Jury awards plaintiffs $25 million in lawsuit against white supremacists behind violence at Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally

A jury in Virginia decided Tuesday that a who's who of U.S. white supremacist leaders and hate groups should pay more than $25 million in damages to plaintiffs who said they suffered physical or emotional injuries during the deadly "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Though the jury found the defendants liable under a Virginia conspiracy law, the seven white and four Black jurors were unable to reach a verdict on whether the defendants were liable under a federal statute that outlaws conspiracies to commit racially motivated violence.

Coming after a third day of deliberations, the decision showed the jurors rejected defense arguments that the trial represented a referendum on free speech rights.

The jurors imposed $500,000 each in punitive damages against several defendants and $1 million each against several organizations on the state conspiracy claim. They limited compensatory damages on that claim to no more than $1 each.

The jury found that lawyers for the plaintiffs proved a claim of racial or religious violence under Virginia law. The panel awarded two plaintiffs $250,000 each in compensatory damages and $200,000 each in punitive damages, to be paid by several defendants. 

The jury imposed $12 million in punitive damages against James Alex Fields, a self-professed neo-Nazi who drove a car into the Charlottesville crowd, killing Heather Heyer. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for the most indelible moment of violence during the rally.

The case represented the latest in a decades-old strategy of plaintiffs using civil lawsuits to hobble hate groups by attacking their finances. It's unclear whether the Charlottesville defendants would be able to pay.

The split verdict came one day after jurors sent a note to U.S. District Court Judge Norman Moon saying they had been unable to reach unanimous decisions on the federal conspiracy claim.

He thanked the jurors for their service Tuesday and assured them that a courtroom sketch artist's drawing of the verdict's delivery would not show their faces or other identifying characteristics.

"This case has sent a clear message: Violent hate won't go unanswered. There will be accountability," said Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, which organized the lawsuit.

The nine plaintiffs still "intend to get a verdict" on the federal conspiracy claim by refiling the case, said Roberta Kaplan, one of the attorneys who represented the group.

"No one will ever bring violence to the streets of Charlottesville ever again, because they know what will happen if they do," Kaplan said.

Richard Spencer, a former leader of the white supremacist and white nationalist movement called the "alt-right," did not respond to a message seeking comment on the outcome of the trial in which he represented himself.

The case focused on two days in August four years ago when hundreds of white supremacists descended on Charlottesville. They marched with lit tiki torches and chanted, "Jews will not replace us." Fights broke out between white supremacists and counterprotesters.

The groundbreaking lawsuit was filed shortly after the rally by Charlottesville residents who said they had been injured in the violence. The plaintiffs included a minister and students.

Several defendants are leaders of the extremist right, including Christopher Cantwell, a neo-Nazi podcaster who is serving a prison sentence for extortion; white nationalist Jason Kessler, the Charlottesville rally's chief organizer; and Nathan Damigo, a white supremacist who founded the group Identity Evropa. 

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued that evidence showed the defendants planned the rally knowing violence would ensue.

The defendants, 24 individuals and organizations, acknowledged espousing racist and antisemitic views but denied they had conspired.

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Proving a conspiracy

The plaintiffs brought the case to trial under the federal Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era statute that allows individuals to sue when violent conspiracies deprive them of their constitutional rights. The law was enacted after Klan violence prevented newly freed slaves from exercising their rights as full citizens.

The plaintiffs had to prove not only that their injuries resulted from the Unite the Right rally but that the defendants had been involved in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence that caused those injuries. 

In an effort to do so, they relied on a trove of evidence, including hundreds of text messages among the defendants and hundreds of thousands of leaked communications from Discord, a messaging platform that many of the organizers used leading up to the event.

Throughout the trial, the defendants remained unapologetic about their racist beliefs. Some used the courtroom as a stage to praise Nazi leader Adolf Hitler or mock the Holocaust. During closing arguments, a lawyer for the defense played a neo-Nazi recruitment video. 

The defendants sought to disassociate themselves from the central planning of the event and argued that they never intended for the rally to get violent. In his instructions to jurors about the conspiracy claim, Moon said they must agree only that a preponderance of evidence showed "there was a mutual understanding, either spoken or unspoken, between the conspirators to commit at least one unlawful act."

Spencer expressed regret for the events and for Heyer's death. He and Cantwell tried to cast the trial as a referendum on First Amendment rights. Moon, who presided over trial over more than three weeks, cut off those arguments and admonished the defendants to stick to the facts of the case.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs produced evidence designed to show that the defendants conspired in planning the rally, knew it would descend into violence and celebrated when it did.

The attorneys showed videos of the defendants discussing how well the rally went. Other evidence included communications and social media posts from the defendants talking about what equipment they would bring to Charlottesville and signaling they might hurt anyone who showed up to oppose them.

"We are raising an army my liege, for free speech, but for the cracking of skulls if it comes to it,” read one of the text messages between co-defendants Kessler and Spencer.

Plaintiffs' attorney Michael Bloch noted a Facebook post in which Cantwell wrote: “if you think the alt-right is insignificant you might want to ask the bleeding commie filth we sent to the morgue and hospitals how insignificant we are.”

During cross-examination, Bloch asked Cantwell, "When you said the 'bleeding commie filth we sent to the morgue,' you meant Heather Heyer?"

"Yeah," Cantwell responded.

A legal tactic to shut down extremists 

The lawsuit follows a successful, decades-long tradition of using civil courts to decimate white supremacist and hate groups. Spencer said before the trial that the case had been financially crippling.

In the 1980s and 90s, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued several chapters of the Klan on behalf of plaintiffs who had been intimidated or threatened. The lawsuits caused those chapters to file for bankruptcy or shut down. 

The plaintiffs previously won default judgments against seven of the 24 defendants. The plaintiffs' lawyers moved to enter those judgments formally after Tuesday's split verdict was announced.

The court has issued five-figure fines against three other defendants for failing to produce evidence or show up for court hearings or depositions, court files show.

Contributing: The Associated Press