Columnist Finds Telling the Truth a Dangerous Path

Molly Conger/The Guardian

When the editor of a weekly paper approached me about writing a regular column about local politics, the first thing I asked her was: “Are you sure you know what you’d be getting yourself into?”

That was February. I’d been live-tweeting Charlottesville city government meetings for a year and a half, ever since the deadly Unite the Right rally in August 2017. Entirely by accident, I had created a fairly large audience for what amounted to municipal meeting minutes narrated by a mouthy socialist.

Though I’d never written for a publication before, my concern wasn’t whether I could produce readable content. It was whether the paper was prepared to be targeted by two primary detractors of my work: neo-liberals and neo-Nazis.

I wrote just six pieces before the column was canceled. Two centered on the need for police accountability in a city traumatized by the memory of officers standing by as neo-Nazis beat residents in the streets. 

I’m not surprised a police officer and a former prosecutor would try to weaponize the legal system to silence a critic

In a column published in May, I mentioned a photograph taken in August 2017 of an officer with his arms around James Napier, of the neo-Confederate group the Highwaymen, and Tammy Lee of the American Freedom Keepers militia. Lee’s caption read: “You should know the police escorted us and worked days with us 2b there.”

My intention was to highlight both the lack of accountability of the department as a whole for its conduct during Charlottesville’s Summer of Hate and the degree to which it had disregarded the community’s concerns about rally attendees. At no point did I allege that the individual officer had personal ties to the people with whom he was pictured.

The image of a Charlottesville officer with his arm around a member of a white supremacist militia was to me a perfect illustration of a department choosing to ignore the community it serves. It was a picture of wilful ignorance and complicity, of harm through inaction. The officer could have been any member of his department.

I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when I received a letter from the attorney for the local Southern States Police Benevolent Association, sent on behalf of the officer in the picture. One of the remarks the letter quoted and claimed to be “odious” and defamatory was taken directly from the after action report, commissioned by the city, about police conduct that summer. I have not reached out to the attorney who prepared that report. I doubt he received a similar letter.

I am surprised the paper’s owners reacted with such incredible cowardice

I read the letter. I spoke to an attorney. I spoke to another. I retained one. But I wasn’t worried. Even with my layman’s eyes, I could see right through what was clearly an empty threat. There is a certain class of citizen for whom hurt feelings are the worst form of assault and the best redress is a demand for an apology on legal letterhead. Naively, I assumed the paper was as committed to unashamed truth-telling as I was and that it too would take the letter in stride.

It did not.

I’m not surprised a police officer and a former prosecutor would try to weaponize the legal system to silence a critic. I am surprised the paper’s owners reacted with such incredible cowardice. What good is journalism that folds when confronted by those in power? How can we trust local media that allows the police union to dictate what is published about the police?

Despite the editor’s best efforts on my behalf and the absence of any followthrough on the threat of a defamation suit, the paper’s owners did not want to continue to run my column. The attorney for the police union got exactly what she wanted: the paper fired the person who wouldn’t stop publicly advocating for a strong civilian review board, a nascent body whose failure would benefit the attorney’s clients.

I have spent two years carving out a strange, precarious little niche as a local journalist. I crowdfund most of my income and spend my days attending city board and commission meetings or sitting in court. I document both the ongoing legal fallout of the day in 2017 that made my city’s name synonymous with white supremacist violence and the day-to-day banalities of the local government that created the conditions that allowed it to happen.

I get so many death threats I can catalog them by the gunmaker mentioned. I babysit to make rent. But I write for and about a community I love and believe in and to which I feel accountable. And if I had my short time with a paper byline again, I wouldn’t pull my punches.