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Guy Who Punched Charlottesville Organizer Jason Kessler Fined a Measly $1

Jeffrey Winder won't face any jail time after clocking the white supremacist in 2017.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

A day after Heather Heyer was killed during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year, the event's neo-Nazi organizer, Jason Kessler, held a stomach-turning press conference where he blamed her death on the cops. But as you might remember, Kessler was forced to cut his own press conference short after a protester bum-rushed the white supremacist and punched him in the head.

That protestor, Jeffrey Winder, was later charged and convicted for assault and battery, facing a $2,500 fine and a year in jail for clocking Kessler. But on Tuesday, a jury decided that his punishment for punching a neo-Nazi would only amount to a paltry $1 fine, local NBC affiliate WVIR reports.

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"He had an incredible amount of nerve coming in front of the people of Charlottesville after the pain, suffering, and terror that he brought on the community," Winder told WVIR last year of Kessler, who called Heyer a "fat, disgusting Communist" days after she died. "He should never be allowed to show his face in town again."

Tuesday's sentencing was just another big L for Kessler, who staged a second Unite the Right rally in DC last month that basically no one showed up to. Since then, he's busied himself by rattling off anti-semitic screeds online, only to have his dad yell at him in the middle of a recent livestream. According to the 34-year-old's dad, his son is currently living off and on with his grandmother, a housing situation Kessler has blamed on all the lawsuits he's dealing with.

And while punching anyone in the face, regardless of how offensive their views are, might be deemed morally reprehensible, we now at least have a better judgement of just how much that kind of behavior could cost—less than a cup of coffee.

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