https://www.yahoo.com/news/victims-neo-nazi-trolling-whitefish-montana-strike-back-court-200303427.html


This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Tanya Gersh, a
Jewish mother and business owner from Whitefish, Mont., who was the main
target of a vicious anti-Semitic “troll storm” launched by neo-Nazi blogger Andrew Anglin this past December.            
               Background: The drama began after Sherry Spencer, mother of well-known white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, authored a
blog post claiming that Gersh, a real estate agent, had tried to
pressure her to sell a building she owned in downtown Whitefish and
publicly denounce her son’s political views or risk drawing protesters
to her property. (Gersh and the SPLC describe a very different sequence
of events in their complaint.) Anglin repeated Sherry Spencer’s claims
on his neo-Nazi website, Daily Stormer, and urged followers to “take
action” against Gersh and other members of the small Jewish community in Whitefish, a city of approximately 7,000.            
               Though Anglin himself never engaged directly with Gersh, the SPLC argues that he is responsible for the 700-plus harassing
emails, tweets, Facebook posts, voicemails and other threatening
messages received by Gersh, her husband, and even her 12-year-old son,
causing them to fear for their lives. The complaint accuses Anglin of
various torts, including intentional infliction of emotional distress
and invasion of privacy.            
               “We didn’t know if they would come after us … [we] still don’t,” Gersh told reporters Tuesday, choking back tears as she
described the barrage of threats she and her family have received,
including countless references to the Holocaust and gas chambers.            
               “Once I answered the phone and all I heard were gunshots,” she said. “I have never been so scared in my entire life.”            
           
               
                   
                 
                       The suit is a first for the SPLC in terms of targeting the perpetrator of a digital harassment campaign, but the
principles at the core of the case are similar to many other lawsuits
the center has filed against the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups for
nearly 40 years.                    
                       “In the old days, Anglin would’ve burned a cross on Tanya’s lawn to intimidate her,” SPLC president Richard Cohen
told reporters Tuesday. “In the digital age, he launched a troll storm
against.”                    
                       The method of harassment may be new, but then as now, Cohen said, “we always try to try to make leaders responsible
for the actions of their followers.”                    
                       The SPLC, an Alabama-based legal advocacy group, has a long history of doing that. In 1980 it sued the Invisible
Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and several individual members after
more than 100 Klansmen attacked a group of peaceful civil rights
protesters in Decatur, Ala., with guns, clubs and sticks. Evidence
discovered by SPLC investigators led the FBI to reopen its case on the
attack, and prosecutors won convictions of nine Klansmen of criminal
charges.                    
                       After 10 more years, the civil case was finally settled and the Klansmen were required to perform community
service, pay damages, refrain from white supremacist activity and also
attend a course on race relations taught by leaders of the same civil
rights group whose members they’d attacked in 1979.                    
                       Since then, the SPLC has pursued a number of similar suits, seeking to hold hate groups and their leaders legally and
financially responsible for acts of violence and harassment carried out
by their members.                    
           
                       Before this week, the last such “hate” suit the group had filed was in 2007 against the Imperial Klans of America
and four members who’d participated in the brutal beating of 16-year-old
Jordan Gruver in Brandenburg, Ky., the previous summer. The SPLC
successfully argued that, despite claiming to discourage illegal
activity, the Klans’ leadership was responsible for promoting hate and
violence against minorities. (The Klansmen reportedly called Gruver, who
is of Panamanian-Indian decent, an “illegal spic” as they threw whiskey
in his face, beat him and kicked him on the ground.) A jury awarded
Gruver $2.5 million in damages.                    
                       Cohen acknowledged that Anglin urged followers to refrain from engaging in any violence or threats of
violence. But Cohen dismissed this disclaimer as a flimsy defense in light of Anglin’s publishing photographs and personal contact
information for Gersh and several other members of Whitefish’s Jewish
community, whom he described as a “a vicious, evil race of hate-filled
psychopaths.”                    
                       “To tell people to harass someone and then say ‘don’t do anything illegal’ is talking out of both sides of his
mouth,” said Cohen. “I don’t think Andrew Anglin is going to be able to
hide behind … others who carried out his bidding.”                    
                       Anglin did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.                    
                       Danielle Citron, a University of Maryland law professor and leading expert on cybercrimes, called the lawsuit “an
important step forward” and commended the Gersh family for fighting
back.                    
                       “So often people don’t want to sue,” said Citron. “Usually you just disappear because you’re terrified.”                    
                       In her book, “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” Citron makes the case that cyberharassment is a civil rights issue, but
she told Yahoo News that the lack of legal ramifications has created a
mentality of “I don’t give a shit because there aren’t consequences.”                    
                       Of course, Citron said, a win against Anglin is “not going to deter everyone because there are a lot of sick people
in the world.” But, she argued, the more the law can be used to impose
costly penalties for such behavior, “if these people are rational actors
they will be deterred.”                    
                       Citron, who consulted on the SPLC’s complaint against Anglin, said she is confident that any First Amendment defense
he may try to bring will fail.                    
                       “This isn’t hate speech,” she said. “This is the targeting — with racism and hatred and anti-Semitism — of a specific
family with threats and defamation.”                    
                       The SPLC, which tracks hate groups in the United States, identifies Anglin as a “neo-Nazi,” and Citron would agree
with that description based on the content of his blog posts and
website, the Daily Stormer, named after the Hitler-era Nazi newspaper
Der Stürmer. But, she clarifies, whether or not Anglin is actually
affiliated with any sort of neo-Nazi group is irrelevant to the case
against him.                    
                       “You can’t punish someone for having a viewpoint or for participating in a disgusting group that has disgusting
political ideas,” she said. “That’s protected behavior.”                    
                       
                       The troll storm may have subsided slightly, but the impact on Gersh and her family continues. Search “Tanya Gersh”
in Google images and the first result is a photoshopped picture of Gersh
with a yellow star of David on her forehead and the words “Filthy
Juden” written in big bold letters across the bottom.                    
                       Gersh said the threats have forced her to stop working as a real estate agent for fear of putting her clients at
risk. She now goes to trauma therapy twice a week and is experiencing
anxiety-induced medical issues.                    
                       “Most importantly, I’m never feeling safe,” she said. “This went so far beyond harassment, this was terrorism.”                    
                       The suit did not specify an amount of monetary damages, but Cohen said he plans to seek “extensive”
compensation for the suffering experienced by Tanya and her family, as
well as a “substantial punitive damage judgment to punish Anglin and to
send a message to other likeminded people.”                    
                       “Cyberhate in our country is a growing problem and it’s incredibly ugly,” he said. “We hope to change that.”

Yeah I thought that was the interesting part. It's a great case (I don't mean that the end result is desirable) for pushing for an expansion of liability for people who encourage others on the internet to harass the person's enemies. There's no less sympathetic defendant than the defendants. But then am I liable if I complain that a gun company didn't honor a warranty and post "Firemission! Acme Firearms Screwed me!"

Yup Cohen says in the article that their intent it to sue "leaders" for the actions of "followers." Admittedly neo nazis are pretty low on the bell curve,but if I post a "acme firearms firemission" I don't think I'm really responsible if someone, instead of emailing the company and asking to fix my gun, calls the owner's wife and threatens her

If you get handed pleadings from me "those paragraphs are terribly spaced" is probably not the first thought one has

So what would your remedy be? Do nothing when harassed by Nazis?