Last Tuesday, Integrity First for America hosted a program to remember August 11 and 12. IFA is a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization that represents the plaintiffs in the upcoming Sines v. Kessler federal lawsuit, where August 11 and 12 victims are suing the organizers and participants of Unite the Right. The trial will take place in October and run for multiple weeks.
“A Call to Justice: Four Years After the Charlottesville Attack’’ was a virtual panel to update members of the public about the upcoming lawsuit and pay respect to victims and their families. The program featured community leaders, experts, and other partners involved in the lawsuit.
“This was the loss of my baby girl,” said Susan Bro, mother of Heather Heyer, the activist who was killed in the terrorist attack that day. “Those who were injured besides Heather need compensation for ongoing surgeries, ongoing trauma, ongoing difficulties caused by this.”
Although Bro is not a plaintiff in Sines v. Kessler, she said she supports the effort to ensure the organizers of Unite the Right are held accountable. She said Unite the Right was a “wake up call” to white America to realize the dangers of white supremacy. “We have much systemic change to make but this trial is definitely a step in the right direction.”
“Those memories will undeniably haunt me for the rest of my life,” said Elizabeth Sines, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. Sines, a counterprotester, was in her second year of law school at UVA during the August 11 and 12 attacks. “I will never forget watching them [Nazis] attack my fellow students, or the feeling of running for my life through the streets I had walked with friends and family countless times before.”
Sines said she often gets asked why she showed up to counterprotest and why she decided to join the lawsuit. She said the answer to the two questions is the same: “I believe that the organizers of the Unite the Right Rally must be held accountable for the harm they’ve inflicted,” she said. “We’ve seen time and time again that without accountability, the cycle of violence, hatred, and misinformation continues and grows.”
Roberta Kaplan, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, talked about the importance of the lawsuit. Kaplan believes the court appearances will allow the American public to learn, for the first time, what really happened leading up to and during Unite the Right: what the groups were planning to do, how they went about it, and how they celebrated after the fact.
“I believe it is so important for the American people to actually hear it and see it…with their own eyes, what really happened,” Kaplan said.
Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, spoke to the consequences the organizers have already faced before the trial. According to Spitalnick, Richard Spencer has called the lawsuit “financially crippling,” and other defendants have faced large financial penalties, jail time, and evidentiary sanctions. Some defendants have even talked about how this lawsuit has deterred them from participating in additional violent acts.
“When we go to trial this fall, we put these extremists on trial before a jury of Virginia residents who will finally hold them accountable,” Spitalnick said.
The plaintiffs first filed the lawsuit in October of 2017, shortly after the attacks. The next year, the defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit, but their motion was denied. “The Court holds the Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged the Defendants formed a conspiracy to commit the racial violence that led to the Plaintiffs’ varied injuries,” wrote Judge Norman K. Moon in an opinion at the time.
Most recently, in June of this year, a federal court wrote that Unite the Right organizers had disobeyed a court order to provide evidence. The defendants “chose to withhold such documents because [they were] aware that such documents contained evidence that [they] conspired to plan racially-motivated violence at Unite the Right,” the court found.
A theme of the IFA panel was precedence: this trial will set a precedent to deter future individuals and groups from organizing something of this magnitude again. “We will follow you wherever you go,” Kaplan said. “We will bring lawsuits against you and we will make sure that you will never want to do anything like this again, because there will be consequences to it.”
