Process servers for Southern Poverty Law Center can't find founder of neo-Nazi website
Andrew Anglin. Photo by BFG101, via Wikimedia Commons.
Updated: Process servers hired by the Southern Poverty Law Center are looking for Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.
They have so far been unsuccessful, but it wasn’t for lack of trying, the New York Times reports. Process servers have spoken with his brother, visited his father’s counseling office, driven to his sister’s church and staked out an apartment affiliated with him. Papers sent through certified and regular mail have been returned as undeliverable.
The next step will be to publish a notice in a local newspaper, according to David Dinielli, an SPLC lawyer. “The circumstances in which these steps are normally taken is someone owed $7,000 on their credit card bill,” Dinielli told the Times. “This is not what happens in nationally prominent civil rights litigation.”
The SPLC lawsuit claims Anglin unleashed a “troll storm” against a Jewish real estate agent by publishing articles about her, along with her contact information, and by telling readers to take action against her, according to prior New York Times coverage.
The Montana real estate agent, Tanya Gersh, had asked the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer to disavow her son. She also offered to sell a building owned by the woman.
It’s not the only suit against Anglin, according to the Times. Two women injured in the Charlottesville protest sued Anglin and other organizers, while another suit filed by a SiriusXM radio host says he was falsely accused of being the mastermind behind a terrorist bombing, according to a previous New York Times story.
Anglin’s lawyer, Marc Randazza, told the Times that his client should be easy to find and no one had looked hard enough. Randazza, a First Amendment advocate, says the stories were protected speech.
“There’s this belief among the modern left that free speech is for me but not for thee,” he told the Times.
Anglin told the Times in an email that he only deals with serious reporters and used an anti-Semitic epithet to describe the newspaper.
Updated at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 22 to remove extra punctuation in third paragraph.
