Burning Hate: Criminal Lawyer

Augustus Sol Invictus has been many things. When he reaches his 40th birthday at the end of this month, he will have been a libertarian, a candidate for Senate, a Presidential hopeful, a Proud Boy, a Thelemite, a poet, a licensed real estate agent, a goat-slaughtering blood-drinking pagan, a father, a step-father, a husband and an ex-husband twice over, a self-proclaimed god and prophet, an accused domestic abuser, a traditionalist Catholic, a Holocaust denier, a practicing attorney, a headline speaker at the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017, the son of an accused sex trafficker, and a prominent white nationalist activist and organizer. And for the last month, he has been incarcerated at the Orange County Jail in Orlando, Florida awaiting extradition. He was arrested by the Winter Park Police Department on June 26 on a fugitive warrant. On July 20, he was booked into the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail, at which point the indictment was unsealed: Augustus Sol Invictus, born Austin Mitchell Gillespie, was indicted by an Albemarle County grand jury in April on a felony charge of burning an object in a public place with the intent to intimidate for his participation in the August 11, 2017 torch march at the University of Virginia.

Like his fellow torch march defendant William Fears, Augustus Invictus arrived in Charlottesville in August 2017 after a long summer of attending right wing rallies. The movement was growing. There was a rally somewhere in the country almost every weekend with speakers like Joe Biggs (the former Infowars reporter better known today as a Proud Boy leader convicted of seditious conspiracy), Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Kyle Chapman, or Matthew Heimbach. In May of 2017, Andrew Anglin declared in a post on The Daily Stormer that it would be the "Summer of Hate." In June, as the two men were planning the Unite the Right rally, Elliott Kline of Identity Evropa texted Richard Spencer, "This is going to be a violent summer." And it was. Individual acts of violence at these rallies were celebrated and memeified. When Kyle Chapman, a leader of the paramilitary arm of the Proud Boys called the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, beat a counter protester with a stick at a rally in Berkeley in March, he was dubbed "Based Stickman." A month later, at another rally in Berkeley, Identity Evropa's Nathan Damigo punched a woman in the face, a brutal assault that still pops up as a GIF used in right wing chats to express enthusiasm for violence against counter protesters. All across the country, the momentum was building. At rallies for free speech, rallies against "Sharia law," and rallies to save Confederate monuments, Augustus Invictus was a headline speaker at events in Orlando, Austin, Boston, Huntington Beach, Chapel Hill, and Washington DC. In a fake southern accent that fades in and out and sounds like Foghorn Leghorn doing an impression of JFK, Invictus preached a consistent message: it was time for the right wing to unite against a common enemy and prepare for a coming civil war.

In May of 2017, Kyle Chapman, the founder of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, invited Invictus, the organization's second in command, to speak at a rally in Boston. In an eight minute speech, Invictus told the crowd that "a new civil war is upon you," and they have "nothing left but force of arms." In his parting words, he polled the crowd for their group affiliations. There were some exuberant libertarians and a polite smattering of republicans. A man in the crowd yelled, "What about nationalists?" and the crowd whooped and shouted. There were Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, and Proud Boys, too, according to the audience poll. In what would become a theme of his speeches that summer, Invictus chastised them for "bicker[ing] like children" on the internet, exhorting them to "unite the right wing in this country" against their common enemy, as he pointed up the hill at the counter protesters.

Later that month, Invictus hosted his own rally in Orlando. Standing in front of a large Confederate flag and an Identity Evropa banner, Invictus read a poem in his bizarre fake southern drawl about Confederate honor and waxed poetic about his memories of looking at the Confederate monument in the park when he visited nearby businesses. "Reconstruction is over," he said as he paced in a tight circle in front of the large, wrinkled battle flag, before pivoting from discussion of the statue to his core message: uniting the right. Video of the event shows it was sparsely attended, with no counter protesters visible or audible during over an hour of speeches, but Invictus had expected resistance. A few days before the event, Invictus was a guest on Christopher Cantwell's Radical Agenda podcast to promote it. Cantwell asked, half in jest, "Is there anything you want people to bring? Torches, pitchforks, anything like that?" Invictus responded sincerely, "Yeah, sticks, shields, you know, leather gloves... if you've got a concealed permit, bring your firearm." Invictus instructed Cantwell's listeners who planned to attend, "Come prepared for a fight because antifa is planning to show up and so is Black Lives Matter."

Two weeks later, on June 10, Invictus took the lead in organizing an Orlando event as part of a series of coordinated, nationwide anti-Muslim, anti-immigration demonstrations put on by Act for America. Invictus stood on the side of a busy street next to a large banner reading "END ISLAMIC IMMIGRATION" held by members of Identity Evropa and blamed violent crime on immigrants. In another appearance on Christopher Cantwell's podcast that week, he specifies that Identity Evropa attended the rally to support him, despite their opposition to Act for America's pro-Israel position. On that June 12th episode of the Radical Agenda, the two men discuss the upcoming rally in Charlottesville. According to texts entered into evidence a later lawsuit against the rally's organizers, Invictus himself had been the organizer to invite Cantwell to be a speaker at Unite the Right, having sent the text just the week prior. Cantwell was looking forward to the event, but asks "What specifically is the statue that they're rallying around?" The rally was, allegedly, about preserving the Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues in downtown Charlottesville. But Invictus admits he doesn't know, but assures Cantwell it isn't really about the statues anyway. It's about uniting the right, just like he's been saying all summer. And just two weeks later, Cantwell would hear Invictus make that point again when both men made speeches at a rally in Washington DC. Invictus opened his speech by saying, "For the past few months, all I've been talking about is unite the right. Unite the right. Unite the right." He exhorted listeners to stop fighting each other and fight the real enemies: communists and the media. He urges the crowd to arm themselves, to prepare for revolution, to make a blacklist of the media. "This is a war," he told them, just as he'd told crowds in cities across the country.

