Kiah Morris’ exit from politics in September 2018 in the face of persistent racial harassment briefly placed the national spotlight on racism in Vermont. VTDigger and Vermont Public Radio teamed up a year later to return to Bennington, where Morris lives and once served as a lawmaker, to tell the full story about what happened, and how those involved are reckoning with the harsh realities it exposed. One central question to our reporting over the past few months: What has changed since Morris rang the alarm? The sobering answer: not much.
VPR is airing its own five-part series this week on the impact of Kiah Morris’ departure from politics. Tune in on the radio or stream the series on VPR.org.
Kiah Morris was working for an online travel agency in Chicago when the economic recession hit in the late 2000s. Like some 8.8 million people across America, she was laid off and started looking for new opportunities elsewhere. “I had some friends out this way, came out to visit, and just fell in love,” she said of a trip to Vermont at that time.
Morris was naturally drawn to the green valleys and fresh air. “It was lovely to come and just breathe,” she recalled during a recent interview. Morris wasn’t necessarily looking to move to Vermont, but a job opportunity came her way in Bennington. “So I took advantage of it, and decided to stay,” she said.
Morris was born and raised in Chicago and lived in several other cities, including Seattle and the nation’s capital. Upon arriving in Bennington, she recalled “being struck by how few persons of color that I actually saw on the streets.”
Bennington County is home to 37,125 people, according to the latest Census figures, 95.5% of whom are white, 2.2% Hispanic, 1.3% African American, and 1.2% Asian. That makes Morris one of about 285 black people in the southwest county, which borders New York to the west and Massachusetts due south.
After attending local meetings, getting to know community leaders, and becoming part of the local creative scene as a spoken word artist, Morris announced in 2014 that she was running as a Democratic candidate for a seat in Vermont’s House of Representatives. She won, becoming the only African American woman lawmaker in the Statehouse.
Max Misch, who hails from Queens, New York, arrived in Bennington soon after Morris. Lisa Shapiro, Misch’s ex-wife who made the move with him, said they found the cost of living lower and the pace of life in Bennington slower than the bustling region they left behind. Shapiro doesn’t expect Misch will ever move away from the town he now calls home.
“He has his gym on every corner,” she said of the street where Misch, a body-builder, now lives in an apartment. “He loves it here.” Plus, she added, “It’s primarily white.”
Morris doesn’t have any plans of leaving Bennington, either, despite the hateful rhetoric and online vitriol she has faced since moving to the county — much of it coming from Misch, an avowed white supremacist and Iraq war veteran.
Misch and Morris would come to play central roles in real-life drama that has placed a spotlight on divisions in Vermont around race, hate speech and gun rights: Misch as a hate-mongering promoter of white nationalism, and Morris as a symbol of diversity and change in a community still clinging to its past.
When Morris decided to quit the Legislature, in part because of relentless harassment coming from Misch, it made national news. “Black Female Lawmaker in Vermont Resigns After Racial Harassment,” read the New York Times headline. HuffPost made a mini-documentary about Morris, and she’s since been working with filmmakers to tell a longer version of her story.
Her decision also inspired a great deal of hand-wringing among state officials, lawmakers and advocates, who said something had to be done to protect Vermonters of color from the abuse that pushed Morris out of office. “This is not, and cannot be, who we are,” Gov. Phil Scott told high school students in September 2018, referencing Morris’ decision not to run for reelection, among other instances of hate speech and racism in Vermont. “We must do better,” he added.
But despite all the attention and discussion sparked by Morris’ decision, little has changed in Bennington or Vermont around the issue, with no legislation passed and local and state leaders tied to the case still in place. The Vermont Human Rights Commission is still looking into the matter, though details of the ongoing investigation are currently confidential.
While Bennington police and local officials have defended their actions upon receiving complaints from Morris and her family, newly obtained emails show both town and law enforcement leaders were concerned largely with their own reputations as investigations into their actions were underway.
Morris said all the noise about what did and didn’t happen to her, and whether there’s more officials could have done, has prevented anyone from taking concrete steps to address the underlying issues. “Of course I’m disappointed more hasn’t happened,” Morris said last week. “However, I don’t know how it would without all the facts coming out to the light.”
