Each day, we’ll have the latest news from the courtroom in the Sines v. Kessler Unite the Right trial. For coverage from previous days, check the list of links at the bottom of this page.
The Reverend Seth Wispelwey was not physically injured at the August 12, 2017, Unite the Right rally, but he said he was “wounded badly that summer.” Wispelwey is a plaintiff in Sines v. Kessler, and when he took the stand Wednesday, defendants questioned his Christianity and tried to portray him as a member of antifa.
Wispelwey, who grew up in Charlottesville, was an ordained minister with the United Church of Christ. In 2017, he co-founded Congregate, a group of local clergy whose purpose was to “show up in loving support for our community for what we understood would be a violent event,” he testified.
Friends and colleagues who were Black, Jewish, Muslim, and queer saw the Unite the Right rally as an “existential threat” and feared for their bodily safety, he said. Congregate held weekly sessions with singing, theological discussions, and training for “how to act lovingly in potentially volatile situations,” he said. “We were explicitly a nonviolent entity.”
The group put out a national call for support, and religious leaders like Cornel West answered.
On August 11, Congregate held a prayer meeting at St. Paul’s Episcopal. “We felt called as members of the faith community to use that as an opportunity to respond and to tell a different story when people gathered,” said Wispelwey.
An estimated 700 people assembled in the church. He called the evening “a mountaintop experience,” where the “spirit felt alive… It felt like a real manifestation of our motto, to concretely project love over fear.”
That mood changed. As the service was winding down, he learned of the tiki-torch march down the street at UVA. “We really didn’t want to create a panic,” he said. Congregants were told there was a situation and they were “going to keep singing and no one is going out the front doors.”
Worried clergy eventually started evacuating people in small groups out the back of the church, and it took until 11:30pm to get people rides and home safely, he said.
Early August 12, Wispelwey attended a sunrise service at the historic African American First Baptist Church on West Main Street, then he walked with a group of clergy to what was then called Emancipation Park, where the Unite the Right rally was scheduled to take place.
A group of between 40 and 50 leaders and congregants linked arms outside the park around 8:15am. “It was a practical way of staying connected when there was a lot going on,” he said. And spiritually, “we wanted to communicate that we were there together.”
Unite the Righters had been entering the park from its southwest corner. The Congregate group moved to the steps on the southeast corner of the park, where several neo-Nazis broke through. “I heard yelling and ‘kill the faggot priests,’” said Wispelwey, adding that he was pushed and tripped into the bushes.
“It was a sobering moment,” he recalled. “We were rattled. We wanted to understand what had happened. We could feel the dread.”
Later, he was at Escafe on Water Street when he heard a car had hit people. He rushed to Fourth Street.
He remembers seeing a young Black woman writhing on the ground, two smashed cars, glass and blood, and bodies on the road. “I didn’t know what had happened,” he said. “It was awful.”
Wispelwey said he was diagnosed with PTSD, has night terrors, panic attacks, and has been unable to work full-time or go out socially as he once did. “I used to be an extrovert,” he said. “I don’t even know what I am anymore.”
After August 12, when the nation was trying to make sense of what had happened, Wispelwey wrote that “antifa saved my life.” He’d recently learned the term, and thought it was a catchall for counterprotesters against fascism, he testified.
A video showed shield-carrying League of the South and Traditionalist Worker Party members marching toward the park. “When League of the South was walking up, other counterprotesters moved bodily in front of us,” explained Wispelwey. “I was afraid… League of the South charged into them and they took the hit.”
Saying that antifa saved his life and later tweeting in 2019 that “Jesus was antifa” were like red meat to pro se defendants Richard Spencer and Crying Nazi Christopher Cantwell, who got to cross-examine Wispelwey.
Spencer asked what sola scriptura meant, a term Wispelwey said he hadn’t heard since divinity school, and asked him to recount the story of Jericho. “You are a pastor,” admonished Spencer. “This is the Bible we’re talking about.” He followed that with a question about what the Bible says about slavery—“if you have read it.”
