Life as the victim of a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory
Backer of Trump forced to hide away in fear for safety
IN THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS — Up a winding country road, in a trailer park a half-mile from a cattle ranch, lives a man whose life has been ruined by a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory.
Ray Epps has suffered enormously in the past 10 months as right-wing media figures and Republican politicians have baselessly described him as a covert government agent who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol last year.
Strangers have assailed him as a coward and a traitor and have menacingly cautioned him to sleep with one eye open. He was forced to sell his business and his home in Arizona. Fearing for his safety and uncertain of his future, he and his wife moved into a mobile home in the foothills of the Rockies, with all of their belongings crammed into shipping containers in a high-desert meadow, a mile or two away.
“And for what — lies?” Epps asked with a look of pained exhaustion. “All of this, it’s just been hell.”
Almost from the moment that a violent mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, allies of former President Donald Trump have sought to shift the blame for the attack away from the people who were in the pro-Trump crowd that day to any number of scapegoats.
First they pointed at antifa, the leftist activists who have a history of clashing with Trump’s backers but who did not show up when the Capitol was breached. Then they tried to fault the FBI, which, according to those who spread the baseless tale, planned the attack to provoke a crackdown on conservatives.
Epps, 61, was not just a bystander Jan. 6. He traveled to Washington to back Trump, was taped urging people to go to the Capitol
and was there himself on the day of the assault. But through a series of events that twisted his role, he became the face of this conspiracy theory about the FBI as it spread from the fringes to the mainstream.
Obscure right-wing media outlets such as Revolver News used selectively edited videos and unfounded leaps of logic to paint him as a secret federal asset in charge of a “breach team” responsible for setting off the riot at the Capitol.
The stories about Epps were seized on by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who gave them a wider audience. They were also echoed by Republican members of Congress like Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Eventually, Trump joined the fray, mentioning Epps at one of his political rallies and lending fuel to a viral Twitter hashtag, #WhoIsRayEpps.
After months of watching from the shadows as public figures he once respected — Trump among them — tarred his name
and destroyed his reputation, Epps decided that he wanted to answer that question for himself.
In a daylong interview, sitting in his air-conditioned recreational vehicle with his wife, Robyn, and their two Shih Tzus beside him, Epps described himself as a father, a former Marine and a staunch but disillusioned conservative whose leaders had betrayed him. He granted the interview on the condition that the location of his new home not be disclosed.
“I am at the center of this thing, and it’s the biggest farce that’s ever been,” he said. “It’s just not right. The American people are being led down a path. I think it should be criminal.”
To that end, Epps and his wife have been searching for a lawyer to help them file a defamation lawsuit against several of the people who have spread the false accounts. Should they end up doing so, they would join a list of other individuals and companies — most notably, voting machine producer
Dominion Voting Systems — in using the courts to push back on the rampant disinformation that emerged again and again during Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
While Epps was a participant in some of the events that unfolded Jan. 6, the claim that he inspired the Capitol riot in a “false flag” plot is solely based on the fact that he has never been arrested and therefore must be under the protection of the government.
But scores, if not hundreds, of people who appear to have committed minor crimes that day were investigated by the FBI but have not been charged or taken into custody.
Epps said he had acted stupidly at times when he and one of his sons took a last-minute trip to Washington for Trump’s speech about election fraud.
But he said that he had managed to avoid arrest because he reached out to the FBI within minutes of discovering that agents wanted to speak with him
and demonstrated during interviews with them that he had spent much of his time at the Capitol seeking to calm down other rioters, an assertion supported by multiple video clips.
One of the moments Epps said he regrets most from his stay in Washington took place the night before the Capitol attack, when he joined his son and a friend for a pro-Trump rally at Black Lives Matter Plaza. During the event, he was videotaped by a rightwing provocateur encouraging people to go inside the Capitol on Jan. 6 in what he described, even at the time, as a form of peaceful protest.
The clip has been used to depict Epps as a man who not only urged people to riot at the Capitol but also then evaded prosecution. The Justice Department has not publicly addressed its decision not to charge him, but the legal definition of incitement requires a person’s words to cause an immediate threat of danger, not one that could possibly occur the following day.
On Jan. 6 itself, Epps, believing he could stop the violence at the Capitol, inserted himself into a conflict between the police and members of the pro-Trump mob that is widely considered to be the tipping point of the attack.
He can be seen in videos from around 1 p.m. that day accosting a rioter named Ryan Samsel, who had already started to confront officers behind a metal barricade on the west side of the Capitol.
Epps said he intervened in the conflict to keep Samsel from attacking the police and tried to tell Samsel that the officers were merely doing their jobs. Samsel gave an identical account to the FBI when he was arrested weeks later.
The problems began for Epps almost as soon as Revolver News published its first article about him in October. Suddenly, there were emailed death threats; trespassers on his property demanding “answers” about Jan. 6; and acquaintances, fellow members of his church and even family members who disowned him, he said.
Things became significantly worse after Carlson and prominent politicians began to amplify the lies.
Then, in January, Epps received a letter from someone claiming to have been brought into the country by a Mexican drug cartel.
The writer said he had overheard some cartel members talking about killing Epps.
Ultimately, the couple sold their business, a farmstyle wedding venue, and their house in Arizona, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars and wrecking the arrangements they had made for retirement.
“It has a been a nightmare,” Robyn Epps said.
While he wants to clear his name, he is under no illusion that he will ever manage to divorce it fully from the lies.
“They’ll always be associated,” Epps said. “You can’t convince some people.”