When Neo-Nazis Attack
It's been a year since I was assaulted by Nick Fuentes and his day in court is finally coming up.
Somehow
On Tuesday, I just happened to be looking at my Facebook memories and I saw a reference to something I’d posted about that had happened a year and two days before, when I was assaulted by white supremacist and misogynist Hitler fanboy, Nicholas “Nick” Fuentes. On November 10, 2024, frankly devastated by the recent news that Donald Trump would be serving a second term, I made a spontaneous choice that has resulted in consuming a lot of my time and mental energy for the past year. It also tied my name up with Fuentes’s in the news cycle. In addition to his criminal case, which will be finally winding down next month, the past year has also meant being targeted by Fuentes’s sad Groyper Army and being served a pu pu platter of some of the internet’s most unsavory characters – misogynists, anti-Semites and all-purpose, basement-dwelling trolls – that pop out with their hate only when they can anonymously attack through unlisted numbers and fake accounts. It was like shaking out a nasty rug and having society’s worst bottom-feeders come flying back at me.
The day that set all this in motion was a beautiful autumn Sunday. I woke up that morning with no particular plans that I can recall. In context, again, this was less than a week after the election. For the previous few days, I’d been receiving messages from my friends asking me about Fuentes as he had already been doxed and it turns out, he lives in my town. Fuentes, long notorious for his hate-speech and racist rhetoric, had posted the day of the election something that was beyond the pale, even for him. With Trump elected again, he taunted, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Your body, my choice. Forever.
How would you interpret this, which Fuentes has brushed off as just trolling? (Sort of like that old chestnut that drunk people say what they’re really thinking when given a little liquid courage, trolls do the same, drunk on their ability to get a reaction.) Living in a country where The Handmaid’s Tale feels less like dystopian cautionary tale and more like a straightforward instruction manual written by the Heritage Foundation and handed to Trump, what Fuentes wrote was not only not funny, it was threatening. Those simple five words of his were a warning shot that women would no longer have personal agency over their bodies, a fervent wish acted upon by far-right, religious extremists that is becoming closer and closer to a lived reality with every day under this administration. It’s also a message for girls that they are lesser beings without autonomy whose bodies are at the disposal of someone else – for sexual gratification, for reproductive choice, for receiving abuse – whatever is deemed agreeable to the man or boy making the decisions.
There are people who say that the best thing to do with trolls is ignore them; like bullies and emotional abusers, they feed off the reaction to them. I understand that. I was a kid who was bullied and can confirm that this approach usually works eventually but it will keep accelerating until the perpetrator moves on to a more reactive subject. That said, I don’t believe that letting people say what they want without pushback is the best approach in life, especially not when real lives are at stake. How many rapists did he embolden with those words? How many girls and women did he re-traumatize, make feel voiceless or deserving of abuse? How much did his little spiking the ball in the end zone add fuel to anti-choice legislation? I don’t think any of this is quantifiable, but demeaning and degrading millions of people as being unworthy of deciding their own bodily autonomy after finally achieving some self-determination in the last part of the 20th century cannot help.
Despite this, despite being angry, Fuentes’s post was just rubbing more salt in the wound. Eventually, the wound will become numb, and that was how I felt when I saw the post. That Sunday, though, I found myself with some free time in the afternoon and, admittedly, my curiosity was piqued: Were there protestors at his home? Was there an abundance of deliveries, because people online said they were going to send him dog feces? Was it even his house? I didn’t set out to accomplish anything, but just to see if there was activity around the address that had been doxed as his home. I was curious and if there were protestors, I was going to join them.
When I arrived, it was a quiet street. There was no one there. I recorded a short video just to send to my friends who’d been asking if anything was going on at his house. It was funny. It was snarky. I thought it was over. I’d just finished recording when a car pulled up and the woman who was driving asked me out of the open window if “this was where the d-bag” lives. Something to that effect. She seemed friendly enough so I told her that I wasn’t sure. This was the address that had been connected to him but I still didn’t know if it was his. She said that I should ring the doorbell and find out.
