City Councilors Mike Signer and Wes Bellamy will not seek re-election. Photos: Jen Farriello and Mina Pirasteh
For some, it came as a shock when City Councilor Wes Bellamy announced yesterday that he would not run for re-election, especially considering his public remarks the week before that made it sound otherwise.
At his March 20 Virginia Festival of the Book event with former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, where the two politicians discussed how Confederate statues are symbols of institutional racism, Bellamy indicated he was likely to run for a second term because the best way to change policy “is through elected office.”
But a Rob Schilling report—from just a few hours before the 125 signatures needed to participate in the Democratic primary were due yesterday—cited “recent reports from deep inside the nascent Bellamy campaign” that he was more than 75 signatures short.
Then the former vice-mayor penned an open letter to the community, which said, “I love the people of this city, but I love my wife, my daughters, and our unborn child more. And because of my love for them, I am stepping aside for new energy. …Honestly, I need a break for my mental health, my physical health, and my family’s well being.”
Though city council voted unanimously to remove Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments after the Unite the Right rally, Bellamy, who has been calling for their removal since 2016, bore the brunt of the vitriol from local and faraway statue supporters and racists. Those included Jason Kessler, who dug up some problematic, years-old tweets from the only black councilor at the time, and called for his resignation.
Bellamy has publicly discussed the multitude of threats he and his family members receive daily.
“Some people will say that I’m quitting, or that I’m giving up, and that’s okay,” Bellamy wrote. “Some will say that the haters won. That’s okay, too. What matters most is not what people say, but what we do.”
Local activist and UVA professor Jalane Schmidt says Bellamy’s legacy includes bringing up the city’s difficult white supremacist history and present, a push for equity, a community presence, and an effort to connect people who’ve “been left out by the system” to city resources.
Deacon Don Gathers says he was “troubled and somewhat hurt” to find out Bellamy wasn’t running again, but he understands putting family first.
“I applaud him and I appreciate everything that he’s done and tried to do for the city as a whole and the black community, specifically,” says Gathers. “I really think that he has always had the community’s best interest at heart, and not everybody was going to agree with the direction that he took to try to move us forward.”
Gathers initially planned to run for council this term, but cited health concerns as a reason he did not officially launch a campaign. He and Schmidt have publicly supported Democratic candidate Michael Payne, who will now officially run against Lloyd Snook, Bob Fenwick, Sena Magill, and Brian Pinkston in the primary, where no incumbents will be on the bill.
Former mayor Mike Signer’s name also didn’t make the list of those in the running, and in the public statement he posted to Twitter yesterday, he also mentioned his family.
“My wife and I never intended that I would serve more than one term on city council,” he said. “Another four years would however be hard to balance with the competing demands of raising two young kids, my day job, and my work on initiatives like Communities Overcoming Extremism.”
Schmidt says it was no secret that Signer had higher political ambitions—including an unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in 2009—before moving to Charlottesville and being elected to city council in 2015.
“There were many of us who suspected that this was a kind of stepping stone,” she says. “It seems that his aspirations were dashed by his failure to address the [August 11 and 12, 2017,] attacks.”
Signer’s leadership came under fire in former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy’s independent review of that summer’s white supremacist events. In what was already a maelstrom of poor planning, Heaphy found that city council further complicated matters by making a last-minute decision to move the Unite the Right rally to McIntire Park, despite nearly unanimous advice that such a move would not withstand a legal challenge and spread police resources even further.
In an August 24 Facebook post, Signer publicly pointed the finger at then-city manager Maurice Jones and police chief Al Thomas for the devastating events.
And then on August 30, his fellow councilors held a three-hour closed door meeting to discuss his performance and potential discipline, where they seemingly accepted his apology—which he also read to reporters and community members who gathered in council chambers.
“In the deeply troubling and traumatizing recent weeks, I have taken several actions as mayor, and made several communications, that have been inconsistent with the collaboration required by our system of governance and that overstepped the bounds of my role as mayor, for which I apologize to my colleagues and the people of Charlottesville,” he said.
Schmidt says he’ll also be remembered for his reluctance to move the statues, support of luxury developments such as Keith Woodard’s now-defunct West2nd condos at a time when affordable housing was a pressing need, and his “foray into public consciousness,” when he became president of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association just as it was starting to gentrify, she says.
Though Gathers was one of Signer’s more vocal critics, especially in the fallout of August 12, he says he wishes him success in all his future endeavors.
“As he exits, I’m certainly not going to take shots at him,” he says. “I’m sure that he did the best that he thought he could, and what he felt was best at the time.”
Though Fenwick is once again in the running, the departure of Signer and Bellamy—along with Kathy Galvin, who’s running for the House of Delegates, instead—means there could be no remaining councilors on the dais who called the shots during the Summer of Hate. Is Charlottesville turning over a new leaf?
Tensions ran high at Charlottesville City Council meetings in the aftermath of August 12, 2017. Photo: Eze Amos
I had lived in Charlottesville for 10 years almost to the day before I saw the inside of City Council chambers. I’d paid my gas bill in person once or twice. I think I bought a trash sticker in 2012. But I’d never even been upstairs at City Hall before. If you’d asked me at any point between August 2007 and August 2017, I would not have been able to tell you the mayor’s name.
I’m not sure what I was looking for when I squeezed into the packed chambers that night in August. I didn’t understand how Unite the Right had been allowed to happen to us. I didn’t know how our local government worked, but I needed to know what had gone wrong because surely something had. Things were out of control—cops were dragging people from the room, white supremacists were showing up at public comment. Even without any understanding of municipal government, this was noteworthy content, and like any millennial, I took to social media to tell my friends. And, unexpectedly, people seemed to enjoy reading what amounted to meeting minutes. I have tweeted out a blow-by-blow, real-time account of every City Council meeting since December 2017.
