CHARLOTTESVILLE — Natalie Romero looked straight ahead from the witness stand as she fielded questions about the 2017 Unite the Right rally weekend, when a neo-Nazi fractured her skull in a car-ramming attack.
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Romero’s questioner was one of the rally headliners, Richard Spencer, a white supremacist who says his race makes him superior to her.
Romero, who is Colombian American, testified that she was in court this Friday because she was tired of hiding. She wanted to tell the truth.
She said she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, panic attacks and flashbacks. She has an emotional support dog named Luna, who was with her in Charlottesville.
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She was the first witness to testify in a federal civil trial where a jury will decide if two dozen white supremacists and hate groups named in a lawsuit engaged in a conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence during the rally four years ago.
Romero told jurors how the skull fracture clouded her memory and forced her to take a medical leave of absence from college. This horrific experience, she said, crushed the confidence she worked so hard to build in herself.
In her nightmares, she can hear the cadence of white supremacists marching at night, their faces illuminated by torchlights and chanting “Blood and soil!” and “You will not replace us!”
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In front of her was the neo-Nazi figure who led that August 11, 2017, march.
“You did not see me on August 12th as you have testified,” Spencer said to Romero, referring to the next morning’s events. “Um, did you … ”
Romero jumped in. “I would also remind you that the injury that I had that day blurs a lot of things. So for example, if you were to show me what you were doing that day, I could say, ‘Yes I remember that.’ ”
There are photos of Spencer in Charlottesville during the rally weekend, but he did not display any to Romero. Spencer is representing himself in the case.
In arguing this conspiracy case, the plaintiffs do not need to prove that they, as individuals, can identify the defendants in the crowds that weekend.
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Jurors need only to find “a preponderance of the evidence” standard, rather than the higher bar of “beyond reasonable doubt” in criminal trials, to determine if it is more likely than not that the defendants conspired to commit racially motivated violence.
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Romero is one of the nine plaintiffs bringing this suit, including three others who were directly hit when defendant James A. Fields Jr. sped his car through a crowd of protesters, and then reversed back up the street.
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They are represented by attorneys Karen Dunn and Roberta Kaplan, who are presenting expansive evidence they say shows months of violent planning. A Reconstruction-era statute designed to protect newly emancipated Black people from the Ku Klux Klan underpins this case. Integrity First for America, a civil rights nonprofit organization, is backing the lawsuit.
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The defendants are some of the most notorious racists in the country. Representatives for many of them have tried to blame others for the violence that unfolded that weekend. They brushed off hateful rhetoric as hyperbolic, a common tactic of the far-right to assume plausible deniability, and said it was constitutionally protected speech.
Defendant Christopher Cantwell, who also is representing himself, has been dubbed the “Crying Nazi” and has pleaded guilty to two counts of misdemeanor assault and battery for pepper-spraying counterprotesters. He is serving a federal prison sentence after being convicted of extortion.
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Cantwell also cross-examined Romero and went on tangents.
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“Is that a question?” she asked Cantwell at one point, softly shaking her head.
“I’m a little confused,” he said.
“I’m also a little confused,” she said.
Romero is now 24, identifies as a queer woman and is living in New York City. But in 2017, she was a first-generation college student from Houston entering her second year at the University of Virginia.
She worked hard, joined a peer mentoring program, and went on hikes and watched sunsets with friends.
On Aug. 11, she was wearing flip-flops when she headed outside with two friends toward the Thomas Jefferson statue. Then she heard the roaring.
The students linked arms, held hands and started to sing. Then she heard the roaring of a torch-wielding mob. She closed her eyes, prayed and wished she could cover her face. She said she and a friend were the “only people of color” nearby and rally attendees “were screaming at us.”
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She was sprayed with mace, and saw them use torches as weapons and attack people.
This was not the last time in the next 24 hours that she would fear for her life.
The next morning, on Aug. 12, she joined community members outside what she referred to as Emancipation Park, which formerly included a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. She saw shields, someone with a hammer, swastikas and shirts exalting Adolf Hitler.
At one point, she said she with standing with a group of women in a line when white supremacists called them “b----es,” and other derogatory and misogynistic language toward women.
She remembers feeling briefly relieved most of the women she was with were White.
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“I’m a light-skinned Latina. Maybe they don’t notice,” she thought.
Instead, she said they pushed her and threw her against a police car.
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“I got spit on by people who hate me and who do not think I should be alive,” Romero said.
Then she explained how she ended up on Fourth Street SE, the narrow one-way street where Fields drove his car through the crowd, striking her.
She felt blood dripping down her face, a loud ringing in her ears and the thumping of her heartbeat. She wanted to call her mom.
Romero said she reached out to grasp a nearby pole in a desperate attempt to hold her body upright.
If she allowed herself to lay down, she told the jurors, she feared she would die.