A Vermont man who wielded a torch with other white nationalists at an infamous 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., has pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for his role in the event.

Ryan Roy is among several participants at the so-called “Unite the Right” rally — a neo-Nazi revival that turned violent — to face criminal charges in Virginia. Local prosecutors initially brought felony charges against Roy and others under a state law that bars people from using a burning object to intimidate another. The law was passed in 2002 with the Ku Klux Klan in mind.

Roy pleaded guilty in Albemarle County Circuit Court earlier this month to the lesser misdemeanor charge. He entered a so-called “Alford” plea, which allows a defendant to accept conviction without trial while still maintaining innocence. A judge imposed a one-year suspended sentence, meaning Roy can avoid prison time.



“I don’t think I did anything wrong,” Roy said by phone on Friday, comparing the charges against him to the various criminal prosecutions of former president Donald Trump. “The entire thing is political.”
A throng of mostly white men marched across the University of Virginia campus in August 2017 carrying tiki torches and shouting thinly veiled racist chants. They encircled a smaller group of counterprotesters who were gathered around a statue of Thomas Jefferson, and a brawl broke out.

The next day, during larger dueling demonstrations, an avowed white supremacist drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring others. The driver, James Alex Fields Jr., is serving life in prison for first-degree murder and more than two dozen hate crime charges.
Vermonters identified Roy, then 28, as a “Unite the Right” participant after he appeared in a Vice News video clip holding a torch and chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!”

He wasn’t indicted until 2023, nearly six years later. The county prosecutor who was in office during the 2017 rally declined to bring criminal charges against the marchers. His successor, Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney James Hingeley, campaigned in 2019 on a pledge to prosecute them.

At least five marchers have pleaded guilty to the felony charge of intimidation by fire, according to the Associated Press. But a recent two-day trial of Jacob Joseph Dix, of Clarksville, Ohio, ended with a hung jury.

Prosecutors agreed to reduce the charge against Roy after his public defender found new video evidence, according to the Daily Progress, a Charlottesville newspaper. The footage, prosecutor Lawton Tufts said at the August 9 sentencing hearing, shows Roy backing away from the crowd as his fellow marchers encircled the counterprotesters.

“Tufts said that additional footage showed Roy having extinguished his torch and making ‘nonverbal facial cues’ indicating discomfort with the behavior of some of his fellow marchers,” the newspaper reported.

Roy told Seven Days on Friday that he pleaded guilty because he didn’t think he could get a fair trial in “left-wing” Charlottesville.

Court documents identify Roy as a resident of Enosburg Falls. Roy’s race-based politics haven’t changed substantially since he complained to a Seven Days reporter in 2017 that white people face discrimination and Jewish people tend to lie.

The language he uses seven years later, however, is a little less explicit. Roy described himself on Friday as a “nationalist” and an “American.” Asked to clarify, Roy said only white descendants of Europe should be considered Americans.