I started attending city government meetings for myself, because I had questions I couldn’t answer. What I found was not a simple explanation. Slowly, the meetings became about the mundane business of governing a city again, and it was clear the violence of the summer of 2017 was a symptom of a disease we have had for a long time—a nasty flare-up of a chronic illness. There is white supremacy deeply entrenched in the most boring parts of our government. We think of that violence as the Nazis who marched in our streets, but that was just the ugly cold sore caused by the virus that reproduces quietly in decisions about school district boundaries and funding allocations and building permits.
As the meetings became less about the spectacle, I was fascinated by the process of government. Decisions made in council chambers are based on decisions made in still more meetings—boards and commissions and work sessions. I was between jobs with time to kill, so I went to another meeting, then another. I realized the real work of governing was happening in open meetings that were open in name only—they were sparsely attended and lightly reported on.
The reporter is, typically, not part of the story. The news should be dispassionate. But we have no dearth of sterile, detached coverage of the events affecting our daily lives. What I’ve found is that we need more than that. Entirely accidentally, I discovered there is a real desire for news with an audience surrogate. For as intimately as it affects our lives, government can be opaque and inaccessible. We want the facts, but the lack of any emotional context makes them hard to grasp. In my coverage of city meetings, I am not just accountable to this community, I am a part of it. I don’t hide my frustration, my sadness, or even my boredom during long hearings on easements or alleyways.
Charlottesville as a community is uniquely civically engaged, but civic engagement is time consuming. Some board meetings are held in the middle of the day, some are held inside the jail, and City Council meetings can last until one in the morning. I never intended for my strange hobby to become a public service, but the combination of having the time and tenacity to sit through dozens of hours of meetings per week and no editorial board asking me to tone down the emotional intensity of my coverage has created a unique public record that I am still shocked to find so many people rely on for their city government news. With this column, my hope is to bring you not just a bi-monthly update about what happened in some dry public meeting you missed, but to make the business of these meetings more relatable, more accessible to you, my neighbors.
My personal style of intensely emotional, tonally conversational coverage cannot and should not replace traditional reporting from our local mainstream press. Those reporters provide an invaluable service. While my coverage may be less comprehensive, I see these forms of media as complementary. Providing people with bite-sized, digestible, relatable coverage makes broader engagement possible. I’ll sit through a full day city budget work session, a six-hour City Council meeting, and days of motions on that statue lawsuit so you don’t have to–although I’d be happy to save you a seat.
Follow Molly Conger’s real-time coverage of city meetings on Twitter @socialistdogmom
Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Frank Earnest is unwavering in his belief that the Civil War was not about slavery, and the statues of generals Lee and Jackson honor defenders of the state. Photo: Timothy C. Wright
Before August 12, 2017, many people thought of America’s Confederate statues as harmless pieces of history—if they thought of them at all. Then the hate groups came to Charlottesville, ostensibly to protest the monuments’ removal. The violent clashes that led to the death of Heather Heyer and the injury of dozens, and the sight of Confederate flags waving alongside Nazi flags, brought new urgency to the conversation about the meaning of Confederate symbols.
Cities like Baltimore and New Orleans quietly sent their monuments packing. Descendants of General Robert E. Lee and General Stonewall Jackson have said statues of their ancestors have become tributes to white supremacy and need to go. And many brought up the words of Lee himself, who was opposed to memorializing the Confederacy after the war was over.
But one group of citizens remains unconvinced—the 13 plaintiffs in the lawsuit known as Monument Fund v. Charlottesville.
The people and organizations suing to stop the city from moving its Confederate statues straddle a spectrum that ranges from First Families of Virginia to a heritage organization that has members who were here August 12 with a secessionist, neo-Confederate gang.
“You’ve got the bow tie, upscale people tied to the League of the South people who want to secede and are slavery apologists,” says activist and UVA professor Jalane Schmidt.
Three years ago, some City Council members and local activists raised the idea of removing the Confederate statues from downtown. The city appointed a community commission that spent months examining the issue and ultimately presented City Council with two options to consider: relocating the statues to McIntire Park or re-contextualizing them by transforming the existing sites. In February 2017, City Council voted 3-2 to remove the Lee statue, and in April voted to sell it.
Then came August 12. Following the trauma that made Charlottesville a national hashtag, former “no” votes Mike Signer and Kathy Galvin joined Wes Bellamy, Kristin Szakos, and Bob Fenwick in saying that both the Lee and Jackson statues should go.
And that’s the issue in the lawsuit: whether councilors violated Virginia state law, which forbids the removal of war memorials, when they voted to send the Confederate generals on their way.
The lawsuit is approaching its second anniversary March 20. It’s scheduled to be in court March 11, but plaintiff spokesman Buddy Weber is dubious that it will go to trial then because Jones Day, one of the largest law firms in the world, is representing four of the five councilors and has asked for a jury trial.
In the two years the case has been active, Judge Rick Moore has ruled that the councilors do not have immunity and are personally liable for voting to remove the monuments.
In January, Delegate David Toscano carried a bill to allow localities to decide for themselves whether they want Confederate statues in their midst. The bill was killed in subcommittee.
While much has been written about—and much blame thrown at—those who first raised the idea of removing Confederate monuments from the center of town, very little attention has been paid to those still fighting the city’s decision. C-VILLE reached out to the plaintiffs to find out why they joined the suit and whether anything had changed for them since 2017.
Here’s what we found out:
Edward Dickinson Tayloe II
Tayloe, 76, comes from a First Family of Virginia that was one of the largest slave-owning dynasties in Virginia. His ancestor, John Tayloe II, called “one of the richest men of his day,” built Mount Airy plantation in Warsaw.
John Tayloe III, ancestor of lawsuit plaintiff Edward Dickinson Tayloe II, was one of the wealthiest men of his generation and “bred horses and slaves,” says the New York Times review of Richard Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations.
Tayloe’s great-great-grandfather, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, invested in his brother Henry’s plan to start a cotton plantation in the Black Belt of Alabama in 1835, according to Richard Dunn’s 2015 book, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia.