Over the past year, VTDigger and VPR have reviewed records of the Vermont attorney general’s investigation into harassment against Morris and taken multiple trips to Bennington to speak with more than a dozen people with links to Morris, Misch and local politics, in an attempt to understand exactly what happened, and why the initial reaction hasn’t led to more concrete action.
A ‘jarring moment of reality’
Morris, in her first run for office in 2014, said she knocked on just about every door in the legislative district. “It was overwhelmingly positive,” Morris said of that campaign. “I had people who were just happy to have someone listen to them, to actually listen to, not just say, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
It was about two years later, in August 2016, that Morris said she began to experience racial harassment online from Misch and other white supremacists.
A Twitter post from Misch, who says he gets a thrill and his “LOLs” out of harassing Morris, showed a cartoon caricature of a black person with the caption, “Sheeeit, I be representin dem white muhfugghuz of Bennington, gnome sayin?”
The tweet followed news that Morris had just won the Democratic primary in her 2016 bid to win reelection for a House seat from Bennington. “It was a wake-up call, pretty jarring moment of reality,” Morris said of Misch’s posting.
Misch has said that he sent that message to point out the “absurdity” of a black person representing a legislative district of mostly white people.
Morris and Misch soon came together in a Bennington courtroom. At that hearing on Dec. 1, 2016, the two educated Judge William Cohen about Twitter, from hashtags to tagging, then focused on the topic of the court proceeding — hate speech and allegations of stalking.
Morris, at the time, was seeking a one-year stalking order against Misch, for perceived threats including the online messages. Misch represented himself at that hearing. Morris testified that the tweets made her fear not just for her safety, but for the safety of her family as well. “This isn’t typical political banter, this is very hate-directed and very specific and intended to intimidate,” Morris told the judge.
There had been other incidents as well, Morris testified, including one on Election Day at the Bennington fire station polling place about a month earlier. She said Misch had stared at her for a long time in a “threatening way.”
Misch denied trying to intimidate Morris at the polling place and told Cohen his “online trolling” may alarm people, including Morris, but it’s speech protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“Well, some is and some’s not and it depends on what the speech is,” the judge replied, later agreeing to grant the stalking order prohibiting Misch from contacting Morris in public or online for a year.
There were other offline incidents that prompted reports from Morris and her husband, James Lawton, to police in 2016. The couple found swastikas painted on the trees in a cemetery near their home and reported a break-in at their residence where someone stole roughly 100 of her husband’s ties, leaving many scattered in the nearby cemetery. There was also racist literature that was slipped under the Bennington Democratic Party’s office door. Morris’ campaign sign had been prominently featured in a front window of the building.
Police say the swastikas had been painted on the trees so long ago that moss had started growing over the paint. “The fact is,” Lawton said, “you have a person of color, walking on a trail where these things are, and they’re supposed to think that they’re safe?”
Misch, while admitting to trolling Morris online, has denied any role in other actions directed at Morris and Lawton that had led to police involvement. “I don’t know anyone who did any of this stuff,” Misch said.
After that no-stalking order expired, Misch went back to harassing Morris on social media, writing in July 2018, “Every time you attend a political rally at the Four Corners (intersection) or another local venue and I’m aware of the event, I will troll the hell out of you and the other subversives there. Maybe I’ll bring a friend or three with me too.”
In an interview with state police as part of the attorney general’s investigation, Lawton talked of going online to engage white supremacists to find out more about them and their tactics. He told VTDigger it wasn’t just Misch who was directing racially harassing messages at Morris.
“It isn’t just about what he did. It’s what he brought to us, which is the national hate,” Lawton said. “And that’s what really made it harsh. That’s what really made it bad … so we’re not just dealing with Max.”
Morris put it another way, “Who decides to take up the charge and determine that I do need to be exterminated?”
Email exchanges
Just days after primary voting in August 2018 and securing a place on the general election ballot, Morris announced she would not be seeking reelection to a third two-year term, citing racial harassment as well as the poor health of Lawton. Misch has boasted about being among Morris’ chief online harrassers.
Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan concluded last year that no one, including Misch, violated any criminal laws by racially harassing Morris. Documents show the attorney general’s probe relied heavily on previous investigations conducted by the Bennington Police Department — a law enforcement agency that the couple, along with many racial justice advocates, had lost faith in.
The documents provided to VPR and VTDigger from the AG’s investigation included exchanges between Assistant Attorney General Ultan Doyle and Bennington Police Chief Paul Doucette. In one of those email exchanges, from Oct. 16, 2018, Doucette wrote about the many media inquiries he had been receiving about the ongoing AG-led probe. He added that he had not responded to those requests based on advice by the AG’s Office.
Then came a line that allies of Morris point to as illustrating the police department’s attitude in the case. The police chief ends his email to Doyle, writing, “Kiah Morris continues with her media interviews and seems to be profiting for her ‘story.’ A local resident contacted me today and advised her GOFUNDME account has received over $7,700.”
Both Morris and Lawton take issue with questions raised about the use of the GoFundMe funds. Morris said that the funds from the online campaign helped support her family during the several months she was unable to work as she cared for her husband. She says she asked friends who set up the page to take it down once Lawton got better and she found work as the director of the Vermont Coalition on Ethnic and Social Equity in Schools.
Doucette declined an interview request, though he has in previous statements defended his department’s handling of complaints from Morris and her family.
Lawton has since filed a complaint with the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council alleging misconduct by Doucette. The complaint questions the handling of evidence in the case, particularly an alleged threat he reported to police when the words “dead dead” mysteriously showed up as a screen name on his computer.
Also, in support of the misconduct complaint against the police chief, Lawton provided emails he has obtained involving Doucette. Those emails from the police chief’s municipal account, Lawton said, show “highly inappropriate and inflammatory communications.”
Among those are communications that took place shortly after Morris announced she would not be seeking re-election, prompting the attorney general’s investigation. On Sept. 14, 2018, the same day that Donovan made a comment to VPR about a “breakdown in Bennington,” local resident Joey Kulkin, who operates the Politics of Bennington Facebook page, wrote an email to Doucette.
“What do you suppose Donovan means by ‘breakdown in Bennington’ as it relates to your PD?” Kulkin wrote, ending his message with, “Feel free to use backchannels to chat. You know where to find me.” There is no reply email from Doucette in the records Lawton submitted along with his complaint.
Lawton also points to an email Doucette wrote Sept. 26, 2018, to Donovan and Erica Marthage, Bennington County state’s attorney. The email was also sent to Stuart Hurd, Bennington’s town manager, and Dan Monks, the assistant town manager.
The police chief wrote in that email that after Morris’ announcement and the national attention it got, he received calls from CBS and the New York Times.
“I am not clear on what is going on here but I can tell you it is damaging the reputation of the Town of Bennington, the Bennington Police Department and myself personally,” he wrote. “I am very willing to allow for a thorough investigation into the accusations of Kiah and her husband James. I don’t mind taking ‘fire’ but I am not willing to continue to have accusations leveled against the Town of Bennington or the Bennington Police Department that are not factual.”
A couple hours later, Hurd, Bennington’s town manager, responded to the group with an email to Donovan and Marthage.
“I returned from lunch today to a voicemail from a very angry New Hampshire resident who read of Kia’s (sic) resignation from the House,” Hurd wrote. “He read/heard the CBS story where Kia states that our response to her complaints was underwhelming.”
He added, “Needless to say, I am not responding because all I can say is that there is an investigation ongoing. Please, let’s rap (sic) this up. We are being maligned by potentially fraudulent activity.”
Minutes later, Marthage replied with an email to the group.
“I echo Stu and Paul’s concerns,” she wrote.
Hurd followed up with Donovan again that afternoon.
“TJ, is it possible that your office could make a statement that in your opinion formed during the investigation, it appears that the BPD and the States Attorney’s Office acted properly in the investigation at the local level,” Hurd wrote. “If you think we screwed up, please let us know now.”
There are no emails from Donovan in the messages provided by Lawton.
In the other emails Lawton provided, Kulkin writes repeated messages to the police chief, many questioning the veracity of complaints from Morris and Lawton to the police, including a reported break-in at their home.
