HUD Comes to Aid of 2 Stalked by Neo-Nazis

Bonnie Jouhari and her daughter have been running for more than a year. But when you’re running from a neo-Nazi Internet site that called for the outspoken housing activist to be hanged from the nearest tree, there’s nowhere to hide.

Terrified by the cybervenom and the campaign of threats it inspired, the two stuffed everything they could into their car 15 months ago and left their Pennsylvania home for a new beginning in suburban Seattle. Within a month, the phone calls started again: “You better get a will.” A bloodied rabbit was left outside their door. They moved, again and again. But it didn’t stop.

Last month, Jouhari finally got some help: The Department of Housing and Urban Development filed suit against the Web site operator for alleged violation of federal fair housing laws. It is the first time the federal government has sought civil rights sanctions against the operator of a hate-based Web site.

Philadelphia neo-Nazi Ryan Wilson, who has yet to respond to the suit, had posted Jouhari’s picture on his Web site and called her a “race traitor” for her work against housing discrimination. Her daughter, Danielle, was labeled a “mongrel” because her father is black. The site showed an image of Jouhari’s office exploding--and provided a convenient link to recipes for homemade bombs. If found liable, Wilson faces at least $22,000 in fines and tens of thousands of dollars more in damages.

“This case is unbelievable,” HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo said. “In some ways, we like to think we’re past this, that we’re not this crude, we’re not this ugly,” he said of the racial hatred in the country. “It’s wishful thinking on our part. . . . We have the capacity to be just as mean and violent as we ever were.”

To Jouhari--who for more than a year sought the FBI’s help in an attempt to move and change her identity--the HUD suit represents the opportunity to perhaps recoup thousands of dollars spent in her attempt to escape her stalkers.

Next week, she and Danielle, 18, will move out of their fourth home in 15 months and head for a new state--packing new hopes that, this time, no one will find them. “I lose my job, I leave my stuff, my kid hates me,” Jouhari said, “and then this madness starts all over again.”

Jouhari is hardly alone. The number of Web sites espousing racism, anti-Semitism, violence and other forms of extremism has more than doubled since 1997, to more than 1,400, according to the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center. Individuals who are their targets become immediately visible to a worldwide audience of millions.

Like Jouhari, however, some of the targets are fighting back.

A year ago--in a case that broke legal ground on how victims of menacing but indirect threats could seek recourse--two abortion clinics and four doctors in Portland, Ore., won a $107.9-million civil judgment against anti-abortion activists who made “wanted” posters containing their names. The case is now being appealed.

In Los Angeles, the U.S. attorney’s office last year won criminal convictions, the first of their kind, against two men who sent threatening hate mail to minority college students, among others, over the Internet.

However, criminal charges against Web site operators are tougher to prove than those involving direct e-mail, said Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Gennaco, who prosecuted the Los Angeles cases.

“When you receive an e-mail, you have not done anything to reach out to the sender. . . . You’re a passive recipient of a threat,” he said. A Web site operator, on the other hand, could argue that the target of a threat logged on to the site by choice and thus could have avoided suffering any fear or emotional distress. “It makes it more difficult to prosecute,” Gennaco said.

Those who post threats on the Internet could be charged under federal incitement statutes, Gennaco said, but only if their site offers a direct reward for acts of violence. “If I put on my Web site, for example, ‘Anyone who is interested in killing X, I will give you $1,000 to do it,’ I think that’s a prosecutable case.”

Ultimately, the most important question in the Jouhari case and others is how far the 1st Amendment goes in protecting threatening posters, fliers and Internet content. The Portland abortion case likely will be the first to reach the Supreme Court on the issue: If threats are not shielded by the 1st Amendment, and they clearly are not, what constitutes a true threat?

Don Black, an ex-Ku Klux Klansman whose Stormfront site is believed to be the oldest white supremacist site on the World Wide Web, said the Jouhari case amounts to government censorship. “It’s an outrageous reach of power, and it is an attempt to censor content on the Net,” Black said. “Even though the content of Wilson’s site was pushing it a little bit, it’s still protected speech under the Constitution.”

Wilson, whom The Times was unable to contact, is reportedly going to computer school and has been trying to “mind his own business,” said August Kreis III, an associate of Wilson’s who is information director for Posse Comitatus of the U.S., a group with anti-federal government and white supremacist views.

“They’re using a little-known HUD housing law to go after him. Now, where . . . is he going to get the money to go after the federal government?” Kreis said.

Kreis said it is impossible for Wilson’s threats to have followed Jouhari to her new home. “How the hell did Ryan Wilson get all the way to Washington state? Ryan can’t even afford an attorney. To tell you the truth, Ryan’s been saying maybe he’ll put his Web site back up now. . . . What’s he got to lose?”

