun to get to say we sue Nazis for a living,” Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America (IFA), tells Teen Vogue.

The organization Spitalnick directs is the force behind a major lawsuit against organizers of the 2017 United the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Three years after that event, the IFA is preparing for an October trial that could potentially bankrupt the far-right extremists who spearheaded the event that killed counterprotester Heather Heyer and injured several more, some of whom are now plaintiffs in IFA’s case.

The case, Sines v. Kessler, has several people injured in the violence suing a who’s who of big-name far-right personalities and organizations, including people like Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer and organizations like Identity Europa, the National Socialist Movement, and a couple Ku Klux Klan groups. The case is predicated not on any free speech arguments, but on the violence that happened in Charlottesville and the ways, according to the lawsuit filed by IFA, that these individuals and groups made clear in their planning that they wanted to incite such violence against the kinds of people who are now suing them.

“Our plaintiffs are a coalition of Charlottesville community members, many of whom were students and other young activists in the Charlottesville area, who were injured during the violence three years ago,” Spitalnick explains. Among the plaintiffs are people (including college students) who were surrounded by Tiki-torch-carrying marchers on August 11, 2017 around the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson.

“We all were horrified and terrorized watching it on TV ... the thought of actually being there surrounded by these Nazis and their torches and their weapons is unthinkable,” Spitalnick says. “And a number of our plaintiffs were injured that night. But, of course, we all know that the violence continued throughout the weekend.”

Also among the plaintiffs is Reverend Seth Wispelway, who was part of a group of interfaith clergy that attempted to block white nationalists from entering a park but were attacked by right-wing protesters before, as Wispelway told ThinkProgress days later, “Antifa saved our lives.”

But the Jefferson statue confrontation and the street combat with clergy wouldn’t be where the violence ended, as James Fields Jr. (one of the defendants in the IFA case) drove his car into a crowd of counter protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring at least 19 people in the incident that came to define the Unite the Right Rally. Among the plaintiffs are Marcus Martin and Marissa Blair, a couple and friends of Heyer’s. Martin was the man depicted tumbling over the back of Fields’s car in the Pulitzer-prize winning photograph; he sustained serious injuries and severe PTSD as a result.

“They are truly some of the bravest people I know in that they lived through and survived this horror, this terrible thing that happened to them,” Spitalnick says of the plaintiffs on the case. “And in some cases, like Marcus and Marissa's case, their friend, Heather Heyer, was killed. Their community was attacked and they all suffered major injuries, both physically and emotionally.”

Central to pressing the cases on behalf of those injured is identifying actions that hurt them and the plans that led to those actions. In other words, they need to show that organizers were planning for violence, as seen in chat logs published by Unicorn Riot and cited in the case.

“Our lawsuit is not about speech. It's about action,” Spitalnick explains. “It's about the fact that they conspired in these chats and otherwise to bring racist violence to Charlottesville, and then went and did it.”

While that weekend in Charlottesville has lingered in the public consciousness — even being the basis of Joe Biden’s official presidential campaign launch — there has been a material legacy to Charlottesville, as well.

“Charlottesville really served as both sort of a flash point in the rise of that violence and a preview of so many of the tools and tactics we've seen since,” Spitalnick argued. “So, since Charlottesville, there has been a horrific cycle of white supremacist violence.”

Spitalnick tells Teen Vogue she sees a line from Unite the Right to the horrific shootings in Pittsburgh, Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso. On its website, IFA has identified how several far-right groups have attempted to interfere with Black Lives Matter protests.

“It ties directly into the broader tools and tactics they use, which is a combination of disinformation, duplicity, conspiracy theories, and straight-up hate and violence,” Spitalnick says. “And so the confluence of all of the events of 2020 — from the pandemic to the reckoning that we're finally having on racial justice — is in some ways a perfect storm that has allowed these extremists to try to further their conspiracies, their disinformation, their violence.”

“The finger pointing at Antifa — to blame them for violence during protests, to distract from what's happening, to deflect from far-right violence — is exactly what the Charlottesville attackers did, as well,” Spitalnick says.

In the aftermath of many of this year’s protests, antifascists like those who saved clergy members’ lives during Unite the Right have quickly become a top target of both the White House and conservatives in Congress. In the Trump administration, that’s even meant Attorney General William Barr comparing antifa to cancer. Meanwhile, Spitalnick points out, Barr’s Department of Justice Barr seemingly lacks enthusiasm for civil rights investigations, leaving cases like this one to organizations like IFA.

“At the end of the day, the most important thing is justice for our plaintiffs and accountability for those responsible for what happened,” she tells Teen Vogue. “They decided to channel what happened to them into this critical legal effort to hold accountable those responsible for the attack on their community.”

“Their bravery in bringing the suit is going to have impacts that extend well beyond Charlottesville,” she says. “The case can have an outside impact by setting a legal precedent that makes crystal clear the consequences if you're part of these racist, violent conspiracies.”

In July, Judge Norman K. Moon denied motions filed by defendants to dismiss the suit, as organizers say they were, as Moon put it, “simply engaged in lawful, if unpopular, political protest and so their conduct is protected by the First Amendment.” According to Moon’s ruling, among the defendants’ claims were that they couldn’t be sued by white plaintiffs because they only had a racial animus against non-white people. Moon also wrote that the defendants argued for the case’s dismissal on First and Second Amendment grounds, but shot that down, as well.

But Moon ruled that the plaintiffs “plausibly alleged the defendants formed a conspiracy to commit the racial violence that led to the Plaintiffs’ varied injuries.” That means the First Amendment doesn’t cover their actions or advocacy for violence. It’s a similarly subtle difference Moon noted in rejecting Second Amendment claims, finding that the plaintiffs were right to assert that the defendants could’ve beared arms legally, but using them as they did created some of the grounds for the lawsuit.

That means that the case will still likely have its day in court this October with Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn serving as co-lead counsel for IFA. Spitalnick says IFA expects a win and a bold new precedent for successfully suing extremists.

“It can have major financial, legal, and operational impacts on these leaders and groups. It already has had major financial, legal, and operational impacts on the defendants,” she says. “The case can really bankrupt and dismantle the leaders in the groups that are at the center of this movement, which, again, will have impacts that extend well beyond Charlottesville.”

Read the full article on Teen Vogue here.