Interview with the landlord of the punched Seattle Nazi

Desdemona Despair

By James Galasyn
20 September 2017

(Desdemona Despair) – I had the opportunity to speak with the landlord of the “Seattle Nazi” who got punched on Sunday, 17 September 2017. Sarah (not her real name) manages the apartment building where he lives, and she has told him that she won’t be renewing his lease, which expires in 60 days. Here are some of her thoughts on the situation.

When Sarah first saw the punch video, she thought, “Holy shit! That’s my tenant. I guess my day tomorrow is going to be fun.” She watched the video over and over again. She told me, “The thing that shocked me the most is that I talked to him on Sunday. I got a noise complaint about him singing – well, screaming – a Nirvana song at the top of his lungs. His interactions with me have always been incredibly respectful; he’s never been disrespectful. I said, ‘Hey, it’s Sunday afternoon, people are trying to have a quiet day, and you’re screaming at the top of your lungs.’”

He apologized and said, “I’m going downtown to have some fun.”

Apparently, Sarah had an inkling about his state of mind. She said, “Stay out of trouble. Seriously, stay out of trouble. I don’t want to see you on the news.”

The next day, after the video had made its way around the world, Sarah texted him, after giving her boss the heads up and consulting an attorney. He came to the office, and she asked, “How’s it going?”

He said, “It’s going.”

“I saw the video.”

He was surprised. “You did?”

“I sure did. What the fuck were you thinking?”

He took off his sunglasses. Sarah could see that one eye was swollen. She said, “I’ll be honest with you: you deserved every bit of that fucking punch.”

Sarah went on: “You’ve lived here for a year. We’ve had some pretty crazy conversations. You consider yourself to be a nationalist, but not necessarily a white nationalist. We’ve had conversations, and we’ve disagreed. Never have I looked at you and saw you as a racist, disgusting human. Now I’m questioning my judgment.”

He was quiet. “I never expected that I’d get the reaction I did.”

“What did you think would happen?”

Sarah explained to me, “Sometimes, he’ll say and do things to get a reaction. He said he wanted to started a conversation.”

She replied, “You saying that makes me even more mad. That fact that you did it wearing a swastika, a symbol that’s so disgusting, there’s no moral explanation that will ever make sense. Let me explain: my line is very firm as far as that symbol is concerned; there is nothing that will ever change my mind. Nothing you can say will make sense.

“Anyone who associates themselves with that symbol is deplorable to me. That fact that you don’t have the common sense to know that, or if you did and did it anyway, makes you really fucked up in the head. It makes me question my judgment. I thought you were a decent kind of person, and now I’m questioning that. And that makes me angry.”

He replied, “I’m not that person.”

“But no one’s ever going to know that now. I don’t give a shit that it was a ‘social experiment’”.

Sarah had to explain the situation that he had created for her, and he wasn’t getting it. “You put me in a position where all of the other tenants are questioning their safety, because they’re afraid of what craziness you’ll bring. People were able to track you down on social media, how do you know someone won’t track you to the building? And as much as I hate to do it, my concerns are also about your safety: the other tenants might want to get pitchforks and come after you.”

He still didn’t get it. Sarah told me, “It felt like I was talking to a child who had made a really poor decision.”

He asked, “What are you telling me?”

“This is your 60-day notice. If there was a way to kick you out now, I would. You have jeopardized the safety of people in this building. People may show up and decide to destroy my building. Or question me as a black woman: ‘How can you let this person live here?’”

He just sat there. He seemed to think the situation was a momentary thing. He didn’t realize how big this is.

Sarah told me, “I can only go by my interactions with him for the last 10 months. Other people in the building have had good interactions with him. The building is multi-cultural and multi-generational. And as people have been finding out on Day 2, and Day 3 for some, everyone is questioning themselves: this is someone that we welcomed into our community. If these are his views, that’s fucked; if these aren’t his views that’s fucked, because he has no moral mind.”

He was focused on the wrong things, like his expensive headphones. He said that somebody had stolen his headphones when he was knocked out.

Sarah said, “Who gives a shit about your fucking headphones? Do you not understand what you did?”

I asked her if he learned anything from this experience.

“I don’t think he’s capable of internalizing or learning. He said the media response is ‘just another moral hysteria’, that the media hysteria that has happened is exactly the same as the Satanic child-sex scandal in the 80s.” This is possibly a reference to the Martensville satanic sex scandal.

“Are you fucking kidding me? There’s no correlation.”

“He gets parts of it, but he doesn’t seem the picture as a whole. He Gets my point of view and what I’m saying about people in the building, but he doesn’t get that my view is the view of a lot of people. He thinks, ‘They’re all wrong.’”

Sarah asked him if he’ll wear the swastika again, and he said that he will not. So maybe he learned something.

“I feel awful, I don’t want this problem, and now I’m making it someone else’s problem. People call me for rental verification: ‘Would you rent to him again?’ My answer is no, but it puts me in a bad position: should I lie, just to get him out?”

I told her that she has handled the situation about as well as possible.

“I had to refrain from punching him in the other eye.”