Quick Facts
Biography
Cassandra Fairbanks is an American journalist and activist. As an activist, she is best known for "Find the Dancing Man," her successful 2015 social media campaign against fat shaming, and for helping to organize the DeploraBall in Washington, D.C. to celebrate the 2017 inauguration of President Donald Trump. As a journalist, she has worked for the Russian state-funded international news agency Sputnik (2015–2017), and far-right American media websites Big League Politics (2017) and The Gateway Pundit (2017–present). In 2018, Fairbanks arranged the unexpected appearance of prolific leaker and transgender activist Chelsea Manning at what The Washington Post headlined as "a far-right pro-Trump bash, infuriating the far left."
In 2020, Fairbanks submitted evidence to the legal team defending WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in his London extradition hearing, and posted audio online of a September 2019 phone call to her from Arthur Schwartz, a conservative consultant with close ties to Richard Grenell, U.S. Ambassador to Germany. Schwartz told Fairbanks that Grenell "took orders from" President Trump when the ambassador secretly brokered Assange's April 2019 arrest at Ecuador's London embassy, where Assange had been given political asylum.
Early life
Cassandra Fairbanks grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts, an hour from Boston. She traces her ancestry to Jonathan and Grace (Smith) Fairbanks, English colonists who in 1633 immigrated to New England and circa 1637 built the Fairbanks House, now North America's oldest surviving timber frame house, in Dedham, Massachusetts. After high school, she enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study physics, but dropped out after a few months. Moving to California, she attended the Los Angeles Recording School and became a sound engineer. In that capacity, she traveled the country, working for bands of the Warped Tour variety.
Activism
Fairbanks's activism began with Greenpeace environmentalism, followed by animal rights protests at SeaWorld and circuses. In 2013, she took part in the hacktivist collective Anonymous and helped run a popular Anonymous Twitter account. By then living in Pittsburgh, she traveled to Ohio and helped organize the outcry over the Steubenville High School rape case. In 2015, Fairbanks spent several months with Black Lives Matter in Ferguson, Missouri, amid civil unrest stemming from the 2014 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer.
Social media
In 2015, 4chan trolls created what the BBC called one of the year's "biggest internet sensations" by posting pictures of an obese, 47-year-old Englishman dancing exuberantly at a concert. "Spotted this specimen trying to dance the other week," they jeered. "He stopped when he saw us laughing." Incensed at the fat shaming, Cassandra Fairbanks launched a social media campaign to "Find the Dancing Man". "If I see something wrong," she said, "then I try and fix it." With a friend, Fairbanks created a GoFundMe account to locate the man and fly him to Los Angeles, where she lived, for what turned out to be a celebrity-packed party with 1,000 guests at Avalon Hollywood, one of L.A.'s hottest clubs. During a westbound stopover in New York, the man danced on NBC's Today Show. Once in L.A., he was photographed bending elbows with a beaming Monica Lewinsky. The next day, he threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the L.A. Dodgers' home game against San Diego. The viral campaign raised $70,000 for anti-bullying and positive body image charities in the U.S. and UK, and made Fairbanks, again in the words of the BBC, a "social media star."
Shift to right
In 2016, Cassandra Fairbanks "underwent something of a political transformation," according to BBC News. Having begun the year as a supporter of Hillary Clinton's main rival within the Democratic Party, Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Fairbanks was by fall rallying her 70K Twitter followers to support Donald Trump. In an October 2016 episode of BBC Television's Panorama, the world's longest-running news television program, Fairbanks said, "I'm going to be voting for Donald Trump. I think that Hillary Clinton is a terribly dangerous person."
Cosmopolitan subsequently named her a leader in the defiant Deplorable movement, alluding to Hillary Clinton's campaign description of half of Donald Trump's supporters as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic." In January 2017, Fairbanks was one of the organizers of the DeploraBall, an unofficial inaugural ball at Washington's National Press Club to celebrate Trump's victory. Threatening to shut down the black-tie event, Antifa circulated a list of "high-value" targets including Cassandra Fairbanks. Three alleged accomplices with DisruptJ20, a Washington, D.C.-based group of mostly anarchists that included the DC Antifascist Coalition, plotted to infiltrate the ball and infect the ventilation system with butyric acid, which can burn skin and lead to loss of vision. A 34-year-old Washington, D.C. man later pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit assault in connection with the planned attack.
Journalism
Fairbanks's writing career began in 2014 as an outgrowth of her activism. For nine months at the Free Thought Project, she reported mostly about police brutality. In 2015 she wrote for PINAC News, continuing to chronicle controversial policing around the United States. That summer, she live streamed her own arrest while covering anti-police brutality protests on Interstate 70 in St. Louis.
Also in 2015, Fairbanks was hired as a reporter for the Russian state-funded international news agency Sputnik, and moved to Washington, D.C., for the position. Her first article (sans byline, "NSA Struggles to Recruit New Talent in US Post-Snowden," appeared in April 2015. She remained at Sputnik until May 2017. In early 2016, while still with Sputnik, Fairbanks also wrote 10 bylined articles for Teen Vogue.
In April 2017, Fairbanks and right-wing provocateur Mike Cernovich posed for a photo behind the lectern in the White House briefing room, each making an OK gesture at the camera. According to Britain's The Independent, this "sparked outcry on social media" because the hand sign can symbolize white power. Fairbanks denied the gesture was racist, citing her partial Puerto Rican ancestry (her mother is from San Juan) to corroborate that she is not a white supremacist. After journalist Emma Roller tweeted the photo, which she captioned "just two people doing a white power hand gesture in the White House," Fairbanks sued in federal court alleging defamation. A year later, the court found that Fairbanks failed to show that Roller posted the image with actual malice.
