“I anticipate being kicked out from our gym,” C. Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University, announced in a Tumblr post, where she described verbally confronting the white nationalist Richard Spencer near a set of barbells at an Alexandria fitness center.

Instead, it was Spencer who was asked not to return to Old Town Sport & Health in Alexandria. Fair, meanwhile, has been subjected to a torrent of phone calls, death threats, pizza orders, and truly vile online harassment since the story got out.

“The quality of the heinousness is off the chart,” Fair tells DCist. “This isn’t my first rodeo [with right-wing trolls], though these guys are more sophisticated—publicizing my home address, phone number. They’re clearly well-resourced and practiced in this kind of thing.”

An expert in South Asian politics and military affairs, Fair headed to the Alexandria gym with her husband on Wednesday expecting nothing more than a workout. That’s when she found out from the trainers, most of whom she’s friendly with and has known for many years, that Spencer had become a member about two months ago (he rented a space in Alexandria in January). They told her he had appeared at the facility for the first time the night before.

Fair says she planned to call or write to the corporate owners about the “unfair burden they’re putting on the staff by putting this very public Nazi in a gym and expecting them to treat him decorously.” Most of the trainers are people of color and/or women, and at least one is Jewish, and some were upset that management had accepted Spencer’s membership, according to Fair. Before she got the chance to issue a formal complaint, though, she spotted Spencer in person.

In the Tumblr post, Fair recounted how she confronted the head of the white-supremacist National Policy Institute (and a well-known punching target) and “exploited the full range of my first amendment entitlements.”

But first she had to make sure it was really him. “I want to note that this man is a supreme coward,” Fair wrote. “When I approached this flaccid, sorry excuse of a man and asked ‘Are you Richard Spencer,“ this pendulous poltroon said ‘No. I am not.’ But of course he was.”

Spencer is the man behind the re-branding of white supremacy as the “alt-right.” In addition to outlawing minorities, he’s said that his ideal state would also relegate women to the domestic sphere. He recently led a march of torch-carrying demonstrators to protest the removal of a Confederate monument. At a conference in November, he quoted Nazi propaganda in German before a room full of people shouted “Heil the people! Heil victory.”

Back at the gym, Fair started “loudly” identifying him as a neo-Nazi and letting Spencer know that this country doesn’t “belong to white men.” She goes on to describe how the “pusillanimous shitbird” asked a black, female trainer to help end the diatribe.

“I left that night expecting to be kicked out of my gym. It’s the manager’s right. I did make a scene. I did accost a member who was minding his own business,” she says. “But I believe you don’t get to be a Nazi from 9-5 … He’s a Nazi and he should be treated like a Nazi.”

Her account was first picked up by Buzzfeed, and then a number of other news outlets followed suit.

While Fair was asked to leave during the confrontation, it was Spencer’s membership that was ultimately revoked.

“I’m really a model gymgoer. I don’t bother anyone. I don’t talk to anyone. I really just go and lift weights,” Spencer told Buzzfeed, confirming that his membership was terminated. “I was a well-behaved member of this gym. I did not cause any controversy.”

The trolls came trolling very shortly, sending a steady stream of anti-Semitic, misogynistic, fat-shaming, hateful messages to Fair’s email and social media accounts. She says her home and cell phones are ringing every few seconds, far too many times to count.

“For better or for worse, this is not my first rodeo with this stuff,” says Fair, who received a similar torrent of messages after getting into an online fight with a Muslim woman who voted for Trump. “The fat shaming is quite new. But the sexual assault, the murder threats; the anti-Semitism … I’m quite practiced in getting those threats.”

Fair is able to laugh off the messages as nonsensical, and grammatically and factually incorrect. She’s not actually even Jewish, though had begun the conversion process many years ago (“I don’t feel compelled to correct them. I’m in it just as any other Jew would be,” she says). And while she’s struggled with an eating disorder in the past, she hasn’t found the bombardment triggering.

“You come through each of these more prepared for the next time,” Fair says. “They picked the wrong b*tch.”

Even though it came at the cost of a horde of harassers, she feels it would be immoral to ignore Spencer’s views, even when he’s innocuously working out.

“It is the responsibility of every single one of us to not tolerate this. I know it sounds dramatic but I believe in it,” Fair says. “In 1932, some German people were probably saying between bites of wiener-schnitzel, ‘this is some f*cked up shit,’ and then didn’t do anything.”

Filed Under: c. christine fair, christine fair, georgetown, national policy institute, richard spencer,