WATCHDRAGON | The Personal Fallout From Seattle Police Proud Boys Ruse

When C heard the Proud Boys were coming, she made a decision: She was going home.

“I was thinking, ‘Eh, if [this is] going to be a thing, I don’t really have the stuff with me to encounter Proud Boys,” C recalled. “I did consider going back with a firearm, but I did not.”

Later into the night, C said that for some, it became apparent that the news about the Proud Boys coming to hurt protesters on the evening of June 8, 2020, was just that: a story. 

Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers had said over the radio that armed Proud Boys were headed to the protesters outside SPD’s East Precinct. Officers said the Proud Boys were intent on confrontation.

But this wasn’t true.

To C, the fact that the police fabricated a story was nothing compared with the physical force the police levied against people in the course of the protests that summer. And it isn’t the fake story about the Proud Boys itself that has created so much ongoing trauma for C and other protesters who were there that night.

The real difficulty was — and still is — the ongoing blasé attitude experienced in public and private circles about something that frightened protesters enough to arm themselves and create protective barricades around the area of the East Precinct.

When people dismiss what happened, the protesters who experienced that tense night feel gaslit and disregarded.

Because she had gone home by then and was not part of the communications effort, C said she learned later of how, throughout the course of the evening, protesters would go where the police had reported seeing Proud Boys, only to find nothing.

But then she started talking about it in personal circles, including within protest circles.

“I had talked about this with people, and said this [sightings of belligerent Proud Boys] happened, and I was totally gaslighted,” C recalled. “That was honestly the worst part of it. … Compared with other things that happened later, and even before, [the actual incident] was not particularly traumatizing. The gaslighting up until The Seattle Times published was the part that got to me.”

C is referring to the Times article that dropped on Jan. 5, 2022, the same day the OPA released its case findings — but in those findings, the OPA declined to call the effort “disinformation,” and therefore sidestepped naming the Proud Boys claims for what C and others still feel they were: Intentional misinformation meant to frighten protesters.

And when that happened, she said, “I got really pissed off, and then I got drunk.”

Now, C says, she feels there is not much good that can come out of investigating the case again, or dredging it up in any capacity. In her eyes, when the OPA’s findings came out, the people who had told her she was misremembering or just plain wrong were given an officially sanctioned justification to instead claim it just wasn’t as bad as she thought. 

It’s why she doesn’t talk with those people anymore. She has lost relationships. She knows of at least one person who left the country and now lives on the other side of the world in New Zealand, simply in an effort to get away from the city and everything that happened to them here.

Both C and Matt Watson — the Twitter (now X) user who goes by @Spekulation — Spek said there are self-formed support groups for people who participated in the protests. While C said the groups mainly focus on more current events, members still occasionally talk about what happened to them in 2020. For privacy reasons — and because “people who were not there cannot understand” — C did not share further details about these groups.

C has also lost sleep over everything that happened, and the past four years have left her feeling attempting to hold police accountable for their actions is a futile effort.

“I kind of got into collecting a lot of evidence, because so many people were denying my experiences — and I have found that it doesn't matter. People still just won't apologize, even if I demonstrate with hard evidence that I was right,” C said. 

Does the evidence about the Proud Boys ruse make her feel any better?

“Yes, there is some amount of it that does make me feel better, and I probably should do this [daylight the police’s actions] for me. But it would be nice to have someone say, ‘Oh yeah, I was wrong.’”