Victims of Charlottesville rally say violence planned
The violent rally started with a mob of men brandishing burning torches in the heart of a U.S. city while chanting racist, antisemitic slogans, and it ended with a woman murdered, scarring a nation. Now, more than four years later, a civil trial starting today in Charlottesville, Virginia, will revisit those unsettling events.
The long-delayed lawsuit in federal court against two dozen organizers of the march will examine one of the most violent manifestations of far-right views in recent history. Since the rally in August 2017, extremist ideology has seeped from the online world and surfaced in other vio- lence, ranging from street clashes between far-right groups and leftists in Port- land, Oregon, to the storming of the Michigan Statehouse, to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The federal govern- ment has called the rise of domestic extremism a lethal threat to the United States.
The plaintiffs accuse the organizers of the Charlottes- ville rally of plotting to foment the violence that left them injured, while the defendants counter that their views constituted free speech, however offensive others might find it, and that the bloodshed stemmed from self-defense.
Using a combination of dig- ital sleuthing and a 19th-century law written to curb the Ku Klux Klan, the lawyers for the nine plaintiffs in the Char- lottesville case are hoping that their quest for unspec- ified financial damages will both punish the organizers and deter others.
The 24 defendants, including 10 organizations, are a col- lection of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Klan sympathizers and other adherents of
extremist ideology. The case will underscore some of the most divisive fault lines segmenting the United States, including the claim by members of the far right that the existence of the white race is under threat.
“The trial will provide a detailed look into the world of far-right extremism and organization, but that world should not be understood as an outlier,” said Richard C. Schragger, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Though some of the groups and individuals targeted by the lawsuit seem fringe and marginal, their ideas and the wider conspir- acy-mongering and propen- sity to violence that they represent is alive and well in the U.S.”
The Charlottesville march, known as the “Unite the Right” rally, took place over two days to protest the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a downtown park. Some 600 far- right participants gathered from around the country. The violent clashes that erupted culminated with one partic- ipant ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32,
and leaving at least 19 other injured, including four plain- tiffs in this lawsuit.
The events further inflamed the country when President Donald Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
The trial in the case, called Sines v. Kessler after the lead plaintiff and the lead defendant, is expected to last at least four weeks and involve more than 65 plaintiffs, defen- dants and attorneys. It has been postponed repeatedly because of the pandemic.
To make their case, lawyers for the plaintiffs are trying to combine online evidence with a somewhat obscure law from the Civil War era.
They are using chat con- versations leaked from Discord, a platform for game enthusiasts, as well as a raft of telephone texts, tweets and other social media posts to try to prove that the organizers participated in a conspiracy to foment violence against a racial minority, which is ille- gal. The posts that will be used overflow with derogatory remarks about Black peo- ple, Jews and activists from movements like Black Lives Matter and antifa.