When the trial in the federal civil lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in mid-August 2017 opens on Monday, it will represent more than just an opportunity for the victims of that day’s lethal violence to obtain a measure of justice. It also represents the power of a community to hold accountable the out-of-town extremist thugs who travel to “liberal” cities to target them with organized violence—an antidemocratic strategy of the radical right that has victimized cities around the nation, from Portland, Oregon, to Washington, D.C.

“I think it’s powerfully significant that all of the plaintiffs in this suit are local, and most still live in Charlottesville,” said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, the civil rights nonprofit supporting the lawsuit. “These are highly coordinated efforts for the purpose of descending on these cities for the purpose of inflicting violence. And it is members of the community who are holding them accountable.”

The nine plaintiffs in the case all were victims of the violence that erupted Aug. 11-12. Some were assaulted on Friday night as white nationalists bearing tiki torches and chanting “Jews Will Not Replace Us!” and “Blood and Soil!” marched through the University of Virginia campus and surrounded a small group of counterprotesters and beat them. Others were badly injured during the next day’s attacks on counterprotesters in the city’s downtown; the majority suffered grievous injuries when a neo-Nazi drove a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of them that afternoon, killing a woman named Heather Heyer.

Among them are the Rev. Seth Wispelwey, a pastor at Charlottesville’s United Church of Christ who led a contingent of peaceful protesters who were brutally assaulted during the Aug. 12 riots. Marcus Martin, the man whose image—flying over the top of Field’s car as it plowed into the crowd—became symbolic of the day’s carnage is also one of the plaintiffs.

Alt-right godfather Richard Spencer, center, was also part of the Charlottesville violence.

The 24 defendants, on the other hand, were the people who evidence demonstrates planned the violence. The roster reads like a laundry list of the leading figures of the white nationalist movement for whom “Unite the Right” was viewed as a national coming-out party: Richard Spencer, widely seen as the leader of the alt-right and mastermind of the Friday night march; Jason Kessler, one of the primary organizers of the event; white supremacist Christopher Cantwell, a podcaster known derisively as the “crying Nazi”; Matthew Heimbach, cofounder of the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP); Nathan Damigo, founder of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa; Andrew Anglin, founder and publisher of the neo-Nazi publication Daily Stormer; Jeff Schoep, the longtime leader of the National Socialist Movement; and the various organizations to which they were attached, as well as other far-right groups who were involved, such as the hate group Vanguard America, to which James Fields, the man convicted of driving his car into the crowd, belonged.

“The violence in Charlottesville was no accident,” the lawsuit states. “Defendants spent months carefully coordinating their efforts, on the internet and in person. They exhorted each other: ‘If you want to defend the South and Western Civilization from the Jew and his dark-skinned allies, be at Charlottesville on 12 August’ and ‘Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.'”

Even before the trial begins, the lawsuit has already had a powerful effect in derailing many of these groups and their leaders. Spencer has essentially shuttered his organization, the National Policy Institute, in the two years since it was filed. Now representing himself in court, he told the court in June 2020 that the case has been “financially crippling.” Similarly, Identity Evropa disbanded and attempted to rebrand itself (with little success), blaming the hack of its Discord chats that form much of the evidence being presented by the plaintiffs.

Far-right extremists from around the nation converged on Charlottesville.

Two of the groups disbanded because of the fallout from Charlottesville, including the lawsuit: Heimbach’s TWP, which crumbled a domestic violence incident involving Heimbach and his father-in-law, Matt Parrot, who is also a defendant in the suit; and Vanguard America, which had been a central online organizing nexus for young white nationalists, many of whom broke away afterwards and formed such organizations as the openly neofascist Patriot Front.

One of the defendants, white nationalist Mike Peinovich, was able to persuade Judge Norman Moon to drop him from the case in 2018, with the assistance of a so-called “shadow attorney”. A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Michael Edison Hayden this week uncovered the lawyer’s identity: a Baltimore-based attorney named Glen, previously identified as a dues-paying member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance.  

Two defendants—Anglin and his webmaster Robert “Azzmador” Ray—are in hiding. Anglin already has a multimillion-dollar judgement against him as a result of a similar lawsuit involving his harassment of a Jewish real estate agent in Montana; both he and Ray dropped from sight sometime after the Charlottesville lawsuit was filed in late 2017.

“The most important goal is justice for our plaintiffs, and accountability for those responsible,” Spitalnick told Daily Kos. “Civil litigation like this has a long history of bankrupting and dismantling these groups and leaders. Certainly we’re seeing that here already, and with the potential for large civil judgements, it can disrupt the leadership of this movement.”

Spitalnick noted that if the plaintiffs succeed in court, any monetary damages awarded in the judgment will not be subject to bankruptcy claims. She observed that Damigo had already attempted to persuade Moon to drop him from the suit on the basis of his own current bankruptcy, and was denied.

Thus, if the plaintiffs win and the jury awards a large monetary judgement, these same far-right organizers will no longer be able to effectively raise funds for their hatemongering: “Yeah, they can raise money,” Spitalnick said, “but we’ll just take it.”

The Integrity First lawsuit, like many similar legal actions historically used by organizations like the SPLC, is founded on the federal Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era law that, besides outlawing the notorious hate group, also allows individuals to sue when they are injured by their criminal plots.

“Unfortunately, the KKK Act is experiencing something of a renaissance,” Karen Dunn, co-lead counsel with Roberta Kaplan, told USA Today. “But we are glad it exists because this is exactly the kind of conduct it is meant to address.”

Most of all, the lawsuit should establish a model for other communities—particularly those like Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.—that have been victimized by far-right outsiders organizing gangs of violent thugs to descend on their cities and wreak havoc. Considering that they have shown no sign of relenting after the most infamous of these invasions—namely, the Jan. 6 insurrection in D.C.—any tool is welcome.