Katie Couric Media: It’s Been Five Years Since the Neo-Nazi Horrors in Charlottesville — What’s Changed?

By Julia Lewis. Read the full interview here. 

August 12 marks five years since the “Unite the Right” rally Charlottesville, Virginia and the counter-protests that followed. Many of us remember watching in horror as images filled our screens of white supremacists and neo-Nazis spewing images of intense hatred. (Our very own Katie was in Charlottesville covering the rally for her docuseries America Inside Out, which you can watch here.)

We caught up with Amy Spitalnick, the executive director of Integrity First for America, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization dedicated to holding those accountable who threaten longstanding principles of our democracy — including our country’s commitment to civil rights and equal justice. IFA’s suit, Sines v. Kessler, is the only current legal effort to take on the vast leadership of the violent white nationalist movement. We caught up with Spitalnick to reflect on the five year anniversary of the rally and discuss the progress that’s been made in the fight against extremism.

Tell us about the civil lawsuit, Sines v. Kessler your team filed in 2017.

Five years ago, the violence in Charlottesville shocked the nation, but what’s important to understand is that what happened was no accident. It was planned meticulously in advance on social media and across other channels, down to discussions about hitting protestors with cars. And that’s no accident. That’s a racist, antisemitic, violent conspiracy, and we have laws meant to protect against those sorts of things. 

So on behalf of nine Charlottesville community members who were injured in the violence, we brought a lawsuit against two dozen neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and eight groups directly responsible for orchestrating that deadly violence that weekend five years ago. We went to trial in October of 2021, after four years of litigating this case in November, just before Thanksgiving, the jury delivered a resounding verdict in favor of our plaintiffs — a multimillion-dollar verdict, finding every single defendant liable for the violent conspiracy that they brought to Charlottesville.

Who were some of the defendants in this lawsuit?

The defendants in our lawsuit really are a who’s who of the violent white supremacist movement. People like Richard Spencer, who at the time of Unite the Right was the country’s leading neo-Nazi — he coined the term alt-right — and other neo-Nazis like Chris Cantwell, Jeff Schoep, Matthew Heimbach. Also, organizations like the National Socialist Movement, League of the South, certain KKK groups, Traditionalist Worker Party, the armed wing of the Proud Boys, and a variety of other hate groups and leaders, who really were at the center of this movement. 

Since the lawsuit, we’ve seen a number of these leaders in hate groups face bankruptcy; they’ve been dismantled, they’ve been marginalized in this movement, and it’s been heartening to see the impacts that accountability can actually have when they are held accountable for their actions as our lawsuit did. They face very real consequences that undermine their ability to operate and perpetuate their violent hate. And it tells us that if we actually have accountability on a larger scale, the impacts at a moment of record-level extremism would be momentous.

What was the overall effect of the Sines v Kessler verdict ?

So the multimillion-dollar verdict in our lawsuit has had a number of impacts. First and foremost, the resounding message from the jury made it crystal-clear that there will be very real consequences for violent extremism. That sends a strong message, not just to the defendants, but to the entire extremist movement — letting them know that they cannot commit that sort of violence without very real consequences. 

We’ve also seen a number of cases brought against those responsible for January 6th, explicitly modeled on ours. Our case was able to pull back the curtain on how these extremists operate, and expose the tools, the tactics, and the inner workings of these hate groups and their leaders. And by putting both the full story of what happened that horrific weekend five years ago on the record and making the case documents public and available for the long-term, we hope to make it very clear exactly how these extremists operate.

Continue reading at katiecouric.com.