Upon leaving Sputnik, Fairbanks spent April–November 2017 as a senior reporter at Big League Politics, which The New York Times has called "an obscure right-wing news site" given to promoting conspiracy theories and writing favorably about white nationalist candidates.
WikiLeaks
In October 2017, Fairbanks reported for Big League Politics that U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), after visiting Julian Assange at the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where the WikiLeaks founder was in asylum, said that in exchange for a pardon, Assange would provide evidence that Russia did not hack the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
In January 2020, National Public Radio subpoenaed Fairbanks seeking documents and electronically stored information relating to her conversations with Assange, among others, including journalists. The subpoena was part of a defamation lawsuit against NPR by Texas money manager Ed Butowsky over his purported involvement in a now-retracted Fox News story alleging that the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich was connected to the 2016 leak of DNC emails to WikiLeaks. Fairbanks's attorney responded that since the subpoena requested work product protected under the District of Columbia's reporter shield law, "no documents or other things will be produced pursuant to the subpoena." Fairbanks tweeted her loyalty to Assange, recalling that she'd camped outside Ecuador's London embassy for days "confronting the cops" who ultimately arrested him. "NPR lawyers are on 90 different drugs if they think I would ever give up a single sentence of a convo I've had with him."
On February 24, 2020, Politico reported that Fairbanks had submitted evidence to the legal team defending Assange in his London extradition hearing. The evidence consists of screenshots and recorded phone calls spanning October 2018 – September 2019 that Fairbanks had with Arthur Schwartz, identified by The New York Times as a "conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr." Schwartz also had close ties to Richard Grenell, U.S. ambassador to Germany. Schwartz told Fairbanks that Ambassador Grenell was "taking orders from the president" when, through covert, back-channel negotiations, Grenell facilitated Assange's April 2019 arrest by London's Metropolitan Police Service at the Ecuadorian embassy.
On February 27, 2020, The Daily Dot reported that Fairbanks posted audio of a September 2019 phone call from Schwartz to her in which he stated that Ambassador Grenell "took orders from the president" in brokering Assange's arrest. In a separate video, likewise linked by The Daily Dot via embedded tweets from Fairbanks, she said that when she visited Assange at the embassy in January 2019, she told him the U.S. was arranging his arrest. In March, Fairbanks again visited Assange. After being sequestered in a room locked from the outside as officials demanded Assange submit to a full-body search, Fairbanks was allowed to speak with him for only eight minutes (instead of the allotted two hours) in a conference room that she said was "filled with bugs and video cameras." Fairbanks also said Schwartz told her the U.S. would not "go after" Assange over the DNC leaks or for Vault 7—leaked CIA files detailing the agency's electronic surveillance and cyber warfare capabilities that WikiLeaks published in 2017. Instead, Assange would be charged only in connection with Chelsea Manning's 2010 leaks.
Chelsea Manning
"I don't believe anyone has done anything as remarkable as Chelsea Manning in my lifetime," tweeted Cassandra Fairbanks in 2013, two months after the soldier was sentenced to 35 years in prison and a dishonorable discharge for having disclosed to WikiLeaks nearly 750,000 military and diplomatic documents. "I've been relentlessly supporting WikiLeaks since the first time I heard of them, and Manning," Fairbanks added in 2017.
However, after Manning's early release in 2017, Fairbanks was disappointed to see her siding with Antifa in a "March Against White Supremacy" at Berkeley, California, one day before a conservative "Free Speech Week" was set to begin. "It's a real shame," Fairbanks tweeted, "since many of us (like me) fought for her right to free speech for fucking years."
Manning responded privately, angling to leverage the journalist's connections with D.C.-area media influencers. The former military intelligence analyst aimed to collect insider information to undermine the alt-right. Unsuspecting, Fairbanks in December 2017 invited Manning to socialize with her and friends. In January 2018, Fairbanks provided a complimentary ticket and VIP wristband for Manning to attend "A Night for Freedom" hosted by Mike Cernovich. In reporting the "far-right pro-Trump bash," The Washington Post identified Cassandra Fairbanks as a "prominent far-right Internet figure."
By then an official candidate for U.S. senator in her home-state Maryland Democratic primary, Chelsea Manning seized this chance to out herself as a spy. "Crashed the fascist/white supremacist hate brigade party," she live-tweeted to her 324K followers, attaching a scowling, thumbs-down selfie. After reconnoitering for 45 minutes, double agent Manning left to join Antifa protesters who had surrounded the building. She relayed the number of revelers inside, their general mood, conversations, and plans for after-parties. Manning later tied her ruse to her Senate campaign. "I'm running b/c our world should be better for everyone, always," she tweeted with 13 emoji. "Fascists/alt-right deserve no platform. We stand opposed to them. I took up an opportunity to gather intel on them b/c the ideology they peddle threatens everyone."
Cassandra Fairbanks was not pleased, particularly by Manning's explanation that white supremacist-led violence at the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia had compelled her subterfuge. "I really really really wanted to go along with everything because she has been through so much," Fairbanks tweeted, "but she equated me and my friends to Charlottesville knowing damn well that's bullshit. Sorry Chelsea, not cool." Fairbanks insisted that "A Night for Freedom" was not a white supremacist event, and that Manning had been well received. "Tons of people went up to Chelsea and thanked her for what she did. Not one person was rude to her, even those who disagree with her actions. I would have impaled them with my stiletto if they had been—but our crowd isn't like that."
The Gateway Pundit
In December 2017, Fairbanks joined far-right news and opinion website The Gateway Pundit as its Washington bureau chief.