An ACLU lawyer defended racists’ free speech rights. Now she’s running for Congress

Lawyer Leslie Mehta is competing with military veteran Herb Jones in a Democratic primary in the 1st Congressional District. (provided photo)

After growing up learning about the Civil Rights Movement and the importance of people being free to advocate for their beliefs, Leslie Mehta says providing legal help to the racist organizers of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was one of the hardest things she’s done as an attorney.

Mehta, who’s now running for Congress in Virginia as a Democrat, was serving as legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia seven years ago when the chapter made a controversial decision to represent rally organizer Jason Kessler in litigation against Charlottesville officials. 

The ACLU and Kessler won that lawsuit, which dealt with the specifics of how he and his white supremacist allies would be permitted to protest in a strongly Democratic city vehemently opposed to the racist groups coming to town to rally against efforts to remove a Confederate statue. After clashes between rival groups broke out and police lost control of the situation, a white supremacist demonstrator drove into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one person and injuring more than 30 others.

In an interview this month, Mehta said she and the ACLU took the case at Kessler’s request under the impression it would be a peaceful protest. The group would have acted differently, she said, if a “crystal ball” had foretold the violence that occurred that day. 

But Mehta defended a more old-school approach to free speech that’s fallen out of favor with many modern progressives, saying First Amendment principles mean little if they only protect speech that’s popular or agreeable to people in power.

“I’m a Black woman who was raised in the South. I understand the implications of all this,” said Mehta, who lives in Chesterfield County and grew up in a small town in North Carolina. “And certainly it tests your belief in the principles aligned with the First Amendment when you’re representing people whom not only do you disagree with, but you find reprehensible. That is what leaders do. Leaders take on hard cases.”

Herb Jones, who’s competing with Mehta in a Democratic primary in the 1st Congressional District, sees it differently. Mehta’s role in what happened in Charlottesville, he said, would be a “fatal wound” in a general-election campaign against U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Westmoreland. And he said it’s not something Democratic primary voters should overlook.

“To represent Nazis and then think you can represent the values of people in this district, that’s a stretch,” said Jones, who is also Black.

Jones said his own family knows the effects of racist violence, because his grandfather was lynched in South Carolina by “a gang of murderous, low-life thugs just like those in Charlottesville.”

“This was not a First Amendment case, as some want people to believe,” Jones said in email. “The Nazis had a permit to protest in an area that was much safer than downtown Charlottesville. This was about safety.” 

Jones ran against Wittman in 2022 in a Republican-leaning district that runs from the Richmond suburbs to the Northern Neck, Middle Peninsula and outskirts of Hampton Roads.

Two years ago, Wittman defeated Jones — a military veteran and business owner who formerly served as the elected treasurer of New Kent County — by roughly 14 percentage points. Wittman would likely still be the favorite no matter which Democrat he faces. But the district could potentially be more competitive for Democrats in a presidential year when former President Donald Trump is trying to return to the White House.

Mehta’s campaign portrayed Jones’s criticisms of her work in the Charlottesville case as deflecting focus away from the goal of beating Wittman.

“I hate everything Unite the Right represents, but I believe defending our Constitution is an existential imperative,” Mehta said in a written statement responding to Jones. “It’s sad that Mr. Jones chooses to attack my work defending the Constitution when we have an election denier as a member of congress.”

Though Wittman condemned the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, he was one of many Republicans who voted against certifying the election results from Pennsylvania. He also signed a legal brief supporting Texas’ efforts to dispute presidential results from other states.

Like Jan. 6, the Unite the Right rally is one of the most prominent examples in recent American history of violence erupting at a far-right protest.

As the August 2017 rally approached, Charlottesville officials tried to revoke a permit Kessler had obtained from the city in June to hold the event at the Robert E. Lee statue that once stood in Emancipation Park. Local officials attempted to modify the permit less than a week before the rally, resulting in last-minute legal wrangling over where it would be held. 

The city said it wanted to move the rally to the bigger but less centrally located McIntire Park due to safety concerns. A federal judge sided with the ACLU and Kessler, ruling the city hadn’t presented enough concrete evidence of safety threats to justify revoking a permit the city had already granted.

