In Charlottesville, harassment became violence, then injury and death, and now a big lawsuit.
Lawyers bankrupted Idaho white supremacist Richard Butler (bio here), bulldozed his Aryan Nations compound, and converted it to a peace park (details here).
Now, lawyers are going after the organizers of the deadly 2017 Charlottesville rally.
On that day, a New York lawyer watched the violence unfold on TV. She thought, ex-senator Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general, won’t do anything about this. So she called a lawyer acquaintance and asked her, “Would you like to sue some Nazis?” The response was immediate: “Of course.” Soon, several law firms were on board; many of the lawyers are Jewish. Some lost family members in the Holocaust.
Tomorrow, October 25, 2021, the trial begins.
There are 9 plaintiffs and 24 defendants. “Reading the complaint is like flipping over a log and seeing the bugs in the dirt,” Huffington Post says. (That seems unkind to bugs.) It strips away the veneer of respectability that violent extremists try to drape over purveying hate, in order to ward off prosecutions and lawsuits. The lawyers did it by finding and digging through their private communications in chat rooms and other internet dark holes.
The lawsuit is being brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which Ulysses S. Grant used effectively to dismantle the KKK in the early years after the Civil War. It was used against Portland skinheads, and is being used against Capitol rioters.
Litigation is expensive; the lawyers working for the plaintiffs, who are ordinary people, have donated over $40 million worth of legal services, and have spent undisclosed amounts on personal security because of threats. But it’s stripping the defendants of assets, funding sources, and is destroying their organizations; and that makes it worth the effort and expense.
Read story here.
A street sweeper follows a parade led by white supremacist Richard Butler, riding in car with megaphone, Saturday, Oct. 28, 2000, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Butler filed for bankruptcy days before he was to relinquish control of his 20-acre compound to satisfy part of a civil rights lawsuit.(AP Photo/Tom Davenport, File)