The man at the centre of a right-wing conspiracy theory alleging a federal agent incited the January 6 attack could face up to six months in prison after he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of disorderly conduct.
Federal prosecutors told a judge on Tuesday that Ray Epps helped “inspire and gather a crowd” outside the US Capitol, where a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters breached the halls of Congress and blocked the certification of 2020 presidential election results.
In an attached letter to the judge, Epps outlined the “overwhelming and unbearable” waves of “guilt, remorse and humiliation” that followed, after conspiracy theories amplified across social media and Fox News forced his family into hiding.
“I take full responsibility for knowingly trespassing on restricted grounds and as a result unlawfully engaging in disorderly conduct,” he wrote. “By doing so, not only have I put my wife and family through an ongoing nightmare, but it has also left friends and hundreds of youths I taught and led with serious questions. I have let each of them as well as myself down.”
Federal law enforcement officials have repeatedly denied conspiracy theories surrounding Epps, who is suing Fox News and Tucker Carlson for defamation after the now-former network host suggested that he was a government agent who provoked rioters in an attempt to entrap Mr Trump’s supporters.
Epps – who supported the former president in 2016 and 2020 and was a loyal Fox viewer at the time – says he has since learned “not to put my trust in politicians, Fox News and some other media and social media outlets, only to have them betray me and other American citizens with election lies.”
“When the lies were exposed, they created a conspiracy to shift the entire blame for the insurrection on the FBI and myself as I became the face of J6,” he wrote. “The blame for the insurrection is not on the FBI. It is on those who were at the Capitol and engaged in insurrectionist activities and those who misled Americans like myself into believing the election had been stolen.”
In his plea for leniency, Epps said the resulting harassment has “fragmented our families, taken our livelihood and negatively impacted our health, both physically and mentally.”
“I am regretful, remorseful, deeply sorry, and angry at myself for attending the protest,” he wrote.
Donald Trump’s supporters overwhelmed the US Capitol before breaching the halls of Congress to stop the certification of the 2020 election on 6 January, 2021.— (AFP via Getty Images)
In a separate letter to the judge, his wife Robyn Epps wrote that Fox News was the couple’s “exclusive news channel.”
After Fox and others spread what she called the “Ray Epps conspiracy theory,” the couple “endured death threats and harassment that put our lives at risk,” she wrote.
Their phones were bombarded with threatening messages and “frightening” voicemails. People drove by their homes waving guns. Bullet casings were found on their property. Couples posed as potential customers for their wedding business only to corner them with questions about Epps. The threats, intruders and fear became so overwhelming they eventually sold their home and business to go into hiding, Ms Epps wrote.
“We have suffered under the attacks of Fox News, politicians and social media and have learned how conspiracy theories can grow so quickly,” she wrote. “They did so because the media and people who are trusted lie, distort the truth and outright make up information for their own benefit or edification.”
Another letter from Epps family members said he was “thrown under the bus by Fox, Trump and so many other news media for doing what he thought he should to support them.”
On his Tucker Carlson Tonight programme, Carlson claimed there is “no rational explanation” why this “mysterious figure” who “helped stage-manage the insurrection” was not criminally charged at the time. They are among two dozen statements cited in Epps’s lawsuit, which notes that the claims were not isolated to Carlson’s prime-time programme.
“Fox repeatedly published defamatory falsehoods about Epps, including by broadcasting and rebroadcasting defamatory statements by Tucker Carlson who devoted over two dozen segments to Epps and by republishing those falsehoods” across Fox platforms, according to the lawsuit.
Members of Congress and Mr Trump himself have also platformed bogus claims about Epps and his family on social media and in congressional hearings. In a post that linked to a false claim that Ms Epps worked for Dominion Voting Systems, the voting machine company that has also been subjected to a flood of bogus statements from Trump allies, the former president wrote: “Is this really true?”
In their sentencing memo, federal prosecutors once again shot down conspiracy theories surrounding the Epps family.
“Other than his four years in the Marines, Epps has never been a federal agent,” they wrote.
Ms Epps said that when the couple is in a “healthier” state, they wish to devote themselves to “educating people how to know what’s true and what’s false, how to research information for themselves and how to respond.”
“We think it is the main reason the [January 6] insurrection occurred,” she wrote. “We and others were deceived by those same entities and if we can be a small part in reducing its [effect], we want to do so.”
