HBO airing ‘No Accident,’ documentary on legal team that sued Charlottesville rally organizers and won
(JTA) — A new HBO documentary dives into the successful effort to sue the white supremacists behind the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
“No Accident,” premiering Oct. 10, follows the attorneys Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, who filed a lawsuit against 17 white nationalist leaders and organizations on behalf of nine plaintiffs who suffered physical and emotional injuries while peacefully staging a counterprotest of the rally, which was called “Unite the Right.” The lawsuit alleged that the rally was not a spontaneous gathering, but a coordinated conspiracy intended to incite racially-motivated violence.
The 17 defendants, including neo-Nazi and white supremacist Richard Spencer, were forced to pay more than $2 million in damages, plus nearly $5 million for the plaintiffs’ legal fees.
The film features interviews with and behind-the-scenes footage of the attorneys, their team, and six of the nine plaintiffs.
Amy Spitalnick, who served at the time as the executive director of Integrity First for America — the group that funded the lawsuit — appears in the documentary as well. Spitalnick, who now serves as the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said the lawsuit “had major financial and operational impacts on the defendants,” and has “emerged as a model” for holding extremists accountable via civil court.
“In the six years since Unite the Right, these white supremacist conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes into the mainstream of our politics and society, fueling a cycle of violence targeting communities across the country and around the globe,” Spitalnick said in a statement to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“At the same time, we know that we can’t only sue our way out of this crisis,” she added. “Civil litigation is a crucial tool, but it must go hand-in-hand with a whole-of-society approach aimed at building democratic resiliency and preventing extremism in the first place.”
In the ruling ordering the defendants to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees, Magistrate Joel Hoppe cited the “complex, expansive, and voluminous” research done by Kaplan and Dunn’s team.
“When Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit in October 2017, the world had seen and heard reports of the torch march, overtly racist and antisemitic chants, and violent clashes in Charlottesville a few months earlier. But ‘[t]he world had not yet seen or heard about the planning and coordination that enabled the conflagration’,” he wrote, quoting a filing from the plaintiffs.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30