If the election of Donald Trump signaled the mainstreaming of the “alt-right” in American public life, then the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, was the point made undeniable. Hundreds of avowed neo-Nazis, white supremacists, far-right militants and Klansmen walked the streets of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, bearing torches, assaulting counter-protesters, and shouting a cacophony of racist and antisemitic epithets (“Jews will not replace us!”). On the afternoon of 12 August, an avowed white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than 30 others.
That man was later convicted of first-degree murder and several hate crimes, and sentenced to more than life in prison. But for the rest of the participants, particularly the leaders of the “alt-right” – a loose constellation of antisemites, white supremacists and others – there seemed to be little recourse for justice. There were no criminal charges for organizing an event that, as outlined in the new HBO documentary No Accident, was deliberately intended to foment the violence that cost Heyer’s life and left dozens of others with countless physical and psychological scars.
No Accident, directed by Kristi Jacobson, follows a group of lawyers and nine plaintiffs, all of whom attended the counter-protests in Charlottesville, as they eke out a method for recourse through the civil justice system. The lawsuit, filed in late 2017 by a team including veteran litigators Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, was a dense and complicated thicket of legal work: it sought damages from 24 defendants, including such far-right figures as Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell as well as several groups, for meticulously planning conspiracy to commit violence against African Americans, Jews and others in Charlottesville.
The plaintiffs “were not your typical activists in many cases”, said Jacobson. They were “ordinary people living their lives on August 11, and became heroes, in my mind”, such as Marissa Blair and her fiance, Markus, who was struck by the same car that killed their friend, Heyer; Devin Willis, a Black UVA student who was surrounded by torch-bearing white supremacists on campus and doused with gasoline; or Elizabeth Sines, a law student in 2017, who witnessed both the torch-bearing mob and the car slam into the crowd.
The 97-minute film splits its focus – on the one hand, the team of lawyers undertaking and arduous, protracted, paperwork-heavy battle (“making films about lawyers is very difficult,” Jacobson mused). The case rested, in part, on a rarely used provision in an obscure law called the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which allows for private citizens to sue other citizens for civil rights violations. No Accident is thus partly an enlightening portrait of the civil legal system, from the drudgery of discovery (in this case, the remnants of a Discord server used by organizers) to the art of a deposition (in this case, of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who do not take any of it seriously).
And on the other hand, the endurance test of a lawsuit this was for the nine plaintiffs, who tried to move on with their lives while the case slowly trudged along. The trial was delayed several times, first by administrative issues, then the pandemic; by the time the plaintiffs were able to take the stand, more than four years had passed. Due to pandemic restrictions, most trial scenes are re-created from transcripts and sketches, but are no less shocking. Some prospective jurors claim white people are discriminated against in the US. Some plaintiffs were cross-examined – more accurately, grilled for hours for humiliation – by Spencer, who represented himself, and other individuals who used the trial as a soapbox for the far-right defendants.
The case brought by Kaplan, Dunn and their team contained evidence “that felt like, how could anyone not see that they were planning to commit violence, that that violence was motivated by racism, antisemitism, that they then executed and celebrated it?” said Jacobson. But it was never a clearcut success. “This is America – a place that is rife with both overt racism and white supremacy and also the white supremacy that is in the air that we breathe,” said Jacobson. “How jurors were going to walk into that courtroom, and whether they were going to be open to those facts, loomed large.”
The goal of the suit, as Kaplan, Dunn and others state in the film, was twofold: to expose the truth of the conspirators’ intent to the public via their private messages, and to bankrupt them. On the first count, both the trial and the film were successful. In November 2021, the jury deadlocked on the two federal charges, but found all defendants liable for engaging in a conspiracy to commit violence under Virginia state law. The second remains an open question – the initial ruling demanded $25m from the defendants, which a judge later devalued to $2m while upholding the verdict. The plaintiffs are in the process of appealing.
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Still, the 2021 ruling was a great relief and a victory, the emotion captured on camera. “A jury in Charlottesville, Virginia, finding every one of the defendants liable for participating in that conspiracy is itself a victory,” said Jacobson. But also “many of the defendants, throughout the long period of time from when the case was filed to trial, were impacted financially because of the case. They couldn’t be out there in the way that they were before, and so it was having an impact while it was in process.”
The Unite the Right rally may now seem at least an era ago, but Jacobson urges against seeing the events of Charlottesville 2017 as a bygone time, or limited to the Trump presidency. “During the making of this film, the world changed six million times. Trump was president, Trump wasn’t president. There was a pandemic, there was a ‘reckoning’. So many things happened,” she said. “And I think one of the constants is that white supremacy and patriarchy have a really strong hold in this nation.”
“But the other constant is people that are continuing to fight to dismantle that, and doing it with such bravery, courage and relentlessness,” she added. “It’s a different time, but it’s no less important, because structural racism, patriarchy, antisemitism is all very, very real in this country.”
