A white Detroit woman accused of repeatedly fabricating claims against an African-American man to police has hired a lawyer known for representing white supremacist leaders like Richard Spencer, The Guardian reports.
Deborah Nash, one of three women being sued for making serious, yet bogus charges against Detroit urban farmer Marc Peeples, is now being represented by Kyle Bristow, a self-proclaimed alt-right attorney. Bristow made headlines last year, after bringing legal battles against universities that refused to let Spencer spew his racist rhetoric on campus.
Marc Peeples was acquitted of stalking charges after a judge determined the three white women had fabricated their claims. (WXYZ Detroit / video screenshot)
Peeples filed a lawsuit in March accusing Nash and two other women of repeatedly lying to police in an effort to boot him from Hunt Park, a green space on the city’s east side where he’d built a community garden. Among their allegations, the trio claimed Peeples had threatened violence against them, attempted a drive-by shooting one of their homes, and accused him of painting “gang colors” on vacant residences.
“They just want to control any and everything they see,” Peeples told WXYX Detroit at the time, recalling the racist harassment. “They don’t want to see a young black man coming up and doing something positive.”
In one instance, the ladies waited until Peeples was busy working with a group of children in the garden to call the police and tell them he was a convicted pedophile, which is untrue.
That call resulted in Peeples’ arrest, but a judge dropped the criminal case last October after finding that the women’s claims were all fabricated and largely based on race.
Peeples is now seeking $300,000 in damages, in addition to attorney’s fees and other costs. He and his attorney, Robert Burton-Harris, accuse the trio of working “concertedly to cause economic harm [and] emotional distress” to Marc, blaming him for “various crimes that they knew, [or] had reason to know he did not commit.”
In an interview with The Guardian, Burton-Harris said he “wasn’t surprised” Nash had a hired Bristow to represent her in the matter.
Bristow is no stranger to taking on racially tinged cases, however. The Guardian reports that after pressuring Michigan State University to let Spencer speak at the campus in March 2018, his now-defunct alt-right group, the Foundation for Marketplace of Ideas (FMI), led a weekend long conference that welcomed Spencer and other prominent white nationalist activists.
Bristow once described his group as an American Civil Liberties Union for the far-right. Moreover, nonprofit forms filed by FMI characterized the white nationalist lawyer as one of the “Alt-Right’s most vicious attack dogs.”
Bristow quickly disassociated himself from the movement, however, after his conference was disrupted by local media and its secret locations were revealed.
