About 4:30 a.m. Dec. 2, 2021, Jeremy White’s home in Los Angeles was raided by San Diego and L.A. police and sheriff’s deputies — about 30 in White’s telling.
“They had full-on AR15s pointed at my chest where I was wearing a bathrobe at my door,” he told a podcast last month. “Are you sure you have the right house?”
Treated “like George Soros’ antifa clone,” he and 10 others were charged with conspiracy to riot and felony assaults at a Pacific Beach “Patriot March” organized by Donald Trump fans three days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol invasion.
That day, prosecutors say, White wore black clothing, a gas mask, a tactical helmet and vest, gloves and was armed with a “tear gas weapon.”
On Monday, White will stand emotionally naked before Judge Daniel Goldstein.
Having detailed a private history of childhood family abuse, depression, suicide attempts and how police violence contributed to his PTSD, White and his pro bono attorney Curtis Briggs will argue that all charges should be dropped.
He wants to enter a mental health diversion program — sparing him any potential prison time. (A jury trial is set for March 25.) He’ll also cite, via a demurrer, his First Amendment rights to speech and assembly — hoping Goldstein will toss out his criminal case.
Two other Pacific Beach riot defendants — Luis Francisco Mora, 32, and Brian Cortez Lightfoot Jr., 27 — face trial alongside him.
But White, a Boyle Heights resident, rejects being “pegged as a ringleader” of the Jan. 9, 2021, counterprotest — one of hundreds he’s attended over the years.
“I wasn’t in charge of anything,” he told the Pod Damn America podcast. “If I could explain to them how disorganized (antifa is).”
Briggs says White is in a “way different position than any other defendant. … He’s never touched anybody. … This is not felony conduct at all.”
Who is Jeremy Jonathan White? And how did he come to face years in prison for what the judge once likened to a bar fight?
In an 80-minute Zoom chat with White and San Francisco-based lawyer Briggs, I sought to understand his activist history and current state of mind.
Going into Monday’s 9 a.m. hearing in downtown Superior Court (room 1901), White says he is “nervous but hopeful. I’m trying to stay positive about it. And I’m also trying not to be too positive about it because we never know.”
White is staging fundraisers. He started a GoFundMe page to raise $10,000 to defray expenses of staying in San Diego for a possible monthlong trial and paying Briggs for some of his costs. (He’s raised $2,250 so far, Briggs says.)
Like Briggs, he accused District Attorney Summer Stephan of waging a political prosecution.
Stephan, he told the podcast, is an “unabashed right-wing Trump-supporting anti-antifa person.” In an early court proceeding, he said, Stephan quoted Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham.
White contends that an “American Guard guy with Bowie knife” complained that he was jumped in PB and wanted justice.
“So a Nazi went to the DA and demanded a case be built — and that’s where all this came from,” White said last month. “They’re charging us with conspiracy, but I think the real conspiracy is the DA’s case with these white supremacists — going after just leftists.”
Why would White travel to Pacific Beach amid his brutal experience with protesters on the extreme right?
“Because the way that they single out and attack people who are half my size is unconscionable,” said White, who is 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds and travels as a medic with first-aid gear.
He recalls incidents he attended at Standing Rock and the 2016 Democratic National Convention (when he was a “Bernie Bro.”)
“I was in Flint and Ferguson after everything happened and met with Mike Brown’s parents and [BLM leader] Cori Bush,” White told me. “I’ve had friends who were 100 pounds soaking wet get broken ribs from police jamming batons into their chest for just standing there. I’ve had friends lose eyes, you know. It’s sick.”
He said the only way he could square coming here and facing that trauma was by cobbling together protective gear — helmet, motorcycle pads, “things like that to keep those those assaults from having a lasting damage as much as possible.”
In fact, Briggs hired a veteran psychologist — Dr. Martin Williams of San Jose — to assess White.
In a report submitted to the court, Williams wrote that White’s aims were “self-defense, community defense and deterrence of violence.”