An 1807 ban on importing slaves had opened the domestic slave trade for Virginia and other coastal states. The Tayloes had a surplus of enslaved laborers at their Mount Airy plantation and they sent them to the Deep South.
In 1838, the Tayloe brothers forced 57 slaves to walk 800 miles to Alabama, where most were sold. It was “the cruelest act that I have found recorded in the Tayloe papers,” writes Dunn.
Benjamin Ogle Tayloe continued to send rebellious slaves to Alabama as a warning to remaining slaves, says Dunn.
Between 1833 and 1854, the Tayloes marched 120 enslaved people to Alabama, and another 98 were sent during the Civil War, says Dunn. The domestic migration of enslaved people separated families, made Virginia a major slave exporter, and further enriched the Tayloes.
Plaintiff Tayloe’s father, Edward Thornton Tayloe IV, was vice-chair of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority when the decision was made to raze theAfrican American community of Vinegar Hill over the objections of its residents, many of whom were unable to vote on the issue because of a poll tax.
And the plaintiff, a portfolio manager, was past president of the Lee-Jackson Foundation, which has an endowment of nearly $4 million, according to 2014 IRS filings, and awards scholarships to students who write essays examining the legacies of the Confederate generals.
According to the lawsuit, Tayloe saw combat during the Vietnam War and served in Special Forces, and has a “special interest in the protection and preservation of war memorials in the city.” The Lee-Jackson Foundation contributed money in 1997 to the restoration of the Lee and Jackson statues, says the suit.
A woman answering the phone at the Tayloe residence referred a reporter to spokesperson Weber.
The plaintiff’s cousin, Tayloe Emery, who lives at Mount Airy plantation and who used to work at C-VILLE Weekly, bristles at a reporter’s inquiry about whether family members share his uncle’s enthusiasm for Confederate monuments. He writes in an email, “It’s a shame that our family name is being dragged around by the media and that reporters have the audacity to ask me stupid questions, like ‘do all of your family support Confederate monuments?’
“The answer is of course, no. The vast majority of my Virginia family are against Confederate monuments and anything that pays lip service to white nationalism in any way, shape, or form. Though many of us do in fact disagree with this lawsuit, we still support family members who may think differently on the subject and we hope that through continued conversation that they might see things from a different perspective and understand the bitter feelings and abhorrent racism associated with Confederate monuments.”
Says Schmidt, “For generations this family has been roiling the lives of black people, and this is what [plaintiff Tayloe] chooses to pursue.”
Anthony Griffin
Britton Franklin Earnest
Virginia Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans
Smithfield resident Tony Griffin, 57, is a Sons of Confederate Veterans “commander,” and Frank Earnest, who lives in Virginia Beach, holds the title “heritage defense coordinator.”
Earnest, 63, has been representing the Sons for almost 30 years, he says. “We are the bloodline descendants of the Confederate Army,” and when people start “mudslinging” about the Confederacy, they’re “talking about my great-great-grandfather.”
The Sons of Confederate Veterans contributed money to the 1997 restoration of the Lee and Jackson statues, and to the litigation, according to the lawsuit. “We don’t want to see monuments to defending our state removed,” says Earnest.
Earnest was in town August 11, 2017, for a Katie Couric interview and then got the heck out of Dodge. “It’s pretty bad when you know a riot is coming,” he says.
But the violence and open white nationalism of the Unite the Right rally have not changed Earnest’s mind about Confederate monuments. “Absolutely not,” he says. “It’s not something that comes or goes. They honor our ancestors.”
And he maintains the SCV has nothing to do with the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups that showed up here, adding that it advised its members to stay away. “We have always denounced racist groups over our hundred-year history,” he says. “We have nothing to do with those people.”
Yet some Sons of Confederate Veterans members were here and hold dual affiliations with League of the South, which describes itself as a “Southern nationalist organization.” Its website honors John Wilkes Booth for his service “to the South and humanity.”
“We’re an organization of thousands,” says Earnest when asked about brothers George and Gregory Randall. He believes they’re still SCV members. “I don’t think we determined anyone in SCV did anything that rose to the level of complete expulsion.”
And, he says, Sons of Confederate Veterans are “in no way associated” with League of the South.
Sons of Confederate Veterans member George Randall carries the flag of neo-Confederate League of the South at Unite the Right. Photo: Rodney Dunning
Gregory Randall, who portrays General Stonewall Jackson in Civil War reenactments, and his twin George were in Charlottesville August 12 with League of the South.
George Randall, who lives near Fredericksburg, says he keeps his memberships separate and describes Sons of Confederate Veterans as a “historical” group while League of the South is “more political.”
Of the latter, he explains, “We’re secessionists.” He cites his ancestors and the Lost Cause narrative in objecting to Confederate monument removal. “We were invaded.” And he insists, “The war had nothing to do with slavery.”
He also blames Wes Bellamy for the whole monument mess, and says Bellamy is a “black supremacist.”
Says Randall, “I’m tired of everything being about race, race, race.” He objects to being called a white supremacist for wanting to “protect our culture. If you stand up for your people, you’re a Nazi or racist. It has nothing to do with hate.”
Randall was here for a lawsuit hearing in 2017 to provide security for an unnamed person, he says, but did not seem keen on returning for the upcoming court date because the last time he was here, his tires were slashed.
“I think Charlottesville sucks,” he says, denouncing “anarchist communists” and “antifa” whom he says threw urine and feces at him and his League of the South colleagues August 12. Says Randall, “You can’t wear a MAGA hat. I think it’s a crying shame.”
“Did we have a couple of rogue members in Charlottesville?” queries Earnest. “Probably, but we told them not to come.”
Is there a perception that the Sons of Confederate Veterans is a racist organization? “How much more prejudiced and bigoted can you be to ask that?” says Earnest, who has had a lot of experience talking to the press, not all of it to his satisfaction.
