Attorneys for both sides in a lawsuit brought by a Montana Jewish woman against a neo-Nazi website publisher have asked a judge to decide whether the publisher had a First Amendment right to unleash an online "troll storm" of anti-Semitic messages and threats against the woman's family.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch heard arguments in Missoula on whether to dismiss a lawsuit by Tanya Gersh, a real-estate agent from the mountain resort community of Whitefish, against The Daily Stormer publisher Andrew Anglin.
Lynch did not indicate how soon he would rule, said Marc Randazza, one of Anglin's attorneys.
"It was clear that he's been thinking very deeply about the constitutional issues," Randazza said in a text message Tuesday.
Lynch previously ruled against Anglin's argument to dismiss Gersh's claims of emotional distress, intimidation and invasion of privacy on the grounds that Anglin is "not a citizen of any state" and has been living abroad for years.
But the judge wanted to hear from attorneys on both sides before he rules on another key argument in Anglin's motion to dismiss: that the neo-Nazi publisher was engaged in political speech protected under the First Amendment.
Gersh sued Anglin last year after he published a post in 2016 calling for an "old-fashioned troll storm" and providing the personal information of Gersh and others whom Anglin accused of "extorting" the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Gersh said she had agreed to help Spencer's mother, Sherry, sell property she owned in Whitefish. The mother accused Gersh of threatening and harassing her into agreeing to sell the property.
Gersh said in her lawsuit that Anglin had launched an anti-Semitic "campaign of terror" that bombarded her and her family with hateful messages from anonymous internet trolls who follow Anglin.
One of the messages was just a recording of gunshots. Another message was directed to Gersh's 12-year-old son, telling him to look inside an oven for a free video game console –a reference to the Nazi killings of Jews during the Holocaust.
In a court document laying out their arguments, Anglin's attorneys said Anglin had only invited his readers to protest Gersh's actions. The attorneys, Randazza and Jay Wolman, also said Anglin was not liable for his followers' actions and that the personal information he published was publicly available.
The messages Gersh received were "mean-spirited, nasty, brutish and uncalled for," but were also political hyperbole and not a true threat, the attorneys wrote.
"If we are to reject speech because it comes from an unorthodox group, we do violence to the very underpinnings of our notions of liberty," they wrote.
However, attorneys for Gersh, who is being represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in response that the First Amendment's free-speech protections do not include a coordinated attack through private communications meant to cause substantial emotional harm.
Anglin was not speaking on any broad public issues, but directed his followers to terrorize Gersh personally through private means of communication, wrote attorneys David Dinielli and John Morrison.
"Severe emotional distress was not only the foreseeable consequence of his [Anglin's] troll storm but its very end, and he cannot wash his hands of it," the attorneys wrote.
In a statement released Tuesday, Dinielli said he was encouraged that the magistrate is "examining the claims of our client with such care," and that Gersh is eager for the chance to prove her claims to a jury.
