Photo credit: Kat Gebauer

From Esquire

Tanya Gersh twisted the doorknob of her front door and realized it was locked. Her family always kept their front door open, because they never considered doing otherwise in their sleepy town of Whitefish, Montana.



Standing on the doorstep in the dark, Gersh realized she didn’t even have a key to her own house. So, she knocked on the door. She heard her husband come down their stairs and watched him crack open the door. The lights in the house were all off and the blinds were drawn. She remembers empty suitcases laying behind him.

“Tanya, I have to talk to you about something,” he said, leading her up to their dark bedroom. Her laptop sat open, glowing on the bed.

“Jews Targeting Richard Spencer’s Mother for Harassment and Extortion—Take Action,” read the December 16, 2016, headline at the top of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Gersh scrolled down to find a photo from her Facebook page—a smiling image of herself which had been superimposed in front of a fire with a Star of David on her chest, as well as a photo of her then-12-year-old son. She kept scrolling to see the words in bold, “So Then—Let’s Hit ‘Em Up. Are y’all ready for an old fashioned Troll Storm? Because AYO—it’s that time, fam.”

Her cell phone began ringing. After midnight, the calls came more frequently. The ringing continued for months.

This summer, nearly three years later, a judge ordered Andrew Anglin and The Daily Stormer take down the original post—and the dozens that followed. Anglin had listed phone numbers for Gersh, her husband, their workplaces, their addresses, social media accounts for them—and their young son. Gersh was awarded $14 million in a default judgment in which the judge said Anglin “acted with actual malice.”

“It was absolute therapy to fight,” Gersh says. “It has been so much easier for me to be a fighter than accept being the victim.”

For the years of her fight, Gersh avoided speaking publicly about the case, in hopes of distancing herself from the harassment. Now, she is ready to tell her whole story.

Story continues

Photo credit: Ben Allan Smith - AP

The days after the first Daily Stormer attack was posted felt “like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole,” Gersh told me during a phone call last week. “It's this swirl of information and attacks and phone calls and emails. It was just swirling around me.”

But she remembers the days leading up to it clearly.

In late November 2016, a video of white supremacist Richard Spencer went viral. Speaking at a National Policy Institute conference in Washington, D.C., Spencer gave a speech espousing racist ideologies, ending the talk with, “Heil Trump! Heil our people! Heil victory!” with people in attendance raising an arm in a Nazi salute.

Racism had been a pillar of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, from his announcement speech in which he declared Mexican immigrants rapists. But the Spencer video captured how the candidate was being embraced by a faction of white supremacists which was becoming increasingly vocal online.

Millions watched the video in horror, but the small, mostly white town of Whitefish was distressed over how the video might immediately affect their community. Richard Spencer’s mother, Sherry Spencer, owned a mixed-use commercial building in Whitefish.

Sherry’s property was originally purchased by her son, and when he applied for the building permit in 2014, there were protests in Whitefish. Gersh, however, stayed away from the controversy then. As a Jewish woman, she was scared of getting involved.

Photo credit: Chip Somodevilla - Getty Images

But after Spencer’s video spread across the internet, Gersh, a real estate agent, saw someone with a large camera take photographs of Sherry’s building. Assuming it was press, she called her friends who were tenants of Sherry’s to warn them that they may be recieving some unwanted attention. Soon after, Gersh got a call from Sherry.

“Sherry and I had a very mother-to-mother conversation about how she was very distraught over what her son had done. And she asked me what she should do because she didn’t believe his ideologies,” Gersh says. “I told her what I would do if it were my son. And that would be to sell the building and maybe donate some money to a human rights cause and make a public statement saying she didn’t believe her son’s ideologies.

“She said, ‘Thank you, Tanya. That’s exactly what I should do. Can you help me?’”

Gersh called the owner of her real estate company, who offered to reduce the commission to two percent, the lowest the company could go, to help Sherry sell the building. Gersh came away from her interaction with Sherry feeling relieved.

“I was so honored to help Sherry and to help our town,” Gersh says. “I felt like a peacekeeper.”

Gersh sent over a listing agreement and Sherry shared the code to her building, according to court documents. But when Gersh followed up with a phone call, Sherry said she’d decided to work with another realtor. And that was the last time the women spoke.



Soon after that call, on December 15, 2016, a post appeared on the website Medium, starting with the line, "My name is Sherry Spencer, and I am Richard Spencer’s mom." The post, which has since been removed, continued, “I had no intention of selling [my building] ... until I started receiving terrible threats in the last couple of weeks. These threats came from Tanya Gersh.” According to court documents, there is reason to believe the post was ghostwritten by Sherry’s son, Richard. But Gersh’s lawyer declined to elaborate, and Richard did not respond to a request for comment. Sherry could not be reached.

Gersh’s husband told her about the Medium post, which left Gersh confused because of how innocuous her last communication with Sherry had been. The next day at work, Gersh began receiving phone calls with anti-Semitic attacks calling her a “kike” and “whore.” One said: “You should have died in the Holocaust with your people.” Another: “You are surprisingly easy to find on the internet. And in real life.” Gersh, unaware of what had prompted the deluge, kept her phone on and tried to delete as many messages as she could, to remain available to her real estate clients. She was confused and assumed it would pass—until later that night when her husband showed her The Daily Stormer post.