“I think when she first announced that she wasn’t going to run that she didn’t realize this story was going to blow up nationally,” Kulkin wrote on Oct. 18, 2018, to Doucette.
“Now she is in a place where she has to continue,” Kulkin wrote. “And she has to continue not just because of the national attention but because her husband created half of this crap.”
Kulkin then added, “And it is sink or swim time for them now.”
In several of the emails, Kulkin asked Doucette about the status of the attorney general’s investigation.
“Any idea if TJ’s boys are close to finishing the investigation? Got anything for me to use that isn’t cliche BS,” Kulkin wrote to Doucette Sept. 26, 2018. “C’mon, your reputation is on the line, and will be again when Kiah files her lawsuit against the BPD.” (No lawsuit has been filed.)
A little more than two hours later, Doucette responded to Kulkin, “I am unable to answer any questions about this matter. I am sure you understand.”
Rick Gauthier, executive director of the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council, said due to confidentiality requirements he could neither confirm nor deny if a misconduct complaint has been filed by Lawton against Doucette, or comment on whether any investigation is underway.
VTDigger asked Doucette, Marthage and Hurd about the email exchanges. Only Hurd responded.
“The Attorney General investigated and found no fault with our handling of the Kia Morris complaints. We consider that issue closed,” he wrote, speaking for himself and Doucette. “We have not been notified of a complaint to the VCJTC. It is our understanding that such complaints are handled confidentially.”
‘She didn’t have the support’
During interviews with officials, advocates and residents of Bennington, three views of what happened to Morris emerged: Some felt that systemic racism in Vermont was to blame for the initial behavior as well as the failure to properly respond to it; others see Misch and his allies as bad apples whose actions in this case simply couldn’t be prosecuted for legal reasons; and then there are those who think Morris embellished her story and profited from it.
Mia Schultz, speaking several months after Donovan announced he would not be filing criminal charges related to the racial harassment of Morris, said she has seen how the case of Morris and her family divided the town of Bennington. Schultz, a Bennington resident who is biracial, said she did not question Morris’ decision not to seek reelection, but rather wondered why others didn’t take action sooner.
“At the end of the day, you should have helped her while she was going through all of this in the first place, so it never got to this point,” Schultz said of those who wanted Morris to stay in office. Schultz also feels that law enforcement officers at every level — from Bennington to the Attorney General’s Office — didn’t provide the former state representative with the response that was called for.
“She didn’t have the support from the law enforcement that she needed to feel safe in her home,” Schultz said. “That means to me that I can’t rely on the police to feel safe either.”
Before moving to Bennington five years ago, Schultz said she associated Vermont mostly with “Bernie Sanders … this is the land of Bernie.” Schultz said it took some adjusting when she first moved to town. She would get a “funny, weird feeling” when going into a store, like she didn’t belong, she said. “I cannot put it into words,” she added. “It’s real.”
Initially, she thought her reception was the result of being an outsider in a small community. Then, Schultz said, one of her sons, a fifth-grader at the time, came home crying because another student hurled a racial slur at him and shoved him against the wall.
“In any other location that we lived, he never encountered anybody calling him the N-word before,” she said. “I’m used to absorbing things, but it’s a little bit different when it happens to your child.”
Shawn Pratt grew up in Coney Island, New York, and was recruited to play basketball at Southern Vermont College in Bennington, where he has now lived for roughly 20 years. Pratt, who is African American, said he isn’t shy about raising his voice when he sees an injustice.
He went to a court hearing in July where Misch was charged with violating the conditions imposed on him when he was charged with illegally possessing high-capacity ammunition magazines — a case that is ostensibly unrelated to the harassment of Morris but came soon after Donovan decided not to press charges.
After Misch was let go on conditions again, Pratt spoke out from the back of the courtroom. “You all keep letting him walk out of here,” he said loudly. “This is unfair,” Pratt then added. “He should be locked up.”
‘I call bullshit on Ms. Morris’
The town of Bennington is home to the 306-foot, 4½-inch magnesian limestone Bennington Battle Monument, commemorating the Aug. 16, 1777, Battle of Bennington during the Revolutionary War.