For Augustus Invictus, as for the entire movement, the "Summer of Hate" culminated here in Charlottesville. The long, violent summer they'd planned for, participated in, and celebrated ended when James Alex Fields, Jr drove his car through a crowd of counter protesters, that "common enemy" the Alt Right was at war with according to Invictus. On the eve of the main event, Invictus was there at the torch march with hundreds of others, torch in one hand and cell phone in the other. He live streamed much of the event for his followers who couldn't be there. The footage is shaky and dark. There seems to be a sweat or grease smear on the lens that gives it a gauzy, dream like quality.

As the march moved through the University of Virginia grounds, independent journalist Ford Fischer asked Invictus what the torches represent. Invictus hedges, saying that's a better question for the organizers. Fischer presses, saying "You're holding it. What does it mean to you?" Invictus again refuses to answer, saying, "That's like asking a Catholic at Christmas Mass what's that candle stand for? I think the priest would be a better person to ask." But Augustus Invictus was one of the organizers of the rally, most Catholics would be able to tell you the lit candles represent Christ as the light of the world as described in the gospel of John, and Invictus himself had only just finished joking with his viewers that "somebody forgot the pitchforks at home, so all we got are torches."

As the marchers descended the steps of the Rotunda and begin to encircle the small group of counter protesters at the base of the statue, trapping them there, Invictus was very near the front of the line. He walked his viewers around the statue along the inner circle of the march as it closed in around the statue. He panned the camera up to the figure of Thomas Jefferson atop the comically large base, shouting to make himself heard by his viewers over someone nearby screaming "RACE TRAITORS HANG FIRST!" at the students who are now completely trapped by the flame wielding mob. He ends the video by declaring the event a "total victory" and says the rally in the morning is "the most important rally of the year," or even the decade.

At a bond hearing before Judge Cheryl Higgins on July 25, the Albemarle County Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney made indirect reference to Invictus' last major run-in with the law. It was noted repeatedly that the case did not result in a conviction, but in considering bond on these charges, there is value in exploring his behavior the last time a judge released him on bond. In December of 2019, it was alleged that Invictus threatened, choked, and abducted his then-wife at gunpoint from their home in South Carolina. He was charged with kidnapping, domestic violence of an aggravated nature, and the use of a weapon during a crime of violence.

...let his own journal passages speak for themselves: "Victims will be sacrificed; politicians will be assassinated; wars will be begun. You know these things will happen, yet you will not stop me... And yet - though I am quite easy to find - you will not come put a bullet in my head to stop what you find so objectionable from coming to fruition. You act as though this is because of your reverence for the law - but you only hide behind the law to mask your cowardice... There is no moral reason behind your inaction: you are simply too scared to pull a trigger. And when the day finally comes, and you gloat that you knew it all along, and you say, 'someone should have stopped him' - know that their blood is on your hands, too.

 - A passage from Augustus Invictus' personal journal as read to the court by Anna Arceneaux at a February 2020 bond hearing in South Carolina

Despite a February 2020 hearing during which the victim pleaded for her life, telling the court that she had suffered six years of violent abuse at the hands of her husband and reading passages from his own journals detailing the violent fantasies he would enact as the God Emperor of the New America, Invictus was released on bond in March of 2020. According to a sworn affidavit from an Orange County Florida sheriff's deputy, the no contact order issued by the judge in South Carolina did not stop Invictus from making repeated contact with his wife and her children from a prior marriage.

Neither the resulting aggravated stalking charge in Florida nor the underlying domestic violence case in South Carolina resulted in a conviction. The stalking case was dismissed as "not suitable for prosecution" by a Florida prosecutor. A jury in South Carolina acquitted Invictus on April 19, 2022 when the victim failed to appear at trial. The issue before Judge Higgins today was not one of criminal history - there is technically none - but of past behavior. Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Lawton Tufts read portions of the deputy's affidavit describing repeated violations of the no contact order in the spring of 2020, including text messages, attested to by the deputy, that Invictus sent to his wife's minor children, instructing them, with the implicit threat of violence, to arrange a meeting between him and their mother. Invictus sat in the courtroom stone faced as the prosecutor described the affidavit's recounting of Invictus telling his 13 year old stepdaughter "your mother is a whore" at a public park in April 2020. The deputy's affidavit also revealed that "through a confidential source, messages were obtained originating from Augustus's cell phone indicating to others that he wanted Anna found." These messages contained photographs of his wife's vehicle and license plate. It was at this moment that Invictus himself, in the role of defendant and not defense attorney, blurted out an objection, saying none of that was true.

Augustus Sol Invictus bonded out of the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail on the evening of July 25, 2023. Judge Higgins ordered him to return to Florida and not leave Florida except to attend court here on these charges or to attend to matters in an ongoing custody battle related to a three year old daughter he has with a woman in New Jersey. He is not to possess firearms and is prohibited from making direct or indirect contact with any victim in the case, which the judge ruled included making any public statements about the case. Oddly, his attorney made no objection to this condition. His case has been set for trial March 20-22, 2024.

Author's note: Augustus Sol Invictus has not been convicted of a crime of violence. Information about allegations of domestic abuse committed against multiple partners was gathered from police reports, court filings, public statements made by his former partners, and national publications.