Buzzfeed News: A Woman Who Narrowly Escaped Being Run Over By A Car At The “Unite The Right” Rally Said It Was “A Complete Terror Scene”

By Christopher Miller, BuzzfeedNews. Read the full article here.

The speeding Dodge Challenger barely missed Marissa Blair — only because her then-fiancé Marcus Martin pushed her out of the way. But it struck Martin, shattering his leg and sending him flying into the air.

The couple were among the dozens of counterprotesters who had turned out in downtown Charlottesville on Aug. 12, 2017, to demonstrate against the hundreds of violent white nationalists who had descended on the Virginia city as part of the weekend-long “Unite the Right” rally. More than four years later, Blair recounted in a federal courtroom in Charlottesville the horrors of that day, saying it was a scene of “complete terror” that left her and Martin with physical and emotional wounds and one of their friends dead on the pavement.

Blair took the witness stand Monday, as the civil trial of a federal lawsuit against 24 white supremacists who organized the “Unite the Right” rally entered its third week. The suit, brought on behalf of Blair and eight other plaintiffs by the civil rights nonprofit Integrity First for America, is using the 150-year-old Ku Klux Klan Act to try to hold the rally organizers accountable for what they claim was racially motivated violence.