The threats are like a bad faucet, a ceaseless stream of invective and hatred. The pitter-patter is so constant that Robbie Kaplan has learned to tune it out; white noise.
Still, some pronouncements land harder than others. The ones that promise violence. The ones that mention her son. The ones that are too detailed, filled in with gruesome specifics. And the ones that leave just enough to the imagination. Like: “After this stupid kike whore loses this fraudulent lawsuit, we’re going to have a lot of fucking fun with her.”
It was mid-June, and months since Kaplan and her co-counsel Karen Dunn had filed a lawsuit against the white supremacists who’d swarmed Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. In that time, Kaplan, who is Jewish, has grown accustomed to her neo-Nazi menaces. But even so, for her, this crossed a line. For one, the threat had been shared on Telegram, a messaging platform popular with the alt-right. And second, the person who posted it was none other than Christopher Cantwell, a famed internet white nationalist with a violent criminal record who also happens to be a defendant in Sines v. Kessler, Kaplan and Dunn’s suit. (Other defendants include Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, Matthew Heimbach, and groups like Identity Evropa and the League of the South.)
The incident spurred Kaplan and Dunn to pursue sanctions against Cantwell, asking that the court order him to stop harassing not just Kaplan, but the plaintiffs as well. The motion is still pending. In the meantime, it’s at least cost Cantwell his representation. In a court filing, his now-former attorneys said they were at a “loss” over how to counter Kaplan’s claims.
When I meet Kaplan for the first time and ask about the threats, she almost smiles. She gets it; how much these men despise her. She’s a woman who happens to be both a lesbian and Jewish. Since the 2016 presidential election, she has worn a small star of David around her neck—a personal reminder to keep up the fight against hate in it all its nefarious forms.
When it became clear soon after that weekend in Charlottesville that there were survivors who wanted to seek justice in court, Kaplan decided to pursue the case. (It is now backed with support from Integrity First for America, an organization founded in 2017 that seeks to support public interest litigation. Amy Spitalnick, who was formerly the communications director to New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, is IFA’s executive director.)
Her and Dunn’s approach is unique, but the case doesn’t stand alone. There has been at least one trial in connection to Charlottesville; in June, the man who plowed his car into a group of counter-protestors and killed Heather Heyer was sentenced to life in prison. But the case that Kaplan and Dunn will argue has different aims. With it, IFA doesn’t just take a group of men to court. It puts the alt-right on trial.
Two years ago, hundreds of white supremacists marched on Charlottesville. Within 48 hours, an entire metropolis had been immobilized and one woman was dead. In the months that followed, the violence piled up. In Pittsburgh, the Tree of Life shooting claimed 11 lives, and a hate-fueled attack in El Paso left 22 people dead. Terror is chaotic; that’s a feature, not a bug. But the implementation of it has to be meticulous.
Kaplan understood that—how much time it would have taken the men who’d swarmed Charlottesville to plan and plot “Unite the Right,” as their event had been christened, the resources that have to be marshaled to incite violence. But still, she knew, too, that our cultural theories about “lone wolves” and crazed, impulsive madmen are durable. It wasn’t just that she wanted justice for the victims of Charlottesville, although she did and does; she wanted to illuminate the sophisticated structure of a resurgent white supremacist movement in America. She wanted to prove that the violence committed in Charlottesville had been purposeful and deliberate. In legal speak, well, Dunn explains it best: “If two people are members of a conspiracy, one will be liable for the acts of the other, when those acts were reasonably foreseeable.” In 2019 terms, Kaplan wanted the receipts.