Judge Norman Moon intervened when Spencer asked about how United Church of Christ followers go to heaven. Spencer told the judge he believed Wispelwey was an activist “claiming to be motivated by faith.”
The alt-righter asked the pastor if he believed “fellow Protestants are brothers in Christ.”
Said Wispelwey, “I don’t subscribe to the belief that, just because someone calls himself a Christian, that we share the same beliefs.”
Cantwell questioned Wispelwey for about 90 minutes, calling him “Seth” until attorney Roberta Kaplan objected. Cantwell tried to link Congregate with antifa, and asked whether the clergy blocked entrance to the park. “You’re bodily confronting people whose political opinions you don’t like,” he accused.
Wispelwey said he was not blocking entrance to the rally and was making a stand and showing solidarity.
Cantwell asked if he felt compelled to confront hate speech. “I feel called to show up in the name of love when people are in fear and under attack,” Wispelwey answered.
Cantwell took issue with a Slate article in which Wispelwey wrote, “God is not okay with white supremacy.”
He also questioned a Wispelwey tweet that said, “Hate speech leads to physical violence…” Asked Cantwell, “Is that because your friends use violence against people who engage in hate speech?”
Replied Wispelwey, “I can’t think of any friends who engage in violence.”
Also on the stand on Wednesday was Marchus Martin, who was injured when James Fields accelerated into the Fourth Street crowd.
Martin, who is immortalized in Ryan Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, said he pushed his fiance Marissa Blair out of the way as the car “hit me and tossed and turned me through the air.”
Martin’s left leg was shattered and he has two screws in his ankle, he testified. He couldn’t walk for eight months, and now he can’t play basketball or softball or lift weights.
Later, he was diagnosed with a head injury, he said. “I just was not feeling right,” experiencing anger and trust issues that made it difficult for people, including Blair, to be around him. “It pushed the best thing that ever happened to me out of my life.”
The last witness of the day was defendant Nathan Damigo, who founded Identity Evropa and was lauded in alt-right circles for punching a female protester in the face in Berkeley. Member and fellow co-defendant Elliott Kline was a major organizer of the Unite the Right rally, and on IE’s payroll.
While in prison for pulling a gun and robbing a man who looked Iraqi, Damigo became a fan of KKKer David Duke, and he testified that he believed America was created for white people.
Damigo was a regular at Spencer’s Alexandria apartment, dubbed the “fash loft,” and he posted on Discord as “Fashy Haircut.” Was such usage “tongue in cheek?” asked Spencer on cross-examination. It was, agreed Damigo.
Damigo also came up with the idea of torch-lit marches in Charlottesville in May and August 2017. Asked if he knew torches and fire invoke Nazi Germany for Jews and their supporters, he replied, “I do not recall thinking of that.” Damigo did concede he was aware the KKK in the past had used “torch implements.”
Because the four-week trial is moving slowly, court will continue Thursday, despite it being Veterans Day, a federal holiday.
Previous Sines v. Kessler coverage
Pre-trial: Their day in court: Major lawsuit against Unite the Right neo-Nazis heads to trial
Day one, 10/25: Trial kicks off with jury selection
Day two, 10/26: Desperately seeking jury
Day three, 10/27: Jury selection wraps up
Day four, 10/28: Plaintiffs and defendants make their opening arguments
Day five, 10/29: “I hear it in my nightmares,” says plaintiff Romero
Day six, 11/1: “I stopped being an outgoing, sociable person,” says plaintiff Willis
Day seven, 11/2: “Strike that”
Day eight, 11/3: Defendants fawn over Hitler
Day nine, 11/4: Quibbling about hate
Day 10, 11/5: League of the South takes the stand
Day 11, 11/8: “It gave me Nazi vibes”
Day 12, 11/9: False flags and missing evidence