The economy has recently struggled, even more than the rest of Vermont. In October, Energizer announced it would be shuttering its factory downtown to consolidate its operations in Wisconsin, resulting in the loss of about 100 jobs in town. At that time, local officials said Bennington had lost more than 2,000 jobs since the start of the recession and, like most other parts of the state outside Chittenden County, has been dealing with a declining population.
Kevin Hoyt of Bennington didn’t waste any time when sitting down for an interview to talk about his ties to the town. “My family’s been in Vermont since the early 1600s, a long time before they called it Vermont,” he said.
In arranging an interview, Hoyt specifically requested that it take place at the Bennington Battle Monument.
Hoyt made an unsuccessful run to represent Bennington in the House as a Republican in 2018. He posted on Facebook several months ago about his plans to run for governor.
When Donovan announced at the January 2019 press conference that he would not file criminal charges against anyone for the harassment of Morris, Hoyt was there to demand an apology.
“I was called a Nazi, I was called a white supremacist,” said Hoyt, who in 2018 filed for a stalking relief order against Morris’ husband, Lawton, alleging inflammatory Facebook posts. A judge denied that request.
Hoyt contends that Morris and her husband made up, or exaggerated, their claims of racism, in search of sympathy. “Obviously racism exists in Vermont state. It’s like hate, right, it’s like all these things that’s crazy. We don’t want these things but they’re part of our fabric of society. I question to what degree though,” he said at Donovan’s press conference. “I call bullshit on Ms. Morris.”
In a later interview, Hoyt said “I’ve seen real racism and Vermont is not it.” His biggest issue with Morris, he said, is her position on gun control. While serving as a state lawmaker, she voted in favor of establishing restrictions on firearms in Vermont, which eventually passed the Democratically controlled Legislature and were signed into law by Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican.
“She’s the reason we don’t have armed teachers or gun security in our schools,” Hoyt said.
While Hoyt has made headlines in newspapers across the state in recent years with his claims about Morris and state government corruption, he garnered little support for his candidacy to become a lawmaker in 2018, or his current run for governor. Questioned about his views, Hoyt says his way of life is under attack.
“I’d say rednecks, but up here in the north we’re called hicks,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m white, or if it’s because I’m straight, or because I’m Christian, but all the things that I’ve grown up with, they seem unacceptable. And that’s odd to me.”
‘It’s hard incremental stuff’
Donald Campbell has been a member of the Bennington Selectboard for five years, and in April 2019 was elected as its chair.
He called himself a supporter of Morris, having voted for her when she ran for office. “The community was very excited to have her as our representative, most people I know anyway were excited,” Campbell said. “She had an upbeat attitude. She was working on some kind of edgy stuff.”
Campbell described Bennington as a “pretty liberal community for the most part,” heavily influenced over the years by Bennington College and the now-closed Southern Vermont College.
“We’re proud to be one of the few places that has voted a person of color into the state Legislature, and she was doing great for us,” he said. “But it’s difficult for a small town government to respond to the mega issues of the day. It’s difficult for small-town government to take on racism, to take on poverty, to take on drug addiction, by themselves.”
The Selectboard, he said, enlisted the help of Curtiss Reed Jr., executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity in Brattleboro, in developing the request for proposals for an entity to perform the review of the practices and procedures of the police department. Last year the town of Bennington contracted with the International Association of Chiefs of Police to conduct that review, which remains ongoing.
The request came after the Vermont branches of the American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP called on Donovan to open an investigation into the handling of evidence related to allegations of threats against Morris. Donovan declined, and instead recommended that an outside entity conduct that review.
“But they, and I, the whole Selectboard, will welcome an outside set of eyes to see if we’re following the best practices to see if there’s anything we could be doing better,” he added, “It’s hard. It’s hard, incremental stuff.”
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, called the Morris case a low point for his county.
“I tried to remind myself many times that what happened to Kiah, it was not necessarily a reflection on the community as a whole,” he said, “but rather some individuals in the community.”
Sears, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a longtime elected official from Bennington, said while Misch’s actions may not have been criminal, they were certainly inappropriate.
“I don’t think that I responded as well as I might otherwise have,” he said. “And I might have responded a little differently today than I might have a year ago, but I think we’re all learning and that’s a good thing.”