The wisdom of the city’s attempt to change the rally location was a point of contention in a post-event review commissioned by city officials. A report prepared for the city by former federal prosecutor Tim Heaphy found that Charlottesville’s police chief at the time raised concerns that trying to move the rally would complicate matters by forcing law enforcement to rework public safety plans and prepare for the possibility of crowds gathering in two locations instead of one. Some officials also felt there was no guarantee moving the rally would work as intended, since Kessler could sue or refuse to comply with the city’s directives about where to go.

Those concerns were raised with the Charlottesville City Council in a closed session, according to Heaphy’s report. But the council chose to press ahead with the ultimately unsuccessful effort to move the rally.

The post-rally report also indicated some law enforcement officials felt the city’s case for moving the rally was weak and wanted the city to lose the lawsuit. The report says a police captain suggested the chief at the time didn’t want an affidavit containing information about potential violence to “look too good,” but the chief denied intentionally leaving intelligence out of the affidavit that was presented to the judge.

Those details weren’t immediately known in the aftermath of the rally, when former Gov. Terry McAuliffe and others accused the ACLU of contributing to the violence by helping Kessler defeat the plan to move the rally. 

At the time, former ACLU of Virginia executive director Claire Gastanaga fired back, saying her organization had simply stood up for constitutional principles and the violence was instead a result of poor planning and execution by law enforcement and government officials who were supposed to keep people safe no matter where the rally occurred.

Mehta said the litigation she was involved in was limited to the specifics of the city’s attempt to change the permit and shouldn’t be construed as an endorsement of Unite the Right or excusing the violence that occurred after the city’s lawyers failed to convince the judge there was an imminent safety threat.

“If they thought that there were safety issues, that was their responsibility to make that point,” Mehta said.

Mehta’s work as a civil rights lawyer took a turn after her oldest daughter, Brooke, was diagnosed with Rett Syndrome, a debilitating genetic disorder. Mehta left the ACLU and devoted more of her time to caring for her child and advocating for better research into the disease. Brooke died in 2021 at the age of five. 

Mehta now works as chief of staff and legal counsel to the CEO for the Richmond Metropolitan Transportation Authority, but she’s taken a leave of absence from that role to run for office. She said her advocacy work on health care helped her connect with Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Prince William, who has supported efforts to get more federal research funding for Rett Syndrome.

Spanberger, an emerging Democratic leader who is currently the only member of her party running for governor in 2025, gave Mehta’s campaign a boost last month by endorsing Mehta in the primary against Jones.

“I’ve known Leslie ever since working together to increase funding to fight rare diseases,” Spanberger said in a statement announcing the endorsement. “I was inspired by her bravery, as she had just lost her young daughter to a disease. Virginians will be fortunate to have such an engaged representative working to improve their lives — because I know she will bring her tenacity, intelligence, and passion to the U.S. House every day.”

Mehta has also been endorsed by numerous members of the Virginia General Assembly, including Sens. Ghazala Hashmi, D-Chesterfield, Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach and Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, who chairs the Senate Democratic Caucus.

Jones, who was endorsed by former Gov. Ralph Northam, questioned why prominent Democrats are putting a “thumb on the scale” in the primary. He said Republican voters in the GOP-friendly district are unlikely to vote for an ACLU lawyer, and some Democratic voters would be turned off by her role in the Charlottesville case.

“If she wins the primary, she is going to get clobbered in the general,” Jones said.

Mehta said she doesn’t see the Unite the Right litigation as a liability for her campaign, because people she’s spoken to seem to understand her point of view when she explains what the case was and wasn’t about. She also highlighted other civil rights cases the ACLU of Virginia was involved in during her time with the organization, such as transgender student Gavin Grimm’s battle against his local school board over bathroom policies and efforts to fight the Trump administration’s moves to ban travelers from predominantly Muslim countries.

Regardless of whether she or the ACLU approve or disapprove of a group seeking legal help, Mehta said, “laws have to be applied equally.”

“I believe in the First Amendment,” Mehta said. “But I also believe that it must be peaceful. And if it’s not peaceful, folks who are violent need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

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