Suit targets neo-Nazi website
Publisher accused of unleashing an online ‘terror campaign’ against Jewish woman.
ATLANTA — Once again, the Southern Poverty Law Center is taking aim at neo-Nazis — this time in a rare lawsuit accusing an online publisher of urging anonymous Internet trolls to unleash a torrent of antiSemitic slurs and harassment against a Jewish real estate agent in Montana.
The center filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday in a case involving white nationalist Richard Spencer and his family, alleging that Andrew Anglin, the founder and publisher of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, let loose an online “terror campaign” against the woman and her family.
The suit alleges that Anglin published a string of articles urging his “horde” of anonymous followers to inflict a “troll storm” on Tanya Gersh and her family, invading her privacy, intentionally inflicting emotional distress and violating the Montana Anti-Intimidation Act.
The controversy began in December when Anglin accused Gersh of attempting to extort money from Spencer’s mother. Spencer, who heads the National Policy Institute, won nationwide notoriety after Donald Trump’s election victory when a video showed him leading a chant of “Hail Trump!” in Washington, as his followers raised their hands in Nazi salutes.
With rumors of protests against the Spencer family in Whitefish — a liberal ski town of 6,000 people in northwest Montana where the Spencers own a vacation home and a commercial property — Gersh agreed to help Spencer’s mother sell a mixed-use building she owns downtown.
Two weeks later, Sherry Spencer published a blog post accusing Gersh of threatening her and trying to extort her into selling the property.
In the first of a stream of 30 posts, the Daily Stormer published a story repeating Spencer’s allegations, asking its followers, “Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm?”
Gersh, along with her husband and 12-year-old son, received more than 700 threatening anti-Semitic and homophobic emails, phone calls, texts, social media comments, letters, postcards and Christmas cards, the lawsuit alleges.
“I once answered the phone and all I heard were gunshots,” Gersh told reporters Tuesday in a telephone news conference.
On Dec. 16, Anglin published a post on the Daily Stormer, providing his followers with phone numbers, email addresses and links to social media profiles for Gersh and her immediate family members, friends and colleagues. “Let’s Hit Em Up,” he urged.
In that post, Anglin referred to Gersh’s son using homophobic and anti-Semitic terms. He also published his Twitter handle, encouraging readers to “hit him up” and “tell them what you think of his whore mother’s vicious attack on the community of Whitefish.”
“NO VIOLENCE OR THREATS OF VIOLENCE OR ANYTHING EVEN CLOSE TO THAT,” the website qualified. “Just make your opinions known. Tell them you are sickened by their Jew agenda to attack and harm the mother of someone whom they disagree with.”
“This was so far beyond harassment. This was really terrorism,” Gersh said, noting she was no longer working, had lost hair and was attending trauma therapy meetings twice a week. “My life is forever changed.”
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Missoula, seeks compensatory and punitive damages. Attorneys would not specify a dollar amount being sought.
“In the old days, Andrew Anglin would have burned a cross on Tanya’s front lawn,” Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen said. “In the digital age, he launched a troll storm against her.”
The Alabama-based center has a long track record of filing litigation against extremist groups. In 1999, the group brought a case on behalf of a Native American woman and her son who were chased and shot at by white supremacist Aryan Nations security guards. Two men were sentenced to prison in the attack, and in 2000 an Idaho jury returned a $6.3-million civil judgment against Aryan Nations and its founder.
In 2000, the center sued Jeff Berry, the leader of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, winning a $120,000 judgment after Berry detained two journalists covering a story about a planned Klan rally. After ordering his followers to block the exits, one Klansman pumped a shotgun.
Only one of its previous cases focused on online threats — and that was nearly 20 years ago.
In 1998, the center filed a suit on behalf of Bonnie Jouhari, a fair-housing advocate in Pennsylvania, against a neo-Nazi group, Alpha HQ, after it posted her address and photo on an online bulletin board.
As a result of a barrage of threats from white supremacists, Jouhari changed her name and fled with her daughter to another state. In 2000, she was awarded a $1-million judgment.
“Putting people in fear is a form of assault,” Cohen said. “The legal principles are tried and true, but this is the first time we’ve applied it in a digital context to a troll storm.”
“It’s going to be a precedent-setting case,” he added.
Even though there has been an uptick in online trolling in the last decade, lawsuits are rare, said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and author of the book “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.”
“You mostly see people just pray it goes away,” she said. “You just don’t see a lot of cases like this because they’re expensive, and it’s easier to hide.”
Anglin did not respond Tuesday to an email seeking comment.
In a follow-up post in December, Anglin accused “the lying Jew media” of falsely claiming the Daily Stormer “threatened” anyone in Whitefish. “I have made it explicitly clear that I am not calling for threats or harassment or anything else against the people who are threatening and harassing (and extorting) the Spencers,” he wrote.
Cohen said a jury was unlikely to be swayed by Anglin’s argument.
“We see those disclaimers all the time,” he said. “The hatemongers of the world want to protect themselves. When you look at the material he posted, it’s absolutely clear he knew what was going to happen. He would be terrorizing her.”