Asked specifically what he would have done differently, Sears replied, “I think I would have been more clear about how the act is deplorable.”
And he said of Morris, “I don’t know that we understood enough about what she was going through.”
On Aug. 24, 2018, Morris announced on Facebook that she was dropping her reelection campaign. She cited the harassment from 2016 that picked up again after the stalking order had expired. But the harassment complaints didn’t stop with the announcement to end the reelection campaign.
In September 2018, Morris and her husband reported to police that a group of youth had knocked on their windows and banged on the doors of their residence. The event crystalizes the mistrust between the couple and law enforcement — the couple came away convinced of a targeted intent behind the incident, while police quickly dismissed that theory.
Bennington Police investigated and said there was no evidence that the incidents were racially motivated, or were targeting Morris. At least one other neighbor of Morris and Lawton reported experiencing the same thing (and fired a shotgun in the air to scare the teenagers away).
Doucette, Bennington’s police chief, told VTDigger at the time of the incident that the youth were playing Ding Dong Ditch, knocking on doors and windows and then dashing into the nearby cemetery. Police said all the youths, aged 12 to 17, were issued no-trespassing orders.
“I don’t see criminal intent,” Doucette told VTDigger at that time. “This was kids fooling around.”
Attorney Robert Appel, who represents the couple, issued a statement shortly after the incident disagreeing with the police chief.
“These criminal acts are far more than ‘kids just being kids,’” Appel wrote in an email, “but rather constitute a campaign of harassment, intimidation and terror designed to drive these law abiding residents from their homes and to make each and every member of their family fear for their well-being.”
‘Breakdown in Bennington’
Donovan, the attorney general, became involved in September 2018, explaining to VPR that his office would be conducting a review to determine if any criminal laws were broken stemming from the racial harassment of Morris.
“For whatever reason, there was a breakdown in Bennington. I think that’s clear. I think that’s what we can agree with right now,” Donovan told VPR at that time.
Donovan later revealed the results of his review in January 2019 during a press conference to a standing-room-only crowd at Congregation Beth El synagogue in Bennington.
The event drew scores of state and local officials as well as civil rights leaders from across Vermont. Donovan was barely able to finish delivering his findings before Misch walked in, causing an uproar. Misch was wearing a T-shirt displaying Pepe the Frog — a character has become a symbol of anti-Semitism and racism.
As the uproar around Misch continued, Donovan said, “With that I’m going to conclude the press conference.”
“Let’s not end on this tone,” the attorney general added before leaving the microphone. “We have a challenge to rise above this. We have a challenge to keep our heads high to not meet hate with hate, but with civility and decency. I ask you all to do that.”
The attorney general, speaking before Misch crashed the event, said he would not be bringing any criminal charges against Misch or anyone for the racial harassment targeting Morris. Donovan cited the lack of sufficient evidence to move forward with any prosecutions and the broad legal protections of the First Amendment on the right to free speech, particularly when it involves public officials.
It was a decision roundly criticized by civil rights advocates, including Tabitha Moore, president of the Rutland NAACP. “He missed a big opportunity to strengthen our stance in our state in relation to what is acceptable and what’s not acceptable related to threats and hate speech and racism,” she said.
Donovan has defended his decision and the investigation, which relied heavily on earlier work of the Bennington Police Department. “It was what we do in a typical case,” Donovan said in an interview, “collect the police paperwork, collect the file, and review and make a determination whether probable cause existed for any crime.”
Since many of the incidents had happened a couple of years earlier, that made going back to do any forensic work impractical, the attorney general said. “That’s really important when we talk of the sufficiency of evidence,” Donovan said. “It’s very difficult to go back two years afterward.”
The attorney general’s office, in reviewing the Bennington Police documents, looked at incidents that Morris and her family reported to law enforcement since 2016. Those incidents included the break-in at her home and swastikas painted on trees, as well as a GPS stolen out of a vehicle and paintballing of a political sign and vehicle. In all the incidents, Donovan said, his office found that there was “insufficient evidence” to prosecute a crime.
