Scared Jurors, Intimidation: Reporter Andy Ngo’s Case Against Antifa Shows How Desperately Lost Portland Is By Victoria Taft
Journalist Andy Ngo was chased, beaten, and chased again when he burst into a downtown Portland, Ore., hotel in May 2021 to get away from his black-bloc-clad Antifa attackers. “They’re trying to kill me,” he told the understandably frightened hotel workers. It wasn’t the first time he’d been attacked by the notorious Portland terrorist gang. If Portland’s criminal justice system wouldn’t stop these guys, Ngo figured, he’d sue them for $1 million.
On Tuesday, a Portland jury decided that two key alleged Antifa conspirators whose cases went to trial were not civilly liable for Ngo’s injuries, both physical and otherwise. The trial was marred by intimidation tactics — not just from the attackers but from their attorney who declared to the unidentified jury members, “I am Antifa” and “I will remember each one of your faces.” We’re talking Godfather stuff here.
Before you dismiss this as “Hey, you signed up for this, Portland, you voted in these knuckleheads who gave Antifa a wide berth,” let’s consider what this case means.
I sat in a Multnomah County courtroom in the trial of another journalist who was beaten by Antifa members and who pulled a pistol to fend off a second attack in 2016. Not a shot was fired, the second attack was thwarted, and instead of prosecuting his attackers, woke politicians went after Mike Strickland for showing his gun. He went to jail. His attackers were never pursued. In fact, they were never identified in court or by any of the undercover cops that had infiltrated the protest crowd that day.
The cops didn’t bother to help Strickland, either. While in the courtroom at his trial, I was threatened by Antifa allies. I also later received death threats that the Portland Police dismissed as no big deal.
After Antifa took Strickland off the board — probation rules halted this now-convicted felon’s ability to continue plying his then-booming YouTube and other video work about the left in Portland and Seattle — Antifa started going after other right-leaning independent reporters, including a fledgling reporter named Andy Ngo. Ngo was a witness in Strickland’s trial. He took what Strickland started and continued highlighting Antifa violence and intimidation on Portland streets and the group’s corrosive effect on the psyche of the once-peaceful Rose City.
Non-violent by nature anyway, Ngo has told me that the Strickland attack cemented his peaceful approach in covering the group that rules by violence and intimidation ironically under a flag of anti-fascism. And time after time Antifa continues to demonstrate through its attacks on journalists and people with differing views, such as Trump supporters, that the group is exactly opposite of what it claims to be.
In 2020, Ngo filed a civil lawsuit against several members of Portland Antifa for the violent attacks against him, which began in 2019.
The jury found John Colin Hacker and Elizabeth Renee Richter not civilly liable for the attacks, even though video evidence shows them pursuing Ngo with Richter chasing Ngo into the hotel before she was ordered out screeching, “I can’t wait for you to come out, Andy!” She’s heard and seen on video saying “You thought the milkshakes were bad last time? We are going to beat the f*ck out of you b*tch.”
One of his attorneys, Harmeet Dhillon, whose foundation took on Ngo’s case, said, “Though we lost against these two defendants today, we won a settlement with one of the individual defendants and took the defaults of three of them who failed to show up for court.”
And she accurately described the stakes of Antifa’s violent intimidation tactics. “Antifa thugs had repeatedly used violence in Portland to intimidate and silence journalists and ordinary citizens, including Andy,” she said. “But Andy would NOT be silenced.” But he did have to move to a different country to feel safe.
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In Ngo’s civil case, there was a gag order put on all parties in the lawsuit because of Antifa’s violent history. There were threats against the court. Ngo’s colleague Katie Daviscourt covered the trial and saw first-hand how Antifa allies recorded video in the courtroom against court rules.
Were jurors’ images captured in their video?
When Daviscourt got back to her car parked at her hotel and away from the courthouse, it had been thrashed and tossed by… someone.
In July, Judge Chanpone Sinlapasai dismissed the overall organization, Rose City Antifa, from the case saying that a nonlegal entity can’t be sued under Oregon law.
After the verdict in Hacker and Richter’s cases was read, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, who was on Tim Pool’s TimCast program, said, “I thought Antifa was just an idea, but it turns out this idea has attorneys.” Somebody very real is paying the attorney.
Before I knew he was one of those involved with Ngo, I interviewed John Hacker, whom we identified as “Antifa John” on my Adult in the Room Podcast. It’s a riveting discussion, and Ngo’s name comes up.
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Portland’s Antifa has made it a strategy to neuter the mainstream media in Portland. In this way, they earn my epithet that these people are not anti-fascist, they’re Anti-First-Amendment. They attacked Mike Strickland. They tried to kill Andy Ngo. A Trump supporter was assassinated on the street. Fires, shootings, beatings, riots, jury intimidation, and threats permeate the political zeitgeist of Portland. Police have been beaten and attacked. Their jobs have been disappeared. And the mayor is a eunuch.
It’s believed by a watchdog group that Antifa and their rioting buddies, Black Lives Matter, have cost Portlanders more than a billion dollars in lost business, opportunity cost, physical damage, and scared-off tourists (more on that in an upcoming story). Businesses openly discuss suing the city because it is unsafe.
And for Antifa, it’s still open season on anyone who reports on its continuing criminal enterprise.
Ngo hasn’t been taken off the board at this point. After the decision he wrote, “This sends a dangerous message that violent extremist groups can continue to organize criminal activities in Portland.” He says the court proceeding was tainted with delays and stoppages due to “threats of violence and the need to seal the jurors’ identities following serious concerns over outside efforts to identify them.”
The takeaway from this case comes in the person of Michelle Burrows, the defense attorney for her Antifa clients. In her closing statement, she told the intimidated jurors, “I am Antifa.” Burrows said that after this case she would wear a new t-shirt that would be emblazoned with that saying. She lectured the jurors that Antifa doesn’t deserve its reputation as a violent organization and then promptly contradicted herself. She told them, “Resistance in this country has never been peaceful.” Then she looked at the jurors, whose identities had been hidden because of threatened Antifa violence, and said she would “remember each one of their faces.”
The case should have been thrown out after that. It wasn’t. Dhillon and Ngo’s other attorneys don’t know what their next legal moves will be yet.
Antifa isn’t the only organization trying to silence journalists. Joe Buy-den and his minions pressured Facebook to censor conservative websites because they didn’t like the way they reported the news. Seriously. Facebook censored true information about COVID to pacify the Biden Administration.
The social media companies, at the behest of Democrats, have been preventing you from seeing our brand of opinion journalism for years now. They’re trying to starve us into compliance — or non-existence. PJ Media has been censored, disappeared, thrashed, and throttled by social media companies at the behest of political Leftists. It’s wrong and un-American. That’s where you come in. Are you sick of this yet?
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