Charlottesville protesters suing over last summer's violence filed court papers Wednesday asking a judge to sanction prominent white nationalist Matthew Parrott — one of the defendants in the case — after Parrott posted on social media that he had destroyed information.

Parrott, a spokesperson and director for the white nationalist group the Traditionalist Worker Party, announced Tuesday night via the social media site Gab that he was resigning from the organization, amid a dramatic and allegedly violent falling out with the party's cofounder Matthew Heimbach.



Parrott then posted that he was destroying information, apparently from the Traditionalist Worker Party's systems, which drew the attention of lawyers who have sued to hold him and other white nationalists and white supremacists liable for the violence in Charlottesville in August. Citing Parrott's posts, the lawyers for the plaintiffs are now asking the judge to sanction Parrott and the Traditionalist Worker Party, and to authorize an investigation to determine what possible evidence was destroyed.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that white nationalist leader Matthew Heimbach, who is also a defendant in the Charlottesville case and is described in the lawsuit as chair of the Traditionalist Worker Party, had been arrested and charged with assaulting his wife and Parrott, who is his wife's stepfather. According to a police report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an unidentified witness told police that Heimbach had been having an affair with Parrott's wife, and that spurred the confrontation between Parrott and Heimbach.

On Tuesday night, Parrott posted on the social media site Gab that he was resigning from the Traditionalist Worker Party, where he had served as director and as a spokesperson, according to the lawsuit in Charlottesville. He then posted: "All of the information systems are completely air-gapped and will be destroyed within a few hours in order to guarantee all membership information literally no longer exists anywhere."

Several hours later, he added in another post: "To clarify, the information was scrubbed on account of widespread concern about the data's security. It was a practical security step, and not a political act."