For instance, he was not pleased with a November 28 Washington Post story about him titled “Sins of the Fathers: The Confederacy was built on slavery. How can so many Southern whites believe otherwise?”
“I was very disappointed,” he says.
Charles L. Weber Jr.
Buddy Weber was in the U.S. Navy for 27 years, serving as a combat pilot before getting his law degree from UVA in 1998. He was chair of the city GOP, and in 2013, he ran for City Council with former city cop Mike Farruggio.
Attorney and Vietnam War vet Buddy Weber worries that if memorials to unpopular wars can be removed, Vietnam War monuments could be next. Photo: Elli Williams
Weber, 73, initially was appointed defense attorney for Heather Heyer’s murderer, James Fields, but cited his role in the lawsuit as a conflict of interest.
He says he signed on as a plaintiff for two reasons. As a lawyer and firm believer in the rule of law, “it’s my earnest belief City Council had violated the law, whether you believe the statues should stay or go,” he says.
And as a veteran of the “very unpopular” Vietnam War, he worries that those memorials could be next, negating the sacrifice citizens made of life and limb to defend this country. Virginia state law “protects these memorials from the shifting tide of public opinion,” he says.
If the General Assembly decides to change that, it can, he says, but he thinks Toscano’s bill to allow localities to make their own decisions about Confederate monuments is “a cop out.”
Weber also distances himself from those who showed up to support the Confederate monuments in 2017, taking the battle to court instead. “We do it without lighting tiki torches,” he says. “I don’t personally feel tarred because we have no association with them.”
Lloyd Smith
The founding partner of law firm Tremblay and Smith and a founder of Guaranty Bank and Virginia Broadcasting, the parent company of today’s NBC29, died last summer at age 85.
From 1997 through 1999, the former Marine represented a private group of citizens who raised money to restore the Lee and Jackson statues. That was a major reason he signed onto the lawsuit, says his son, Garrett Smith.
“The city agreed to maintain the statues in perpetuity,” he says, adding that his father always felt that when he represented people as clients, he continued to represent them.
Lloyd Smith “had a great love of history” and would visit Civil War battle sites, says Garrett Smith. “He believed the facts of the Civil War and the oppression of enslaved people was a history that needed to be told and understood.”
According to Smith, when Weber and attorney Fred Payne were helping to organize the lawsuit, they knew his father as “a Democrat and he represented a different group. He wasn’t a hardcore conservative Republican.”
He says his father was saddened by the events of August 2017, but Garrett Smith doesn’t think that changedhis father’s mind about the statues. “The city had become a flashpoint for a larger national debate.”
Frederick W. Payne
Attorney Fred Payne declined to comment for this story. In the first court hearing on the case May 2, 2017, Payne testified as an expert on Civil War uniforms because he “grew up with Confederate insignias since he was 10 years old.”
Fred Payne, an attorney and lawsuit plaintiff, has testified as an expert on Civil War uniforms. Staff photo.
The founder of Payne and Hodous in 1992, he serves as county attorney for Fluvanna, and was deputy county attorney for Albemarle from 1974 to 1987. He was also was an assistant commonwealth’s attorney for the county in 1979, according to the Payne and Hodous website.
Payne graduated magna cum laude from Yale, and got his law degree at UVA. He’s been president of the Charlottesville Albemarle Bar Association, as well as head of the city and county criminal bar association.
One of Payne’s better-known cases was his defense of widow Shirley Presley, who, in 2002, strung razor wire to block Rivanna Trail hikers from a path on her property along the river. The Rivanna Trail Foundation neglected to get her permission or an easement for that portion of the trail. A judge ruled in Presley’s favor on a code violation, and she settled her $1.5 million lawsuit against the city and foundation in 2008.
John Bosley Yellott Jr.
The Monument Fund
Jock Yellott is the fourth plaintiff in the lawsuit who’s an attorney. He’s also executive director of the Monument Fund, a nonprofit formed in October 2016 to help fund the statues’ defense. In 2017, it raised nearly $119,000, according to its IRS 990 form.
Because of his fundraising, Yellott, 64, has a financial interest in the outcome of the suit, and he conducts history tours describing the monuments, according to the complaint. He testified that he walks his dog through Market Street or Court Square parks daily. He did not return C-VILLE’s call.
Betty Jane Franklin Phillips
Phillips, 82, is described in court documents as a collateral descendant of Paul Goodloe McIntire, who donated the controversial statues and the once-segregated parks they inhabit, along with a number of other monuments, parks, and buildings around town. The Keswick resident is a Lane High School graduate. She did not respond to phone messages from C-VILLE.
Edward Bergen Fry
Ned Fry, 31, is the youngest of the plaintiffs. His great uncle Henry Shrady was the sculptor McIntire hired to create the Lee statue, and Shrady also did the Ulysses S. Grant statue in Washington near the Capitol.
Fry is himself a sculptor and graduated with a degree in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University. The CHS grad did not get back to us to discuss further his participation in the lawsuit, but at a 2016 Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces hearing, he said he was in favor of keeping the statues because, “They are historical works of art and, more importantly, because Henry Shrady is my great-great-great uncle.”
Virginia C. Amiss
The 94-year-old plaintiff remembers riding the trolley from downtown to the Rotunda when she was 7 years old to take violin lessons, and that’s when she decided she wanted to study nursing at UVA, she wrote to Virginia magazine in 2010. She graduated in 1946, and worked at UVA and in Houston, as an operating room supervisor.
Amiss had had dental surgery and didn’t feel up to talking when C-VILLE reached her, and she did not respond a follow-up call.
While she is suing to keep the Confederate statues, she was not a fan of other sculptures installed around town by the city’s Art in Place program, a nonprofit dedicated to public art. In 2005, she asked City Council to eliminate the $5,000 it gave to the program. As Cvilleindymedia.org reported, “At the last meeting, her immortal words rang out: ‘Rearranged junk is still junk.’”
