Organizers of deadly 2017 Charlottesville, Va., rally on trial in civil lawsuit
At the heart of the lawsuit is a 150-year-old law designed to curb KKK violence
Jury selection has begun in a civil trial against the men and groups who organized a deadly white supremacist rally in Virginia four years ago.
The case, brought by nine plaintiffs, argues that the organizers of the August 2017 Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville conspired to commit violence.
"After four long years of litigating this lawsuit, our plaintiffs, our team, are finally going to court to seek the accountability and justice that has been so sorely lacking in recent years when it comes to the extremism we saw in Charlottesville, and frankly, the broader rise in extremism we've seen in this country," Amy Spitalnick, executive director of the non-profit Integrity First For America, which is funding the lawsuit, told As It Happens guest host Peter Armstrong.
The federal lawsuit seeks monetary damages against 14 men and 10 organizations in connection with the 2017 rally, as well as a judgment that the defendants violated the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs who were physically injured or emotionally scarred.
The allegations in the lawsuit have not been proven in court. The defendants deny instigating the violence at the rally, and cite their First Amendment right to free speech.
What happened in Charlottesville?
On Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, a group of mostly white men descended upon Charlottesville's University of Virginia campus to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee. They carried torches and shouted racist and antisemitic slogans, including: "Jews will not replace us!"
The rally turned violent when protesters and counter-protesters clashed in the streets, and fatal when neo-Nazi James Fields Jr., then 20, drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring at least 19 others.
Fields, now 24, was convicted in 2018 of murder and multiple counts of aggravated malicious wounding, malicious wounding and hit and run. He has since been sentenced to life in prison.
Who's suing who?
The plaintiffs in the suit are Charlottesville community members who say they were harmed or injured during the rally.
Some of them "were kicked, punched, beaten, had fuel and lit torches thrown at them," alleges Spitalnick. Four were among those injured when Fields drove his vehicle into the crowd.
The defendants, she said, are "a who's who of the violent white supremacist movement in America."
They include the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina; the East Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; Jason Kessler, who took out the permit for the event; Andrew Anglin, founder of the far-right website the Daily Stormer; and Richard B. Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute, which the lawsuit says is a white nationalist think-tank.
A 150-year-old law
At the heart of the lawsuit is a 150-year-old law designed to protect formerly enslaved people from vigilante violence by the Ku Klux Klan.
The 1871 Enforcement Act, often referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act, prohibits people from banding together or going out "in disguise upon the public highways, or upon the premises of another" with the intention of violating people's constitutional rights.
"It was created specifically to give private citizens a right of recourse against other private citizens who undermine their rights," Spitalnick said.
To make a case under the law, Spitalnick said the lawsuit must prove two things: That the rally was motivated by "racial animus," and that the violence was part of the plan.
To do that, lawyers cite a trove of online chats between organizers of the rally, a leaked archive of which has been posted online by the alternative media organization Unicorn Riot.
The chats are rife with messages disparaging Black and Jewish people, as well as members of prominent activist groups like Black Lives Matter and antifa.
They also contain several references to violence, including posts encouraging participants to bring shields, guns and other weapons to the rally, a meme about running over protesters with a vehicle like the protagonists of the film Dawn of the Dead did to zombies, and several discussions about the legality of hitting protesters with cars.
"Certainly, this racial animus is crystal clear when they're saying things like, 'Next stop Charlottesville. Final stop Auschwitz,'" Spitalnick said, quoting from one of the chat excerpts cited in the lawsuit.
"These defendants talked about every detail in advance from the mundane and banal to the vile and the violent, including whether they could crack commie skulls, quote-unquote use free speech and use free speech instruments to violently attack people, and even whether they could hit protesters with cars and claim self-defence."
Defendants deny allegations
The defendants say the rally was an expression of their First Amendment right to free speech. They also deny initiating violence, instead pointing the finger at the counter-protesters.
In a failed motion to have the lawsuit dismissed, defence lawyers argued the complaint is "long on coarse internet language regarding non-whites and short on allegations of racial violence perpetrated by any moving defendant," reports ABC News.
"Plaintiffs have failed to make any credible allegation that any moving defendant came to any agreement with anybody, to do anything, other than march and chant in Charlottesville."
Spencer, who is defending himself, told a court last year there is a "glaring absence of evidence" linking him to a conspiracy to commit violence, the New York Times reports.
Kessler issued a statement to NBC News after the deadly hit-and-run blaming police for allowing the rally to descend into violence.
Spitalnick draws a direct line between what happened in Charlottesville and the rise of white supremacist sentiment more broadly across the United States. As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she said this trial is personal.
"Something that felt like a far away part of our history for much of my life is now, frankly, a cautionary tale in terms of the reality of the world we're living in with extremism and hate and violence on the rise," she said.
"But I think it also gives me hope in some ways, that unlike my grandparents' generation, we live in a country where we have a rule of law, we have a justice system, and we have to work really hard to protect and improve that system, but we can use the tools we have to take action and to stand up against that sort of violence and hate."
Written by Sheena Goodyear with files from The Associated Press. Interview with Amy Spitalnick produced by Katie Geleff.
