Black student body president sues Nazi site for ‘troll storm’

The first Black woman to serve as American University’s student government president has sued a neo-Nazi website’s publisher, accusing him of orchestrating an online harassment campaign against her, reports the Associated Press. Taylor Dumpson’s federal lawsuit, filed Monday in Washington, D.C., says Andrew Anglin directed the Daily Stormer’s readers to ‘‘troll storm’’ her with a barrage of racist and demeaning messages on social media. Authorities began investigating last May after someone hung bananas with hateful messages from nooses on the university’s campus a day after Dumpson’s inauguration. Dumpson has feared for her safety since Anglin posted an article about the incident, including links to her Facebook page and the American University Student Government’s Twitter page, her suit says. The case is at least the third federal lawsuit filed against Anglin by a target of his trolling campaigns. Anglin didn’t immediately respond to an email Tuesday seeking comment on Dumpson’s suit, which was filed by attorneys from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Kristen Clarke, the group’s president, said the lawsuit is a response to a spike in ‘‘hate activity’’ on college campuses. The suit names two other people as defendants and accuses them of sending hateful, intimidating, and harassing Twitter messages to Dumpson after Anglin’s post. Anglin’s site takes its name from Der Stürmer, a newspaper that published Nazi propaganda. It has struggled to stay online over the past year. Domain name registration companies Google and GoDaddy yanked the site’s web address after Anglin published a post mocking a woman killed in a deadly car attack at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August.