Lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center have sued the owner of a white supremacist website, accusing him of unleashing a "troll storm" of harassment on a Jewish real estate agent.
The lawsuit (PDF) was filed Tuesday against Andrew Anglin, publisher of the Daily Stormer neo-Nazi website. It claims he unleashed a "coordinated, repulsive, threatening campaign of anti-Semitic harassment" on Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent living in Whitefish, Montana. The campaign allegedly resulted in more than 700 threatening phone calls, voicemails, and e-mails.
At issue is whether a prominent publisher of a far-right website can be held legally liable for online "trolling" tactics his articles inspired. Lawyers for Gersh say Anglin violated Montana's "Anti-Intimidation Act" and that he should be made to pay for Gersh's emotional distress and loss of privacy.
Anglin has advocated for keeping hatred of Jews front and center as the self-described "alt-right" white-nationalist movement has gained increasing prominence over the last year. "I think there's room for different viewpoints," he said in one interview with a white-nationalist YouTube channel. "But when it comes to the Jews, this is something that's non-negotiable. You have to focus on the Jews as the primary enemy."
The 63-page lawsuit spells out Anglin's months of online attacks on Gersh, laying out his virulently anti-Semitic writing in a chronology that begins in mid-December.
“Old fashioned Troll Storm”
In November, alt-right leader Richard Spencer hit the national spotlight after he hosted a conference in Washington DC that drew a few hundred white supremacists to town for a post-election conference. Images of Spencer shouting "Hail Trump!" and suggesting that white nationalists should "party like it's 1933" went viral.
Spencer's "think tank" listed a Whitefish, Montana, home owned by his mother Sherry Spencer as its main office. Some Whitefish residents believed that Sherry Spencer had not disavowed her son's racism and that she may have been providing financial support for her son, according to the complaint. Local activists, including members of a human rights group Gersh was involved with called "Love Lives Here," began discussing the idea of staging a protest in front of a mixed-use building also owned by Sherry Spencer.