A white supremacist podcaster who allegedly used the deaths of Mollie Tibbetts, Tessa Majors and Heather Heyer in racist robocalls is facing a nearly $13 million fine for his targeted harassment of the communities of those victims.
The man, Scott Rhodes, runs the group Road to Power, which the Federal Communications Commission (FEC) alleges made around 827 robocalls over three days in August 2018 using Brooklyn, Iowa, phone numbers — calls that were received by friends and relatives of the 20-year-old Tibbetts just days after she was stabbed to death.
The FEC has said that Rhodes directed those Iowa calls, which were among half a dozen targeted attacks in 2018 that numbered more than 6,000 calls in total. In late last year, Road to Power also drew media attention after it was reported that faculty and staff of Barnard College and Columbia University where Majors was a freshman had received robocalls.
In the robocalls, Rhodes used an online calling platform that manipulated caller ID messages, tricking people into thinking they were being called by a local phone number, and in apparent violation of the Truth in Call ID Act. Other robocalls were received in Virginia, Florida, California, Georgia and Idaho.
The calls used pre-recorded messages to attack racial minorities, and in the case of Tibbetts, referred to undocumented immigrants from Mexico. An undocumented immigrant was later charged with her death, but the family has disavowed using the 20-year-old’s death to promote racist messages even as prominent figures including Donald Trump have seized upon the situation to sow racial discord.
“As if this tragedy were not enough, just two days after her funeral, Mollie’s family, friends, and the close-knit community of Brooklyn began to receive a barrage of spoofed robocalls,” said Ajit Pai, the FCC’s chairman, in a statement Thursday.
The statement continued: “Preying on the tragedy, the calls contained inflammatory prerecorded messages and a woman’s voice apparently intended to impersonate Mollie Tibbetts saying ‘kill them all.’”
The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate groups in America, said that it is important to hold bad actors accountable for their actions.
“It’s a great first step,” Oren Segal, the director of the organisation’s Centre for Extremism, told the New York Times of the action against Mr Rhodes. “Hopefully, the message is clear to extremists and bigots who want to use this technology in the future that there are consequences.”
Mr Rhodes, a resident of Utah, has not publicly commented on the fine, and it is not clear if he will be criminally charged for his efforts.
