What three January 6 insurrectionists wanted — and what they lost. KerryHowley reports
From top, Gina Bisignano, Rosanne Boyland, and Guy Reffitt. Photo-Illustration: John Ritter This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Hundreds of people caught on-camera committing what was arguably sedition went home to families that feared them, strangers who admired them, federal agents already setting up surveillance. Over a year’s time, many of their lives would be transformed. They would discover the dark state of American prisons. They would be fired and divorced and bankrupt and subject to extraordinary kindness from strangers. They would become fodder for the kind of conspiracies that had summoned them to D.C.
Gina began hanging out with a group of like-minded people: the Beverly Hills Conservative Club. She got COVID, got better, and kept going to meetings. She was an extrovert desperate to socialize, and the people still socializing were people ideologically opposed to the rules against it. Gina was listening to Infowars. Some of the news she heard she believed, and some of the news she heard she did not believe. I don’t believe Biden is a clone, she told me.
Rosanne Boyland with her sister and niece in April 2016. Photo: COURTESY OF THE BOYLAND FAMILY Everyone had been home for so long, deprived of sensory experience, bound to screens in a way unknown to history. Rosanne was 34, a former addict stuck in her parents’ low-slung yellow home in Kennesaw, Georgia, under a copse of tall, straight trees, in a bedroom she had painted bright colors and filled with rare stones.
By mid-2020, social life had stopped, and Rosanne no longer had the sobriety meetings that sustained her, and Lonna’s little girls did not need to be picked up from school. Instead, Rosanne had the internet. On the internet, she learned that Wayfair was using its shipping containers to send children to pedophiles. I’m in deep, she said to Lonna one July morning. I’ve been up all night researching.
Storm the Capitol, said some in the crowd, but others were already there, a mile and a half away, in the place where Trump would tell his thousands of fans to go. Guy unscrewed a bottle, tilted his head toward the sky, and dumped water in his eyes. He went back to his hotel and drove the 20 hours home.The Riot [data-uri="nymag.com/intelligencer/_components/subsection/instances/ckxezg98x001b3f6kave3qlyb@published"] .slug{font:700 14px/17px 'Egyptienne',Georgia,serif!importantEgyptienne;letter-spacing:3px!important;color:#ec2c00!important} Rosanne Boyland moments before her death on January 6.
This was the state of affairs when Rosanne’s parents had made themselves unreachable — phones off the hook, no press — and two men walked past the NO TRESPASSING sign that had been moved from the pool to the mailbox, past stones of iridescent hematite Rosanne had dug from the ground and displayed in the yard, to ring the doorbell. One of these men was Derrick Gibson, a Black podcast host and fringe candidate for New York governor who says he is proud of the Proud Boys.
After the riot, Guy came back to the brick house with his big blue Smith & Wesson–accommodating coat. He was worried about being turned in, worried about the FBI at the door. Peyton was unimpressed, and when she called her mother later that day, she first explained how she was getting to work; her father’s threat to shoot his children should they turn him in for trying to stop the certification of an election was the second-most-pressing issue she had to discuss with Nicole. Mom, she said, Dad is just saying stupid stuff.
He was more understanding than Nicole when they crossed any given line, and he was fun: Once, he attached an ATV to a garbage can and pulled little Jackson around the yard. Guy knew what to say when his wife felt discouraged, and he said it: Baby, you have this. You’re doing such a great job. I have faith in you. He was an oil-rig manager, gone a lot, 28 days on and 28 days off. In 2013, when Jackson was 11, the family moved to Penang, Malaysia, for Guy’s job.
He had some new friends: the Three-Percenters. Twenty of them came over for a barbecue. Nicole was happy to see Guy have some purpose, some get-up-and-go, since he had given up on oil and was casting around for new ideas. Maybe he would start a security company, he said. He had started ranting. Cliché stuff, said Jackson. I mean cliché — Nancy Pelosi, the swamp — stuff you can get out of any far-right article. He was watching a lot of Newsmax.
Gina did not delete everything. She wasn’t scared of these men; she was scared of the cops. On the same morning that Nicole and Guy woke up to flash-bangs in the yard of their brick home in Texas, Gina woke up to a knock on the door. When Gina’s siblings found out she had accrued various charges that could theoretically amount to 20 years in prison, they said she was an idiot, a moron, you’re so stupid. Gina had always been a lot, always loud and brave and drawn to what her father calls upsetting, dark things. Sometimes her father hit her. Whenever Gina brings this up, which is often, she says he was young and Italian and I forgive him.
Um. I don’t really know how to explain it … It just felt like the right thing, regardless of … how much I loved my family and my dad. I was worried. I’m a dad, said Cuomo, crafting a moment for the audience at home. Kids don’t take responsibility for what their parents do. You didn’t make him go to D.C. … What you did was very, very hard. I’m talking to you because I’m impressed by what you did … Okay?Jackson had contacted the FBI well before the riot, in late December, after yet another family argument, upon which he decamped to his room and Googled FBI.
In fact, it was not supposed to be Cara up on the podium at this point in the program. It was supposed to be Nicole Reffitt, but Nicole Reffitt had, she said, been detained by authorities at the airport. Cara would therefore read Nicole’s speech. According to the speech, read off Cara’s phone, Guy was being treated badly in prison, but at least he was alive. Guy gets to have his day in court, Cara read. Ashli Babbitt and Rosanne Boyland did not.Say their names, she yelled.
By this time, Guy had been moved to a jail in D.C., where he was placed in what has come to be called the “Patriot Wing” with dozens of other men in captivity exactly two miles from the Capitol they are charged with breaching. The Patriots complain regularly about their treatment at the hands of the American penal system, complaints that are unusual only in that they have been heard.
Regardless of how we may receive this assessment, which Watkins himself deemed perhaps disrespectful, a country that protects the right to spin fantasy necessarily risks the well-being of those who easily lose themselves to it.
Österreich Neuesten Nachrichten, Österreich Schlagzeilen
Similar News:Sie können auch ähnliche Nachrichten wie diese lesen, die wir aus anderen Nachrichtenquellen gesammelt haben.
Trump’s SPAC Investors Do Not Know What They Are BuyingThe Trump Media and Technology Group is set up to protect rich investors—while endangering the little guys.
Weiterlesen »
It’s Too Late for Donald Trump to Try Making Sense NowHe's just a guy trying to have it all—a rabid cult of conspiracists and his booster shot, too.
Weiterlesen »
Selena Gomez on Rare Beauty’s New Spring Items and Embracing Her Natural Beauty“I wanted the brand to be there for girls and guys and whoever to feel like it's okay to not look like everybody else.”
Weiterlesen »
MMA Fighter Gunning To KO Nate Diaz After UFC Star Made Him Flinch At Paul FightThe man who Nate Diaz made flinch at the Jake Paul fight on Saturday is furious with the UFC star ... saying he now wants to KO the guy for embarrassing him.
Weiterlesen »
Travis Barker Outs Himself as a Foot GuyThe couple now infamous for their displays of public affection up the ante once again with the Blink-182 drummer sharing a photo of himself kissing his fiancee's feet.
Weiterlesen »