Judge Rules Proud Boys Must Pay $1 Million To Church For Burning BLM Flag
(AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez, File)
Last week a judge decreed that the Proud Boy must pay a hefty $1.03 million to a historic Black church in Washington, D.C. The reason? In December 2020, amid a tumultuous protest surrounding the U.S. presidential election, Proud Boys members desecrated and incinerated a Black Lives Matter (BLM) banner from the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, a revered landmark in the nation’s capital.
In his ruling, Superior Court Judge Neal Kravitz cited the “emotional trauma” inflicted on the church members due to the incident. He put forth a firm edict, effectively barring the Proud Boys from venturing near Metropolitan AME for the next half-decade and sternly prohibiting them from uttering disparaging remarks or threats against the church and its leaders.
Significantly, this ruling was a default judgment, given the conspicuous absence of the defendants in the courtroom.
Even though the cost to replace the flag totaled around $36,600, the judge emphasized that “compensatory damages alone will not address the defendants’ reprehensible conduct or the extraordinary emotional trauma suffered by the church and its congregants” and added on another million dollars, writing:
To the members of the church, the burning of the Black Lives Matter sign represented a complete negation of their right to worship as they please and, more fundamentally, to participate fully in the life of the community—and forced them to harken back to the long and painful history of white supremacists committing wanton acts of violence against Black churches.