photo credit: Southern Poverty Law Center
An image from the Southern Poverty Law Center's legal filing shows
Minadeo committing the alleged assault against plaintiff Deago Buck
in downtown Nashville in 2024.

A former Sonoma County resident and alleged ring leader of a racist and anti-Semitic hate group is facing a possible jury trial in federal court.

The Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit against the Goyim Defense League and it's founder, former Petaluma resident Jon Minadeo II, in federal court in Tennessee earlier this year.

The Goyim Defense League is described as an American far-right, neo-Nazi loosely organized network of individuals responsible for racist and anti-Semitic propaganda stunts across the country,

It was founded in 2018 by Minadeo.

Now Minadeo, and a number of his associates, are being sued, following an alleged campaign of assault and harassment against Black and Jewish communities in Nashville, Tennessee in July 2024.

Scott McCoy is deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

McCoy said the ten day campaign culminated in what the center alleges was a violent assault on their plaintiff, a biracial man working in downtown Nashville.

"They carried through on their plans of violence and intimidation including marauding through town waving swastika flags, threatening people, screaming racist and anti-Semitic slurs and obscenities in people's faces," McCoy said. "Then ultimately they violently attacked Deago Buck as they were walking by Deago's place of employment in downtown Nashville."

Minadeo is not facing any charges in California, but he is being accused in federal civil court of assault, battery, malicious harassment, and violations of the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. That's an anti-discrimination law from the Reconstruction Era.

Minadeo has faced legal trouble before. He was sentenced to a 30 day jail sentence in Florida for littering after distributing anti-Semitic flyers, and was arrested in Poland for demonstrating outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp.

McCoy said the case could potentially disrupt the hate group's operations.

"If we get a judgment against these folks for this some of the things that that are available is to go after, you know, their assets and their instrumentalities," McCoy said. "Which include things like their websites."

According to reporting in the Press Democrat, Minadeo has allegedly been spotted around Petaluma in recent weeks.

The lawyer representing Minadeo and his co-defendants told KRCB News his clients dispute the assertion they advocated violence or intimidation, and said his clients did not instigate the Nashville altercation.

Minadeo's attorney, Drew Justice, has filed a motion to dismiss the case, and argues the Southern Poverty Law Center does not have the duty to administer equal protection of the law.

Justice told KRCB News, "in other words, just being racist and divisive, leading to a fight, doesn't violate anyone else's constitutional rights."

A case management conference for the lawsuit is scheduled for December 15th.