Hmm…
Most people would have probably laughed it away but, honestly, in that moment, it didn’t sound like a bad idea. What’s the worst that could happen? I thought at the very least, I could clear up if he lived there if his name was on the mail box. Keep in mind, there were not any no trespassing/soliciting signs or a fence. I have been a reluctant canvasser in the past. I know to avoid those homes but his had nothing. I shrugged, walked up the sidewalk, hit record and raised my hand to ring his doorbell. Before I could touch it, though, the door swung open and standing in front of me was That Guy who is usually sitting behind a desk, mocking minorities with his shrill, nasal voice. His eyes were wide, furious. Though I was startled, I began to say hello, to ask him to stand up for what he’d said in daylight as opposed to hiding behind a screen, and before I could, he sprayed pepper spray in my face, put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me down the stairs. As I was on the ground before I got up, he cursed at me, grabbed the phone that flew out of my hand, went back into his house, turned a bunch of locks and stomped on my phone, which was still recording the whole thing. That was when the recording ended, less than 30 seconds after I started filming.
I’ll condense this next part: The woman in the car called the police, reporting an assault. The police eventually showed up. The main cop talked to us separately, retrieved my phone and gave it back to me. Everything I said in the police report was backed up by my video and the woman in the car’s call. Fuentes was not cooperating for the most part and eventually told the cop that he “wasn’t giving interviews” as if the officer was from TMZ or something. This is all on the cop’s body-cam video. An ambulance showed up, the EMTs checked me out, and I went home. I did not know for a few days after that the push down the stairs had broken six of my ribs. The emergency room physician said it was fortunate that I didn’t hit my head.
I posted about the incident and the story blew up. Fuentes was one of the most hated people in this country at that point so it’s not a surprise.
From there, we got doxed, which is also not surprising. It’s not Sherlock Holmes-level sleuthing work to find our home and contact information; I am a public-facing person with nothing to hide, and we have a food pantry in front of our home that we promote for those facing food insecurity. In the days and weeks following his assault, Fuentes’s troll army was on a real bender. When my husband and I discussed things and decided to not let this incident live and die on my phone, we expected as much, but it was the same day as the incident when the nonstop phone calls, texts, messages to my “other” Facebook Messenger folder and even letters sent to our house without return addresses commenced.
They were all threatening. They were all full of invective, of hate-speech, of slurs, of bigotry, of sometimes just men screaming incomprehensibly into their phones. I’d poked the bear, I guess, and the “bear” was a loose collection of rage-filled but impotent misogynists, racists and anti-Semites. I was called a groomer, a stalker and a bitch. (Pretty much everyone called me a bitch.) I was called a Nazi and a “dirty Jew”. I was called a whore and a Karen. Fuentes’s groupies had us swatted a few times. They ordered countless Domino’s MeatZZa pizzas in my name but not paid for by me and not delivered. I’m not sure the reasoning behind this but I know I am not alone in being harassed by hostile, aggrieved men, conspiracists and general wingnuts. Having pizzas sent is one of their go-tos, apparently.
I did press charges and, after a year of extensions and delays, finally, Fuentes will be in a Cook County courtroom on December 11 to accept deferred prosecution in the battery case. Deferred prosecution, in a nutshell, is a way for first-time criminal offenders to avoid conviction or a trial in favor of meeting certain requirements laid out by the district attorney’s office. In Fuentes’s case, he will need to volunteer for 75-hours of community service, as approved by the DA’s office, complete an anger management class, compensate me for a new cell phone and apologize to me in person, again, with the apology approved by the DA’s office. If he fails to fulfill any of the agreed upon conditions, the criminal charges will be reinstated and he will go to trial.
Anyway, so November 10 was the anniversary. It came and went. I am holding a neo-Nazi accountable and there is not one thing I regret about that.