On Facebook, she supports prayer in school—and in the White House.
And through marriage, Amiss is related to Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler. According to Ancestry.com and U.S. Census records, her husband, Lester “Randy” Amiss was first cousin to Kessler’s great-grandfather, LaSalle Norvell.
Stefanie Marshall
Albemarle resident Marshall is chair of the Monument Fund and has “personally expended money and effort in cleaning graffiti from the Lee monument in 2011 and 2015,” says the complaint.
She and her husband own construction company M3, which specializes in masonry. The company supports the Fraternal Order of Police, Live Arts, The Paramount Theater, Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society and various local charitable organizations, according to its website.
The lawsuit is not the first time the county resident has had a problem with city government. In 2016, she took issue with City Council’s decision to honor Khizr and Ghazala Khan, and told council: “It seems to me that in order for a Gold Star family to be honored and recognized by the current City Council, they must speak at the Democratic National Convention. This is not appropriate, nor is it acceptable. It reeks of choosing to honor specific families or individuals because they fit your narrative.”
Marshall, 52, did not respond to a message from C-VILLE.
Correction March 7: Tayloe Emery is a cousin, not nephew of Edward Tayloe, and this Stefanie Marshall did not graduate from Albemarle High.
Jason Kessler claimed Phoebe Stevens assaulted him when she wrapped her arms around him to protect him from an angry mob at his August 13, 2017, press conference. Photo by Eze Amos
Phoebe Stevens is a pacifist.
She says that’s why she wrapped her arms around Jason Kessler at his August 13, 2017, press conference as a crowd of angry protesters closed in on him. But after she knocked him down in the chaos, he accused her of assault and battery—a charge she was convicted of in Charlottesville General District Court a year ago.
Stevens appealed the conviction, and was scheduled to go to trial on February 14. Before a jury was seated, however, her defense team and the prosecutor reached a special agreement: If Stevens apologized, agreed to do 100 hours of community service, and stayed on good behavior for six months, her charge would be dismissed.
That’s when her attorney, Jay Galloway, walked her over to Kessler, who was seated in the front row of the nearly empty courtroom.
“I apologize for putting my arms around you,” Stevens said, to which Kessler harshly responded, “What about [tackling] me, do you apologize for that?”
During the Unite the Right rally, Stevens could be found using her body to shield counterprotesters and white supremacists alike, and in recordings of the alleged tackle, she can also be heard saying, “We love you, Jason.”
“I apologize for making you feel like you were tackled,” she then told Kessler in the courtroom.
“That’s not a real apology,” he replied.
At that point, Galloway said Stevens was not going to engage any further. A few feet outside the courthouse, in her lawyer’s Park Street office, Stevens gave a brief interview, in which she noted it was Valentine’s Day.
“It’s not missed by me that my date today was Jason Kessler,” she said.
Over the past year and a half, Stevens said she’s heard many opinions on her choice to embrace the man who brought hundreds of white supremacists to town for an event that ended in countless injuries and three deaths.
“We’re all human,” Stevens said. “I know the crowd would not have agreed with me, and my visceral self would have battled me on that, too. [But] when we step back, there’s a human there.”
She says she has forgiven Kessler for accusing her of assaulting him and for his behavior during her apology.
“He is incredibly clouded in his understanding of the world and how to remedy this situation,” Stevens added. “He’s a deeply disturbed individual.”
Tyler Watkins Davis. Courtesy Charlottesville Police Department
Tyler Watkins Davis entered an Alford plea February 8, and though it’s technically a guilty plea, it means the man from Middleburg, Florida, is not admitting guilt, but acknowledging that prosecutors have enough evidence to convict him of malicious wounding in the brutal parking garage assault of DeAndre Harris.
Defense attorney Matthew Engle said his 50-year-old client doesn’t challenge the fact that he bashed Harris in the head with a wooden tire thumper, which caused severe trauma and required eight stitches, but he does dispute that it was done with malicious intent.
If the case went to trial, Engle said he would have argued that Davis perceived a threat outside the Market Street Parking Garage and was acting in self defense when he clobbered Harris—and that he did not intend to maim, disfigure, or kill Harris, which is required to meet the standard of actual malice.
Judge Rick Moore has often referred to the racially-charged beating as the worst he’s ever seen, but unlike the other men who participated, Engle noted that Davis only hit Harris once, and backed off when the others piled on.
When participants Jacob Goodwin and Alex Ramos went to trial for their roles in the attack, they were sentenced to eight and six years, respectively. Daniel Borden, who pleaded guilty, was given a lesser sentence of three years and 10 months in January. Davis faces a maximum sentence of 20 years, and will be sentenced in August.
Davis wasn’t caught until months after the others—and he may have Goodwin’s lawyer to thank for his arrest. At one of Goodwin’s hearings, attorney Elmer Woodard played a video of the assault, and asked why police had not arrested Davis, the then-unknown man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, whom Woodard dubbed “Boonie Hat” as he continually referred to Davis’ role in the beating. It wasn’t long after that that Davis was in cuffs.
Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Nina Antony said the two other men who can also be seen attacking Harris in the viral video have not yet been identified.
City Councilor Wes Bellamy spoke candidly about Confederate statues, the controversy over his old tweets, and the effect his career has had on his family. Photo by Mina Pirasteh
By Jonathan Haynes
City Councilor Wes Bellamy sat down for a revelatory interview at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center January 10 to promote his new book, Monumental: It Was Never About a Statue.
The title alludes to the former vice-mayor’s push to remove Confederate monuments from Charlottesville parks, and the racist backlash it inspired, which culminated in the August 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally. “If it’s just about the statues, people aren’t going to kill you,” he said. “People don’t drive a car into a group of people over the removal of a statue.”
Andrea Copeland-Whitsett, director of member education services for the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, conducted the interview. She began by addressing the derogatory remarks Bellamy had tweeted about women, white people, and the LGBTQ community between 2009 and 2014, and the outrage that erupted when the tweets resurfaced in November 2016.