For example, in the October 2016 burglary at the Morris and Lawton home in which neckties were stolen, a report by the Attorney General’s Office stated, “the basement of Ms. Morris’s residence was not dusted for fingerprints or swabbed for DNA nor was the neighborhood canvassed to see if anyone else had seen anything suspicious.” However, the report added, “As noted by (Bennington Police Chief) Doucette, this was not unusual for such cases.”
The Attorney General’s Office also looked into a July 2018 report from Lawton stating that his recently purchased laptop had been hacked and someone had changed the screen name to “dead dead.” A forensic examination of that computer by Vermont State Police showed that the laptop’s prior owner, a 10-year-old boy, had used that screen name when playing video games online. The attorney general did say it was “entirely reasonable for Kiah Morris and James Lawton at that time to view it as a threat given what was going on.”
The most controversial decision by the attorney general, however, was that online messages directed at Morris from Misch did not warrant prosecution as a crime.
“In order to have a prosecutable threat, you have to have something that is itself a threat,” Julio Thompson, head of the attorney general’s civil rights division, said in an interview. “That would be an expression of a serious intent to harm someone.” He added, “Calling someone a name or making fun of their race or disparaging it isn’t threatening behavior.”
The investigation included interviews with both Morris and Lawton, but the AG’s office did not question Misch. Donovan and other attorneys in his office said they already had Misch’s tweets that had been directed at Morris and that’s all they needed to determine if they rose to the level of a criminal threat.
Donovan, asked why he said there was a breakdown in Bennington, said police could have done a better job trying to understand and respond to concerns raised by Morris and Lawton.
“That system stopped working in Bennington and I think that validation, that responsiveness didn’t work as well as it should have worked and I think you can’t separate the issue of race from it,” he said. “That’s not to say the Bennington Police are racist. It’s to acknowledge that race is a factor in all that we do.”
Marthage, Bennington County’s state’s attorney, did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article. In a story last year in the Burlington Free Press, the prosecutor defended how her office and Bennington police handled the complaints from Morris and her family. She talked about online posts by Misch and exchanges Morris had with him on social media, calling it a “back and forth.”
“That to me,” Marthage told the Free Press, “shows a lack of fear.”
One of those Instagram exchanges between Misch and Morris was included in the records reviewed by the Attorney General’s Office as part of the investigation.
“It’s incredible,” Misch wrote to Morris, “that you’ll complain about VT being too white after moving here precisely because it’s one of the whitest in the country and therefore has one of the lowest crime rates per capita in the country, basically the opposite of multicultural hellscape of Chicago, where you’re from, which has one of the highest amounts of homicides in the nation.”
“Why are you obsessed with me?” Morris then asked Misch.
“I’m obsessed with keeping my town, state, and country safe while you’re obsessed with the opposite,” Misch responded. “I’m trying to defend Western civilization while you’re doing the opposite.”
Both Morris and Lawton say they had little contact with Misch online, and termed Marthage’s characterization as “gaslighting,” when she should have been more concerned about ensuring the safety of the public.
Moore, of the NAACP, doesn’t mince words when asked about her appraisal of law enforcement in its investigation into racial harassment of Morris.
“Representative Morris was targeted by white supremacists, because of her power and willingness to speak up in the Legislature,” Moore said. “The family brought that information to Bennington PD who sat on it or did nothing, or relatively nothing based on their own experience in life, living in white skin and just generally not caring about the issue.”
Moore added, “It came to a head last summer [2018] when Kiah had finally had enough, and people saw that she was serious and that they were serious and the attorney general stepped in and performed a less than stellar, pseudo investigation.”
Charges filed
Misch escaped prosecution in that attorney general’s probe, but it didn’t take long for Donovan to bring him into a courtroom to face other charges. Misch is the first and only person charged under the magazine provision of a gun control law enacted in April 2018.
Those charges allege Misch illegally possessed high-capacity magazines in violation of a restriction that went into effect in Vermont on Oct. 1, 2018. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $500 fine. Misch has denied the charges.
Meanwhile, he has been brought into court repeatedly for violating the conditions of release, ranging from allegedly leaving Bennington County for a night of drinking in New York, to contacting his ex-wife, to buying another firearm — all in violation of court orders.
