Amy Spitalnick's Charlottesville Lawsuit: Integrity First for America, Explained

Long before she took over the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Amy Spitalnick ran a small nonprofit with a single, audacious goal: use the civil courts to bankrupt the neo-Nazi and white-nationalist leaders who organized the deadly 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. That nonprofit was Integrity First for America (IFA), and the case it bankrolled — Sines v. Kessler — is now widely cited as the most significant civil-rights verdict against organized American extremism in a generation.

What Integrity First for America was

IFA was founded in 2017 as a nonpartisan 501(c)(4) organization with a narrow mandate: fund and support high-impact civil litigation against violent extremists who threaten American democracy and civil rights. Spitalnick joined as executive director in 2019 and served as the organization's public face throughout the trial and its aftermath. Rather than build a permanent institution, IFA committed to a defined mission — see the Charlottesville case through — and then wound down operations in 2022 after the verdict was returned.

Sines v. Kessler: the case IFA funded

Filed in October 2017 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, Sines v. Kessler was a civil suit brought by nine Charlottesville residents who were injured — physically, emotionally, or both — during the August 2017 rally. The plaintiffs were represented by a legal team led by Roberta Kaplan and Karen Dunn, working alongside firms including Kaplan Hecker & Fink and Cooley LLP.

The complaint alleged that the rally's organizers — including Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, Christopher Cantwell, the League of the South, Vanguard America, and the National Socialist Movement, among more than two dozen defendants — conspired to commit racially motivated violence in Charlottesville. The legal theory rested primarily on the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 (42 U.S.C. §1985(3)), a Reconstruction-era statute originally passed to give the federal government tools to combat organized racial terror in the postwar South.

The verdict: over $26 million in damages

After a four-week jury trial in the fall of 2021, the jury returned its verdict on November 23, 2021. It found the defendants liable on state-law claims of civil conspiracy and awarded plaintiffs more than $26 million in compensatory and punitive damages. (The jury deadlocked on the two federal KKK Act conspiracy counts, but the massive state-law damages award — later adjusted by the court under Virginia's punitive-damages cap — is what has effectively defanged the defendants financially.)

For Spitalnick and IFA, the practical result was as important as the legal one. Organizational defendants such as the National Socialist Movement and Vanguard America now face judgments they cannot realistically pay; individual defendants such as Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell have spent the years since the verdict in a running fight over discovery sanctions, contempt findings, and collection efforts.

Why the case still matters

The Charlottesville lawsuit did three things at once, and they explain why it still shows up in every serious profile of Amy Spitalnick:

• It set a template for civil litigation against organized extremism. Advocacy groups have since pointed to Sines v. Kessler as a model for suits against January 6 organizers, militia networks, and other coordinated political violence.
• It revived a 150-year-old civil-rights statute. Even without a federal verdict, the KKK Act theory was fully litigated to a jury on a modern factual record — a legal roadmap for future plaintiffs.
• It built Spitalnick's public profile. The trial produced dozens of national television appearances, long-form magazine profiles, and eventually the platform that carried her into the CEO role at the JCPA in 2023.

The line from Charlottesville to the JCPA

Critics and supporters of Spitalnick's tenure at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs frequently reach back to the Charlottesville lawsuit to make their case. Supporters point to it as evidence that she has done tangible, adversarial work against violent antisemites — not just issued statements about them. Critics argue that the same coalition-oriented, progressive-aligned strategy that made IFA effective in a courtroom has translated poorly into the JCPA's broader communal role, where her outreach to left-wing groups has drawn sustained pushback.

Both sides agree on one thing: without Sines v. Kessler, Amy Spitalnick is not a household name in American Jewish institutional life. The Charlottesville lawsuit is the hinge that turned a communications-professional-turned-nonprofit-director into the CEO of the umbrella body representing 125+ Jewish community-relations organizations.

Further reading on this site

• Who Is Amy Spitalnick? A Profile of the JCPA CEO
• What Is the JCPA? The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Explained
• Spitalnick's JCPA Builds Bridges With Left-Wing Antisemitism