“The suit was designed to protect Mr. White and included a helmet and breathing apparatus,” Williams says. “In my professional opinion, the ‘suit of armor,’ Mr. White’s carrying bear spray, as well as Mr. White’s role of protecting others as a medic was a manifestation of Mr. White’s PTSD.”
Further:
Mr. White hoped that the suit and the bear spray would protect him from the trauma that he feared, expected and re-experienced, all due to his condition of PTSD. … He expected others to be attacked or even shot. For that reason, his helmet includes a sticker on the back that states, “If the shooting starts, stand behind me.”
Williams concluded:
Incarceration … would be extremely dangerous to his well being, as he has already made two suicide attempts and has limited coping skills that might enable another individual to adjust to imprisonment.
I consider any imprisonment to be life threatening to this man with a history of childhood abuse, adult PTSD, domestic abuse and serious depression. Should a sentence be necessary, I recommend that it involve alternatives to incarceration. I am prepared to testify under oath regarding the above professional conclusions.
In his demurrer motion, Briggs says the 4th District Court of Appeal in January issued a published opinion “demonstrating Mr. White is deserving of Mental Health Diversion.”
A Grand Jury, and amended indictment, cut White’s charges down from six to two — with the only assault count related to his pointing out “victim R.L. to other co-conspirators.”
White and Briggs say the “pointing out” was toward an alley, not a victim. Briggs acknowledges the prosecution’s evidence of Signal chats around the Jan. 9 riot discussing his anti-fascist viewpoints, but “that’s not relevant to a conspiracy.”
“That’s like saying: Oh, you know Democrats are conspiring,” he said.
White has been a social justice activist for years.
In 2019, while attending a Torrance town hall with BLM protesters, the mayor ordered police to clear the room.
“Mr. White had exited the room but observed the police about to strike the mother
of a crime victim,” said the Williams report. “Mr. White tried to intervene and was badly beaten by four or five officers. Mr. White experienced a broken back from being hit with the baton.”
White eventually won $75,000 in a settlement with Torrance.
“That beating led to PTSD flashbacks and a physical tic such that Mr. White’s head
reportedly jerks while he is trying to fall asleep. He also experiences screaming while falling asleep and as he wakes up,” Williams said. “The pain caused Mr. White to plan a suicide with helium inhalation.”
White’s friends intervened after he began giving away his things.
White, whose parents worked in Hollywood (father as a teamster, mother in accounting), is a production designer in the film industry, who has done mostly commercial work since the actors strike.
That was all that was available last year. With a background in construction and graphic design, he’s had “a lot of interesting movie credits.” He did “pickup shots” on the first John Wick movie.
“I did an autism benefit called ‘Night of Too Many Stars’ with Adam Sandler — that was a lot of fun.”
But with possible trial expenses ahead, White has an added worry — about the art department team he employs.
“Financially, I’m not prepared to do anything,” he said. “I am hurting right now. … The producers that I work for have had a hard time getting projects off the ground this year. I have about 20 jobs lined up on the horizon, but none of them commencing soon…. So yeah, it’s been very difficult.”
White calls the process of seeking a mental health diversion “incredibly difficult.”
“It’s like meeting a new therapist and trauma-dumping your whole life and then not getting the therapy afterwards,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much it was going to really affect me. … But doing it sounds like it’s an incredibly helpful thing for the case. So it’s worth it ultimately.”
White originally was represented by a lawyer with the Office of Assigned Counsel. Briggs saw that White wasn’t getting the help he needed after being a consultant to the appointed lawyer and took over the case 13 months ago.
(White says he missed court dates because the lawyer wouldn’t tell him when they were coming up. “It’s not answering the phone for weeks on end trying to get me to plead the five felonies and seven years in prison with no criminal record,” he added.)
White calls Briggs, mentored by famed activist attorney Tony Serra, “a true godsend.”
Says Briggs: “There’s not many cases that are this important to the Constitution. … This is the cases we live for … You’re lucky if you get one or two of these cases in a career.”