Bellamy called the tweets “something evil-inspired,” and described his personal experience of the scandal for the first time. He was spending Thanksgiving in Atlanta with his wife when he got a call from a blocked number. According to Bellamy, the voice said, “Hey n—-r, we’re going to break you down. This is Trump’s country now.” Then he received another call from his office letting him know that his old tweets had been sent to City Council and local press.
He could hardly believe they were from his account. “I was so far past that [kind of attitude],” he said.
Come Monday, “a tsunami hit.” Friends and allies turned their backs on him. Then-governor Terry McAuliffe publicly denounced him. He was devastated. Though he remained on City Council, he resigned from his positions at Albemarle High School and on the Virginia Board of Education.
Ultimately, he said, the experience was humbling. “I used to walk around thinking I was a hero. It was a very necessary lesson to me that I am not.”
Bellamy’s tweets were dug up by Jason Kessler, who organized the Unite the Right rally the following year.
The movement to remove the city’s Confederate monuments is often presented as Bellamy’s idea. But he gives credit to Mayor Nikuyah Walker and local high school activist Zyahna Bryant, who drafted the original petition asking City Council to remove the statues and rename Lee Park.
Bryant contacted him after McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would protect Confederate monuments in March 2016. “You can remove the statue,” she told him.
He teamed up with then-councilor Kristin Szakos, who had been publicly questioning the presence of Confederate monuments, and calling on the city to end its celebration of Lee-Jackson Day.
When Bellamy and Szakos held a press conference, he began to fear for his safety. Staring down “a sea of individuals” bearing Confederate flags and shouting, “I was concerned someone was going to shoot me,” he said. Afterwards, Bellamy began receiving death threats on a daily basis, and “would hear loud beats on the back window” of his home after midnight.
It wasn’t about the statue, he said. “People believed we were going to change what was theirs, that this is their community.”
Though his tenure in office has been tumultuous, Bellamy professed an unremitting love for Charlottesville, praising local residents for coming together to confront racial inequities. There are other cities that have the same issues, he said, “but we’re really willing to talk about it.”
He wore a construction helmet that said “commie killer” as he joined in on a brutal beating in a downtown parking garage, striking the already downed DeAndre Harris with a stick until it broke as Harris struggled to pick himself up off the ground.
And though two out-of-town men already found guilty of malicious wounding for participating in the same beating have been sentenced to eight and six years in prison, this one—Daniel Borden, the Ohioan who was 18 years old when he hitched a ride to Charlottesville for the August 12 white supremacist rally—will only serve three years and 10 months.
“I absolutely don’t think my son did anything wrong,” testified his father, retired U.S. Air Force pilot Rick Borden, about the younger Borden’s involvement in what Judge Rick Moore has repeatedly referred to as “one of the worst beatings I’ve ever seen.”
The father, who started his testimony by saying he’d done “quite a bit of comprehensive investigation on this,” told the judge his son was separated from his friends when police declared an unlawful assembly and ordered everyone to leave what was then called Emancipation Park.
Borden joined another group of alt-righters and began making his way toward the Market Street Parking Garage. He picked up the stick along the way for protection, according to his dad.
“I’m not sure that I would have walked out of that park with anything other than an M1 Abrams tank,” said the father. He laughed at the mention of the “commie killer” hardhat, and said it was a reference to the film Full Metal Jacket.
“Back in the day, when I was a B-52 pilot, the Soviets were our mortal enemy,” he added.
A visibly frustrated defense attorney Mike Hallahan told the judge he was “on edge” as he questioned the elder Borden.
Judge Moore then called for a recess. As Borden’s father stood and left the witness stand for the break, he passed this reporter, who was seated in a back row. Making eye contact, he made an aggressive gesture somewhere in between starting a lawnmower and ripping apart a newspaper.
Returning to the stand, in an unusually tangential testimony, the father ranted about other aspects of August 12, including that Harris was allegedly seen throwing bottles of soda that day, and about how “antifa personnel” apparently specialize in “gang beatdowns.”
Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania noted that a lot of the testimony seemed irrelevant, but that he wasn’t objecting. “I think Mr. Borden has a lot he wants to get off his chest,” he said.
And Hallahan argued that everything is relevant.
“Everything is not relevant,” said Moore. “I’m not going to let this sentencing hearing be made about something else.”
Getting back on track, Borden’s father said his son had “tunnel vision” or “target fixation” during the attack. Said the elder Borden, “Dan has no recollection of anybody even around him. He was that full of fear and anxiety.”
But in a video taken after the parking garage beating, Platania said Borden appeared “gleeful,” and that he could be heard saying, “Fuck Antifa. Fuck communism. They got their ass kicked multiple times.”
Prosecutor Nina Antony noted that Borden was half a block away when he saw the beating and decided to join in.
Hallahan, who argued that Borden was drawn to the parking garage because one of the alt-righters was also being beaten in a separate fight, asked the judge to “take out all the drama” and “take out all the politics,” to see that this case is just about a “guy in the parking lot hitting somebody with a stick.”
And the defense attorney said that from the sounds of the video, Borden likely missed Harris with at least one of his swings.
“I don’t think that matters,” said the judge. “He kept swinging because he hadn’t done what he needed to do.”
The defendant’s mother, Kelly Borden, said she didn’t know her son had gone to Virginia for the Unite the Right rally until a friend sent her an article by civil rights activist and independent journalist Shaun King, which identified Borden as one of the men who assaulted Harris. She testified it was “fake news.”
Though Borden faced a max of 20 years in prison, the sentencing guidelines presented to the court that day suggested a year and six months on the low end and four years and two months on the high end.
His attorney recommended the lowest: “Get him out of this community. Charlottesville didn’t want him here in the first place,” Hallahan said.
