Alt-Right Leader Richard Spencer Accused of Years of Domestic Violence and Abuse
Richard Spencer, the man who claims to have coined the term "alt-right" as a polite company way to say "white nationalism," is getting a divorce. If this were a normal divorce proceeding, that wouldn't be news, but Spencer is accused of physically and verbally abusing his wife, Nina Kouprianova, almost as soon as the two were married.
At the Huffington Post, Lyz Lenz details the allegations from Kouprianova, and they're unsettling to read. Kouprianova describes Spencer waking her up in the middle of the night to scream at her, him dragging her down the stairs to force her to watch a movie with him, and threatening to break her nose. When he spoke to Lenz, Spencer denied that he'd ever physically abused Kouprianova, but admits that he said "terrible things" to her because she so "frustrated" him. But the judge in the case has refused to seal the records, and they tell a different story:
In an affidavit filed in June, Kouprianova claims that her eight-year marriage to Spencer was rife with abuse—emotional, financial and physical. In July 2014, when Kouprianova was four months pregnant, according to the affidavit, Spencer pushed her down and held her by her neck and her jaw. She has pictures of the bruising.
In an email about the incident, he apologized, saying he felt “terrible.” There was also the time he pushed her into the stove when she was pregnant, she says. He would wake her up screaming at her, telling her to kill herself. She recorded hours of him screaming at her, some of which she transcribed and included in the affidavit.
The story includes multiple screenshots of text messages that Spencer sent Kouprianova telling her to kill herself. "I would actually respect you," he adds in one.
Spencer has for years tried to be the khaki-wearing and pomaded face of a "respectable" white nationalism. He's claimed that, despite both his involvement in the deadly Charlottesville rally and his leading a series of Nazi salutes to celebrate Trump's election, his ideology is nonviolent and that he hopes for a "peaceful ethnic cleansing" of the U.S.
As Lenz describes in her article, the accusations of domestic violence once again undercuts the image that Spencer has worked so hard to cultivate: that white nationalism can be free of all the barbarism and violence that it's been entangled with throughout history.
