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(JTA) — A brand new HBO documentary dives into the profitable effort to sue the white supremacists behind the lethal 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 towards 17 white nationalist leaders and organizations on behalf of 9 plaintiffs who suffered bodily and emotional accidents whereas peacefully staging a counterprotest of the rally, which was known as “Unite the Proper.” The lawsuit alleged that the rally was not a spontaneous gathering, however a coordinated conspiracy meant to incite racially-motivated violence.
The 17 defendants, together with neo-Nazi and white supremacist Richard Spencer, had been pressured to pay greater than $2 million in damages, plus almost $5 million for the plaintiffs’ authorized charges.
The movie options interviews with and behind-the-scenes footage of the attorneys, their workforce, and 6 of the 9 plaintiffs.
Amy Spitalnick, who served on the time as the manager director of Integrity First for America — the group that funded the lawsuit — seems within the documentary as effectively. Spitalnick, who now serves because the CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, mentioned the lawsuit “had main monetary and operational impacts on the defendants,” and has “emerged as a mannequin” for holding extremists accountable through civil court docket.
“Within the six years since Unite the Proper, these white supremacist conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes into the mainstream of our politics and society, fueling a cycle of violence concentrating on communities throughout the nation and across the globe,” Spitalnick mentioned in a press release to the Jewish Telegraphic Company.
“On the similar time, we all know that we are able to’t solely sue our method out of this disaster,” she added. “Civil litigation is an important device, but it surely should go hand-in-hand with a whole-of-society method aimed toward constructing democratic resiliency and stopping extremism within the first place.”
Within the ruling ordering the defendants to pay the plaintiffs’ authorized charges, Justice of the Peace Joel Hoppe cited the “advanced, expansive, and voluminous” analysis accomplished by Kaplan and Dunn’s workforce.
“When Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit in October 2017, the world had seen and heard reviews of the torch march, overtly racist and antisemitic chants, and violent clashes in Charlottesville a couple of months earlier. However ‘[t]he world had not but seen or heard in regards to the planning and coordination that enabled the conflagration’,” he wrote, quoting a submitting from the plaintiffs.
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