Antony noted Borden’s young age, lack of criminal history, and voluntary guilty plea, but she still asked for at least the highest sentencing recommendation. She also said she was trying not to let Borden’s parents’ testimony sway her to ask for more time.
Moments before the judge pronounced the nearly four-year sentence, with 20 years of good behavior, and five years of supervised probation after release, Borden gave his own statement—one that seemed more remorseful than his parents’.
He said he cried in his dad’s kitchen when the photos of him on August 12 surfaced on the web. He had only come to town to protest the removal of the Confederate statues, he added.
“I did not know how overwhelmingly against the statues Charlottesville was,” he said. “If I did, I would have thought twice about coming.”
Though Harris wasn’t present in the courtroom, Borden had a message for him: “You didn’t deserve that.” He gave the prosecutor a personal letter that he wanted Harris to read.
He also apologized to Harris’ parents, his own parents, and the entire city.
Said Borden, “I’m truly sorry this has happened to your town.”
It’s past time to acknowledge that hate crimes are on the rise in Virginia, said Attorney General Mark Herring at a roundtable discussion with approximately 20 local leaders. Photo by Eze Amos
Attorney General Mark Herring has spent the past few years studying the issue of hate crimes and white supremacist violence across the commonwealth and advocating for new legislation to combat it. On December 5—coincidentally during the state’s murder trial against the neo-Nazi who drove his car into a crowd on August 12, 2017—Herring hosted a roundtable discussion on both topics in Charlottesville.
Approximately 20 local leaders representing a bevy of faith communities, cultural groups, government, and law enforcement gathered in the basement of the First Baptist Church to participate.
Herring, who sat at the head of the table in front of a Christmas tree with big red bows, kicked off his discussion with a few statistics.
“It is past time to acknowledge that hate crimes are on the rise,” he said, noting that Virginia State Police have recorded a 64 percent increase in hate crimes since 2013. There were more than 200 committed in the state last year.
Leaders at every level should condemn the hate and bigotry that “we all sense in our own communities,” he said.
And “the state needs to pair those words with actions,” he added, as he introduced multiple bills already on the agenda for next year’s General Assembly session. Last year, he pushed two similar bills, including one that would punish white supremacists as domestic terrorists, but the Republican-led Committee for Courts of Justice declined to hear it.
One of the new bills would give localities the ability to ban firearms at permitted events, such as the 2017 Unite the Right rally in which paramilitary groups lined the streets of Charlottesville with semi-automatic rifles swung over their shoulders.
But that legislation, if passed, still won’t satisfy some local leaders.
“It’s not the permitted event. It’s the every day,” said Charlottesville Police Chief RaShallBrackney, who wants to be able to prohibit gunsat any time or place within the city, regardless of whether a permitted event is taking place.
She noted that at the Key Recreation Center, for instance, the city doesn’t allow its employees to carry guns, but any guest is more than welcome to come in packing heat. Brackney then called Virginia a “very strong Second Amendment state.”
“I believe people’s minds are changing,” countered Herring. He promised the chief, “We’ll keep working on it.”
At this roundtable, and at three he previously held across the state, he asked participants to give examples of hate crimes that they or other folks in their communities have experienced.
“This year, we have just been flooded,” said Janette Martin, president of the Albemarle-Charlottesville NAACP. She gave an example of a woman who keeps calling the police on her black neighbor for seemingly no reason. “It’s obvious what her motive is,” she added.
Rachel Schmelkin, the rabbi educator at Congregation Beth Israel, said their congregation has faced several anti-Semitic incidents over the past few years. She described an alert the synagogue received on August 12, 2017, in which white supremacists had sent out a message that said, “Let’s go toward those Jewish monsters at 3pm.”
Just a few weeks ago, on the anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass—when Nazis in Germany orchestrated a massive attack against Jews on November 9, 1938—Schmelkin said someone drew swastikas on a shop near the synagogue. At 8:30pm, she and her husband went to CBI to “check every inch of the building” to make sure they hadn’t gotten the same treatment.
“We have to bear the burden of that,” she said, and added that Deacon Don Gathers also walks around the synagogue late some Saturday nights just to check on it.
After the October mass shooting of 11 worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Schmelkin said she wanted to debrief with the high school students who attend CBI.
“They were all really quiet,” she told Herring. “A number of them said they were relieved because they expected it would have happened here. I think that’s indicative of how unsettled our children have felt since August 12.”
Schmelkin said they now have security outside the synagogue, “almost 24/7.”
At the local mosque, Islamic Center of Central Virginia outreach secretary Noor Khalidi said law enforcement is also present for major events, such as Friday night prayer sessions.
They haven’t received any threats. “We’re sort of holding our breath, though,” she said.
After meditating on that comment for a moment, Herring said, “No one in our commonwealth or our country should feel that way.”
What’s on the table
When Attorney General Mark Herring stopped by Charlottesville last week to talk about local hate crimes and white supremacist violence, he also wanted to offer details on five upcoming bills that address those topics. This is what they hope to accomplish.
Update Virginia’s definition of “hate crime” to include crimes committed on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability
Allow the attorney general to prosecute hate crimes through a network of multi-jurisdictional grand juries, instead of at the local level
Prohibit paramilitary activity
Give law enforcement better tools to identify and intervene in the actions of violent white supremacist and hate groups, making it harder for the groups to operate
Close the loophole that allows people convicted of hate crimes the right to possess a gun
Many thought James Fields’ mental health would be used as a defense during his murder trial– but surprisingly, it never came up.
Instead, jurors learned about his troubled state of mind during the December 10 sentencing hearing, after he’d been found guilty of murdering Heather Heyer and injuring many others at the Unite the Right rally.
Attorney Denise Lunsford called on a UVA psychologist who evaluated Fields, and who noted the now-convicted murderer’s lifetime of “explosive” and “volatile” behavior.
