Attempts to sue neo-nazi leader bog down

For the past five months, a group of litigants has been trying to hold Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-nazi website The Daily Stormer, to account for some of his actions. It has not been easy.

A team of four people hired by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center to serve Anglin with notice of a lawsuit accusing him of leading a “troll army” have failed. They scoured parts of Ohio, where Anglin is from, and talked to his brother; they went to his father’s counseling office; they drove around his sister’s church. When they saw someone was home at an apartment affiliated with him, they staked it out.

“He knows people are trying to serve him,” said Teresa Ploesser, who works for Encore Process Service, which the Southern Poverty Law Center hired to find Anglin. “He knows what he’s doing. To avoid service, you’ve got to be a step ahead.”

Anglin, 32, who created The Daily Stormer in 2013, has been a key figure in stoking the resurgent white nationalist movement. His website, billed as “The World’s Most Genocidal Republican Website,” is a major platform for neo-nazi news and commentary. He has used the site to champion a modern holocaust that would create an American white ethno-state and to target individuals whom he sees as enemies. During the white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Va., this month, Anglin live-blogged the proceedings.

Since April, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy and civil rights group, has tried to track down Anglin for a lawsuit claiming that he used his website to inflict emotional distress on Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent in Montana. The fruitless search for him exemplifies the challenges that online harassment cases sometimes encounter.

The lawsuit is one of several against Anglin. Last Tuesday, two women who say they were injured in the Charlottesville neo-nazi protest sued him and other organizers. A day later, Siriusxm radio host Dean Obeidallah sued Anglin for calling him the “mastermind” behind a deadly bombing.

Anglin is considered a “prestige figure” in the white nationalist movement and is most likely hiding among his community, said Keegan Hankes, an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Anglin’s lawyer, Marc Randazza, said that the editor should be easy to find and that no one had looked hard enough. Anglin has written on The Daily Stormer that he is in Nigeria.

Asked in an email about Gersh’s lawsuit, Anglin wrote: “I’m a serious person, and I only deal with serious reporters,” adding an anti-semitic epithet to describe The New York Times.

Anglin is facing troubles other than the lawsuits. Godaddy and Google kicked The Daily Stormer off their platforms last week for violating their terms of service. The site re-emerged on Tor, a browser for anonymous web surfing, and within a day found a new home on a Russian server before again being booted. The website appeared to be offline late Friday, days after it was expelled from Cloudflare, a service that provides protection from online attacks.

Gersh’s lawsuit stems from events last spring in Whitefish, Mont. There, Gersh, a real estate agent, encouraged Sherry Spencer, to disavow her son, Richard Spencer, a white supremacist, and donate to human rights causes. As tensions in the community grew, Gersh offered to sell a building in town owned by Sherry Spencer.

Anglin told his followers that Gersh was extorting Sherry Spencer and encouraged them to write anti-semitic messages to Gersh.

She and her son, who was 12, soon received thousands of phone calls and emails, including a message encouraging her son to crawl into an oven.

In April, Gersh and the Southern Poverty Law Center sued The Daily Stormer, accusing it of orchestrating a “troll storm.” The case could set a precedent on how online harassment is treated under the law.

But the suit has stalled. The four-person team at Encore Process Service in Columbus, Ohio, visited seven addresses to find Anglin and returned some 15 times. To Jeffrey A. Cremeans, who runs Encore Process Service and has served notice of lawsuits for 25 years, Anglin became a case that still haunts him.

“Sometimes you take it personal,” Cremeans said.

Ploesser, who specializes in investigations for the firm, added: “We found fictitious offices. Things were always closed.”

Ploesser believes Anglin barricaded himself in one of his Ohio addresses. But after a little over a week of searching in April, the team had exhausted its options.

Afterward, the Southern Poverty Law Center began the byzantine process of trying to move the lawsuit forward without Anglin. The court clerk sent papers to his known addresses through certified mail; those were returned undeliverable. Then the papers were sent through regular mail; they were also returned undeliverable.

If Anglin cannot be served notice in person, the last step is to put a public notice for six consecutive weeks in a local newspaper. Gersh’s lawyer at the Southern Poverty Law Center, David Dinielli, expects to do so this month.

“The circumstances in which these steps are normally taken is someone owed $7,000 on their credit card bill,” Dinielli said. “This is not what happens in nationally prominent civil rights litigation.”

When Randazza, Anglin’s lawyer and a First Amendment advocate, was asked whether his client was avoiding being served, he said: “Would you say that touchdowns are avoiding being scored in a shutout football game? Or would you say that the offense is not scoring them?”

Randazza said that what Anglin wrote was protected speech, and he connected the lawsuit with the broader political climate. “There’s this belief among the modern left that free speech is for me but not for thee,” he said.

Dinielli called Anglin a “coward.” He said Randazza had been avoiding his calls and emails. Randazza said he did not know Dinielli and had not ignored any calls or messages from him.

For Gersh, Anglin’s failure to respond to the suit is a display of hypocrisy. “I don’t know how long he’s allowed to hide,” she said. “The fact that he won’t stand up for himself now after being so willing to blast people and steal their lives and hurt them is shameful.”