Jouhari, 43, was a single mother working as a fair housing specialist for the Reading-Berks County Human Relations Council in eastern Pennsylvania. Her research found substantial discrimination against minorities. According to her statistics, 97.8% of minorities in Berks County lived in the 10.4 square miles of Reading. The other 864 square miles, much of it rural farmland, was almost entirely white.

Alarmed by what that said about her community, Jouhari in 1995 helped organize a local conflict resolution task force. She talked about the problem on TV; she encouraged cultural diversity education in the schools.

Troubles Began Two Years Ago

Although Jouhari had clashed with local Klan leaders before, her real troubles started in 1998, when Wilson--who ran the now-defunct neo-Nazi United States of America Nationalist Party--posted her picture on his Web site.

The caption said: “This ‘woman’ works at the Reading-Berks Human Relations Council and has received warnings in the mail that she is a race traitor and she should beware. Traitors like this should beware, for in our day, they will be hung from the neck from the nearest tree or lamp post.” Later, a note was added stating that Jouhari had a “mongrel” daughter. An image of Jouhari’s office posted on the site blew up every five seconds.

The site also contained links to formulas for making homemade explosives, including “mail box bombs” and fertilizer bombs.

Frustrated that the Justice Department did not appear to be able to make a criminal case against Wilson, Jouhari went to the Reading police department. She told them of the 30 to 40 phone calls a night she was receiving, some of them playing funeral dirges, some simply filled with obscenities.

She reported it when her home was broken into, her tires slashed, her office vandalized. She called them when a white pickup tried to run her off a road.

She showed them pictures of white supremacist church pastor Roy Frankhouser, a former KKK grand dragon, sitting daily outside her office window.

Frankhouser--who has a history of criminal convictions ranging from supplying dynamite for a Michigan school bus bombing to obstructing justice in a synagogue vandalism investigation--has denied harassing or threatening Jouhari.

But Jouhari said he sat outside her office nearly every day for eight months, sometimes snapping pictures of her at her desk.

Still, the local police said there was no basis for a criminal prosecution to protect her.

“We were satisfied that we did the right thing under the circumstances,” said department spokesman Gerald Toor.

Caught up in the mess was Danielle, who had a fiance and a lifelong network of friends in Reading. Danielle was proud of her mother’s work against racism. After everything that has happened, she still is.

But Jouhari said that, within a month of getting her daughter an unlisted phone line, Danielle started getting harassing calls. “I know what your mother’s room looks like,” one caller said.

“Someone was at my track meets,” Danielle said. “Like five track meets in a row, the same guy, just standing there staring at me.”

Jouhari said her daughter “was a basket case, just a mess. Very angry at me.”

Jouhari decided it was time to get out of town, fast.

“We loaded up our car with what would fit. Left all the furniture, the clothes,” Jouhari said. That was Dec. 2, 1998. She had $1,000 in back vacation pay in her purse.

But where to start a new life? A TV cameraman she knew suggested his hometown of Silverdale.

The FBI told her she had to be careful, even there. Don’t use your name or Social Security number anywhere, an agent advised. Don’t open a checking account. Don’t use your own name to get a telephone. Don’t get a driver’s license.

Harassers Caught Up With Them Quickly

Jouhari was careful. She got a job at a temporary agency and cashed all of her paychecks, paying bills by money order. But by New Year’s Eve, the phone calls started. The two women moved twice more. The harassment followed.

Not long ago, Jouhari found a bullet in her kitchen cabinet. Then someone broke in and left all the lights on. And someone still phones and hangs up. Danielle sleeps clutching a kitchen knife. Jouhari has a gun.

“What we’re basically going to do is leave again, and leave for good,” Jouhari said this week. “We can’t stay here. It’s just getting too hot.”

HUD filed its suit under the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it a federal civil offense to threaten or intimidate a housing employee.

It seeks $22,000 in civil penalties--which if awarded would go to the government--and substantial additional damages, which would go to Jouhari to help reimburse her for lost wages, moving costs and emotional distress.

Next week, Jouhari and her daughter will be Cuomo’s guests at a meeting in Washington, D.C., where she will describe her case for other federal housing workers and begin the long process of helping HUD lawyers prepare their case. Then, they will look for a new home.

“I just want to get my life back,” Jouhari says. “I’m not going to get enough from [Wilson] to reestablish my life. . . . I truly believed the government would not let us down. Never did I believe, after all this time, we would still be sitting here like this, with nowhere to go.” The HUD suit, she said, “at least has restored some of my faith.”