Man misidentified as Charlottesville driver had to flee home; plans to sue far-right sites

Source: CNN

In the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville terror attack, the far-right website GotNews posted what seemed like a huge scoop. The website said it could "exclusively reveal" that the person who had run over a group of demonstrators in a Dodge Charger was not a white nationalist, but instead a critic of President Donald Trump.

The Michigan man GotNews had identified was in fact not the driver. He was not even in Virginia at the time. But within hours he and his family had been forced to flee their home at the advice of local police, who expressed concern for their safety after a slew of death threats rolled in.

The family's flight from their home capped off a feverish attempt by right-wing sleuths to discover the culprit behind the Charlottesville attack and dig into his or her history, seemingly in hopes of proving the person was not of a right-wing political persuasion.

To be sure, GotNews wasn't the first outlet to peddle the false report. There had been similar chatter online on places like 4Chan and Twitter, and other far-right publications also ran with the false story. But GotNews wrote about the man who was wrongly identified, Joel Vangheluwe, and his family, in perhaps the most confident terms of any publication. It retracted that story not long after it was published.

Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/16/media/charlottesville-man-misidentified-plans-lawsuit/index.html