In all the cases, Misch has pleaded not guilty, and each time he was released on conditions again without needing to post bail.
Attorney Frederick Bragdon, a public defender representing Misch, contended during one of the hearings that Misch is not a risk to flee. In fact, the attorney said, Misch thrives on the media attention each court appearance brings him.
“I’m sure as long as the press keeps coming, he’ll also be here,” Bragdon said of Misch.
Prior to court proceedings in his cases, Misch speaks at length with reporters, spouting his racist and bigoted views. And he said he picks his clothing for court appearances to make a statement as well. At one hearing, Misch was wearing a hat that stated he was a veteran of the Iraq war and a black T-shirt with white lettering that read, “Fuck Gun Control” with rifles making the “F” and the “K”.
Misch, who is Jewish, is prone to spouting anti-Semitic conspiracies. He said his family members no longer speak to him. He doesn’t work, according to Shapiro, his ex-wife, and derives his income from Social Security disability insurance. (Misch declined an interview request specifically for this article, but wrote in a comment after its publication that he actually receives disability benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)
When speaking with reporters, Misch often discusses his service in the military, including spending six months in Iraq. “I was a gunner on top of a Humvee,” said Misch. “I was only 20 at the time and it had a profound effect on me.” He added, “I’m not going to go into all kinds of, like, details right now.”
While Misch wouldn’t reveal many details of his private life, his ex-wife provided a window into what drives him.
Shapiro termed Misch a narcissist, thriving on all the attention he gets, even though most of it is negative. It appears he even tried to get gigs as a male model while living in New York, posting an ad online seeking jobs, adding, “I have no problem being fully nude.”
The Morris case was not Misch’s first brush with the law. In March 2016 he was charged with assaulting Shapiro. In an interview, Shapiro said Misch was shocked when she called police after he stopped choking her.
“He went from zero flat and calm, we were in the car having a conversation to strangling me,” she said. “But he’s not violent, I know that sounds crazy.”
The case was later resolved in a way that did not result in a felony on Misch’s record, which would have prevented him from possessing firearms. Shapiro said while she doesn’t subscribe to Misch’s views on race, she stays friendly with him because she cares about him.
“He’s just hurt,” she said. “He has pain. Anger is just pain.”
‘The question we’re all struggling with’
The result of the investigation into Misch has left policymakers wondering: should there be a change in the law to address hate speech?
“That is the question we’re all struggling with,” Donovan said. “To say that something is protected does not mean that it isn’t hurtful,” he added. “Words can hurt. Words can inflict harm, and we need to acknowledge that.”
Donovan has appeared at multiple forums around the state focused on race and hate speech over the past year — he’s scheduled to take part in a panel discussion on the topic at Bennington College on Monday evening, along with Sears, the senator, and racial justice advocates.
“There are no easy answers,” Donovan said, “but the biggest thing that we can do is to be at that table, to be comfortable with being uncomfortable about talking about the issues of race in Vermont.”
Donovan recalled speaking to a Vermont Law School student, a woman of color, who told him that his decision to not bring charges in the case left her feeling unsafe. “That still affects me,” the attorney general said, “because our job is to make people safe.”
Efforts in the Legislature last year to pass a series of bills aimed at addressing racism in Vermont failed to advance. Several racial justice advocates had said the bills were flawed anyway, failing to include input and the perspectives of the very people they were trying to protect.
In January 2019, at the same press conference in which Donovan announced that he wouldn’t be bringing criminal charges against Misch for the racial harassment of Morris, he also announced the creation of a “Bias Incident Reporting System.”
The goal of the initiative is to have a protocol in place for local police to provide information to entities such as the Human Rights Commission and the civil rights divisions of state and federal prosecutorial offices about bias-related incidents. However, VPR reported last fall that racial justice leaders in Vermont did not see much value in it, questioning whether it was just creating another system without addressing the underlying problems leading to the bias incidents.
Moore, of the NAACP, said she believed that Donovan should simply have pursued criminal threatening charges against Misch.
“If it’s not within the current definition, this is a way to get it there. This is a way to expand that definition,” Moore said. “The criminal justice system only changes when it sees enough of these sorts of cases.”