Photo credit: George Rose - Getty Images

Gersh and her husband debated whether or not to wake their two young sons and leave town that night, but decided to wait it out. The calls continued through the night and next morning. Gersh answered many of the calls, wanting a sense of control, to know whether or not the callers were threatening violence.

Some of the calls which still haunt Gersh consisted only of gunshots on the other end of the line.

“When you hear gunshots through a phone, it's very … stunning,” she says slowly, choosing her words carefully. “I think that's the best word. Because they imply that after a gun is fired ... I understood that I was supposed to be the target. They wanted me dead.”

Anglin’s followers flooded Gersh’s son’s social media accounts with messages like, “psst kid, there’s a free Xbox One inside this oven.”

Gersh, who grew up in a small town in Idaho, had never experienced anti-Semitism. Her boys knew to say a prayer at religious events for the 6 million Jews lost, she says, but she hadn’t yet taught them the full history of the Holocaust. The timing was particularly painful for Gersh, as she prepared her 12-year-old son for his bar mitzvah.

“The timing was taken away from me,” she says. “It wasn’t the right time to tell my bar mitzvah boy, ‘By the way, tons of people hate you because you’re Jewish.’ It was wrong.”

The Gersh family left town, celebrating her son’s bar mitzvah at an undisclosed location in a different state, because they were scared of having it at home in Whitefish.

“When he gave his speech about what he’d learned and why it’s an honor to be going from a Jewish boy to a Jewish man … he understood how important it was that he was standing up there on such a deep and meaningful level,” Gersh says. “I was so proud, so emotional.”

It was a rare bright spot in the months of terror.

Anglin encouraged his followers to harass Gersh over the course of 30 posts on The Daily Stormer, according to court documents. In a January 2017 message, he wrote about hosting an armed march in Whitefish, going so far as to publish what he purported to be a photo of a permit he’d obtained. The message, which was an exihibit in the courtcase, reads, “We were initially planning to march to Tanya Gersh’s home, but we decided it would be too cold. We will instead simply march through the center of town...They will rue the day, as they see two hundred skinhead Alt-Right Nazis marching with a guy from Hamas carrying machine guns through the center of their town!”

Gersh reacted physically to the threats. She regularly went to sleep crying, and woke up the next day in tears. She lost patches of hair. She dropped weight in the weeks following the initial post, unable to eat. Then, she binged food. She grinded down her teeth and had pain in her shoulders. Gersh went to a social worker, who diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder, and a psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressants.

The suitcases Gersh’s husband pulled out that first night remained packed for months, just in case they needed to flee. They installed a security system, and often kept their blinds drawn.

Nonprofit legal advocacy organization Southern Poverty Law Center reached out to Gersh, explaining how neo-Nazi “troll storms” operated and connecting her with lawyers who filed a lawsuit on her behalf. Gersh, who was nicknamed by friends before the troll storm, “the happiest person alive,” felt permanently changed by the persistent threats and fear. But, she says, working with lawyers to fight back was “therapeutic.”

On July 11, 2019, the United States District Court for the District of Montana heard the case Tanya Gersh vs. Andrew Anglin. Anglin didn’t show up.

“There were definitely moments in trial that I just couldn't believe everything that I had suffered online and over phone calls and on social media,” Gersh says, “and the coward couldn't show up to defend himself."

The judge issued a default judgment ordering $4 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages, the maximum allowed in Montana.

Photo credit: Burton Productions

It’s the second significant ruling against Anglin this year. Earlier this month, a federal judge awarded radio host Dean Obeidallah $4.1 million after Anglin falsely accused him of terrorism. But Anglin’s whereabouts are unknown. Anglin’s former lawyer said he left the United States in 2013, but according to reporter Luke O’Brien who has been covering him for years, Anglin returned to the US in 2017 , and could currently be in Russia. Process servers hired by SPLC attempted to notify Anglin of the Gersh lawsuit, but they couldn’t find him. Anglin didn’t respond to an emailed request to comment for this story.

As of today, Anglin hasn’t yet complied with the judge’s ruling that he remove the offending posts about the Gersh family, though his byline continues to appear on the site. And Gersh thinks it’s unlikely she’ll see the money from the judgment. But the ruling sends a significant message about online harassment.

“It’s a pretty clear signal from this court saying this behavior will not escape punishment, because the judgment was the judge’s way of emphasizing just how bad they thought the behavior was,” says Mary Anne Franks, professor of law at the University of Miami and President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating online abuse and discrimination. “As far as the courtroom’s effects on future behavior, it’s certainly plausible that people would think twice before engaging in this type of behavior because this court is saying, ‘We think that this is extremely egregious behavior that should be very costly to the defendant.’”

Since Richard Spencer’s speech went viral, online communities of white supremacists have endured, sometimes resulting in violence, like the deadly 2016 march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which Anglin reportedly helped organize but did not attend.

Gersh says each of those news stories is traumatizing.

“This story is going to be a part of me forever. I want to make sure that no one else has to experience this type of hate,” Gersh says. “I’m going to make sure I am part of something that educates people about the absolute core of Internet bullying. Just because they didn't show up at my front door and burn a cross, doesn't mean they didn't manage to break a part of my soul, which was what they tried to do. It's what they did … which is what they did…”

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