UVA’s Daniel Murrie, an expert in forensic psychology, spent approximately 14 hours with Fields over a series of five visits from October 2017 to May 2018, he said. He also interviewed Fields’ mother and reviewed “thousands of pages” of records from Fields’ previous doctors and schools.
And he learned that to family members, Fields appeared “unusual” and as having a “difficult temperament” since before he could even talk. As a baby, he often had outbursts of “volatile, unexplainable crying,” said Murrie, and similar outbursts would continue for the rest of his life.
According to school records, Fields would often exhibit these behaviors when a teacher singled him out by calling on him to answer a question or directing him to the chalkboard. His response would be to scream, run out of the room, or hide under a table.
The psychologist noted a couple of specific examples, including a time when a teacher found Fields making problematic drawings in his textbook and asked him to leave the classroom.
Fields then reportedly gave his teacher the middle finger, ran into another room, and announced, “I’m going to kill her. I’m going to butcher her up. She doesn’t deserve to live.”
These behaviors were likely caused by bipolar disorder, Murrie said. At age six, a bipolar specialist said Fields showed all signs of the illness, though formal diagnoses very rarely happen at such a young age.
By the time Fields was 10, he was hospitalized twice in a “mental hospital for children,” and four years later, he was sent to a “residential treatment facility” for many months. He’s also been assigned diagnoses for schizoid personality disorder and Asperger’s, according to Murrie.
The bipolar disorder could have been genetic. Murrie described a family history in which Fields’ father and both grandfathers had the same illness.
The psychologist also said Fields had a “gruesome” understanding from a young age of how his father was killed in a car accident before he was born. And he was also aware that his grandfather killed his grandmother and then himself.
Fields decided to join the military after high school, which required him to go off all medication. After failing a physical fitness test at boot camp, Fields moved back home with his mother, but never started taking his pills again.
Before coming to Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, Fields had just moved into his own apartment, partially because his mother feared for her safety while living with him, Murrie said. But according to his “sanity evaluation,” Fields was considered sane at the time of the incident.
After being found guilty of 10 related charges, Fields faces a minimum of 135 years in prison.
A few of his victims who testified against him during the trial read impact statements for the jury to consider when imposing a statement, including Star Peterson, Lisa Q., and Al Bowie.
Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, told them, “I don’t hate Mr. Fields. I’m leaving him in the hands of justice.”
The prosecution and defense have given their closing arguments on the ninth day of James Alex Fields Jr.’s first-degree murder trial.
The man charged with killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others when he rammed his car into a crowd at an August 12, 2017, white supremacist rally also faces being convicted of five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding, and one count of hit and run.
Prosecutor Nina Antony encouraged the jury to find him guilty on all 10 counts, which would mean they believe he acted with malice, and that his actions that day were premeditated and intentional.
“It’s not about what Mr. Fields did, it’s about what his intent was when he did it,” said Antony during her closing.
Narrating for a final time what happened in videos that the jurors have likely memorized over the past two weeks, Antony said Fields turned onto Fourth Street, where two cars and a group of activists were in front of him, and where nothing but empty road was behind him. He briefly stopped his Dodge Challenger and then started reversing. He could have continued backing up to get off of Fourth Street if that’s what he truly desired, she said, but instead he stopped, idled, and then “something change[d] for him.” That’s when he raced his car forward into the crowd.
Months before, he had posted to Instagram an eerily similar image of a car plowing into a group of protesters.
“He seizes that opportunity to make his Instagram post a reality,” said Antony.
Though the defense’s witnesses testified that Fields was essentially calm, cool, and collected minutes before he sped into the group, Antony said it was in that moment of idling that his demeanor changed. She said he then showed the same “hatred” he previously displayed in text conversations with his mom, in which she asked him to be careful at the Unite the Right rally, and to which he replied with an image of Adolf Hitler accompanied by a message that said, “We’re not the [ones] who need to be careful.”
And though he was immediately apologetic to the police officers who took him into custody after two brief pursuits, Antony said he showed his true colors in two recorded jailhouse conversations between he and his mom months later, in which—among other things—he said, “it doesn’t fucking matter” that Heyer died, and called her mother, Susan Bro, a “communist” and “the enemy.”
This case is about more than differing political ideologies, however.
“It’s about those bodies that he left strewn on the ground,” Antony said. “It’s about Heather.”
In the defense’s closing arguments, attorney Denise Lunsford noted the “crowd mentality” of the protesters and counterprotesters attending the Unite the Right rally.
“A lot of people were behaving badly that day,” she said. “That’s just about as simple as you can put it.”
Though numerous witnesses described the band of activists that Fields sped into as happy, cheerful, and celebratory, Lunsford told the jury, “The difference between a joyful crowd and a hostile mob is in the eye of the beholder.”
She said Fields thought he was being attacked from behind when he plowed into them, which is what he told the magistrate after being taken to jail that day.
“We know there is no one behind him,” again countered Antony. Photos, videos, and witness testimony corroborate that, she said.
Lunsford asked the jury to put themselves in Fields’ shoes. He was 20 years old at the time, overwhelmed by all that happened that day, and as indicated by the directions he had just typed into his GPS, he was just trying to go home to Maumee, Ohio. He’d been spattered with urine earlier in the day and had exchanged choice words with people he calls “antifa.” And when, he alleged, a crowd of them started rushing his car, he thought he was in danger.
Fields didn’t stop at the scene of the crime because his glasses had been knocked onto his floorboard and he couldn’t see whether he’d injured anyone, according to Lunsford. Without his glasses, he also couldn’t see police chasing him, she added.
Antony noted that, even without his glasses, he backed up in a straight line, dodged cars, and efficiently made turns.
A photo taken of the front of the Challenger as Fields reverses away from the crowd he just ran over has been admitted into evidence. His face is visible. He stares intently.
“That is not the face of someone who is scared,” said Antony. “That is the face of anger, of hatred. That is the face of malice.”
Jurors will officially begin deliberating tomorrow at 9am.
