New Horry GOP leaders sued for defamation after altercation at ‘Rock the Red’ event
As the Saturday festivities of the ‘Rock the Red’ Republican Party event in Greenville were winding down last month, Matthew McDaniel decided that he had something to say.
According to a lawsuit McDaniel filed this week, he approached the stage where former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had just finished speaking, and reached for a microphone, which he described as a “public microphone.”
McDaniel called for a toast to Flynn, and then when he saw several people raising their glasses, he spoke.
“General Flynn is the biggest scumbag traitor in the history of this country, next to Donald Trump,” he said.
Other attendees quickly intervened. According to McDaniel’s lawsuit, the microphone was taken from him, he was “grabbed,” then “slammed” to the ground by Horry County GOP activist and former right-wing radio host Chad Caton, and then kept in a “horse-collar grip” as he was lifted back up, knocked to the floor again, and pushed out the door of the hotel ballroom where the the event was held.
Following the incident, South Carolina Republican Party leaders, including Horry County GOP Chairman Roger Slagle, Horry County GOP Vice Chairman Jeremy Halpin, Horry County GOP State Executive Committeewoman Tracy “Beanz” Diaz and MySCGOP leader Pressley Stutts, released statements about McDaniel and what had happened at the event. In the statements, leaders defended Caton’s intervention and described McDaniel and his actions as “antifa” — shorthand for anti-fascist activists who have joined protests around the United States in recent years, some of which turned destructive — and said McDaniel had a weapon. McDaniel said both claims were untrue.
McDaniel is now suing Caton, Slagle, Halpin, Diaz, Stutts and other South Carolina GOP figures, including a blogger, for assaulting him at the event and defaming him afterwards, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in Horry County Common Pleas Court.
And the lawsuit appears to be causing ripples through the local party in a key GOP stronghold for South Carolina Republicans. On Wednesday, the treasurer of the Horry County GOP resigned from his post, Diaz confirmed.
According to the suit, McDaniel is suing Diaz, Stutts, Caton, Slagle, Halpin, The Horry County Republican Party, the Greenville organization MYSCGOP, Greenville resident Jeff Magg and the South Carolina blogger Michael Reed, and the website he runs, TheStandardSC.org.
“They assaulted me and they defamed me and I want them to be held responsible and for them to apologize,” McDaniel said in an interview with The Sun News Wednesday.
Stutts, Slagle, Caton, Magg and Reed couldn’t be reached by phone for comment by The Sun News on Wednesday. Diaz, when reached by a reporter, said she wasn’t aware that she was being sued, hadn’t been served with a complaint, and declined to comment.
Halpin, too, when reached, said he wasn’t aware of the lawsuit, hadn’t yet been served, and declined to comment.
“There’s no way I’m making a public statement if they’re already talking about defamation,” Halpin said.
However, Halpin added, “I stand by Chad, and if what he said is how it happened then I stand by that.”
McDaniel’s lawsuit is the latest controversy for the Horry County Republican Party in recent months, following a censure of South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Drew McKissick, a rocky reorganization process in the spring, accusations that past leaders misspent party funds and a censure of U.S. Rep. Tom Rice (R-Myrtle Beach) in January after he voted to impeach former President Donald Trump following the violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6.
The lawsuit comes as Horry County’s new Republican leadership — Slagle, Halpin and Diaz — work to reshape the party from its so-called “establishment” past into one that’s centered on supporting the policies and politics pushed by Trump, all ahead of next year’s crucial midterm elections when voters will cast ballots for Congress, Governor, County Council Chairman and County School Chairman.
What happened at the ‘Rock the Red’ event
As McDaniel describes himself, he’s a former lifelong Republican who lost faith in the party when Trump first ran in 2016, becoming a so-called “NeverTrumper.” He voted for President Joe Biden last year, Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson in 2016 and said he’s more of an Independent these days. McDaniel also said he’s grown increasingly concerned about the QAnon conspiracy theory – which originally posited that a secret cabal of wealthy individuals, Democratic leaders and others in the federal government were operating a child sex traffiking ring but has since shifted into a theory that pro-Trump forces within government will triumph over anti-Trump forces within the government, oust Democrats and restore Trump to power.
McDaniel said he believes the Russian government to be behind the spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory in the United States, and that he believes many in the Republican Party are being duped by so-called psychological operations. Ahead of the 2020 election, national news outlets reported that Russian-backed organizations had boosted the QAnon conspiracy online, but no evidence has emerged to date that Russian operatives originated the conspiracy.
McDaniel said he bought a $197 ticket to the ‘Rock the Red’ event, held in Greenville in early June, in order to see what the Republicans there would say about QAnon.
“It was actually very disturbing what some of the people were talking about,” McDaniel said. “I wanted to go and observe and learn and find out what these QAnon people were all about.”
After attending the convention for several hours on June 5, McDaniel said he heard Flynn speak and then went to find a microphone to address the crowd, which had begun dispersing. He said he’d seen other attendees use microphones to address the crowd, and figured that it was OK if he did so, too. He thought that Flynn had been lying to the audience about the COVID-19 vaccine and other topics and wanted to address that.
“Flynn was up there spouting off his propaganda and I think at least one person should stand up and say the truth,” McDaniel said.
You can read the lawsuit here:
But shortly after McDaniel spoke, both he and his lawsuit said, he was “mobbed by people.”
According to his lawsuit, Magg grabbed the microphone from McDaniel, and then grabbed him as well. Then Caton walked up behind him, and “grabbed him, and slammed him to the ground” before putting him in a “horse collar grip,” the lawsuit said.
Once McDaniel was back on his feet, he said that Caton “aggressively pushed and held” at him as the two moved through the crowd toward the door. McDaniel, in the lawsuit, said Caton then “slammed” him “to the ground” again, and “drug him on the floor,” before he was able to regain his footing and stand again. Another person, who is described only as “John Doe #1” in the lawsuit, then “punched (McDaniel) in the face while Defendant Caton did nothing to stop him.”
On his way out, McDaniel said, he shouted, “QAnon is a Russian psychological operation” before the police arrived. McDaniel said he received several bruises and that his back and side hurt from the altercation, and that his glasses were bent in the process. He said Wednesday that he shouldn’t have been harmed for speaking to the crowd on the microphone.
“(Caton’s) actions weren’t predicated by actions, they were predicated by my words, they just didn’t like what I had to say,” McDaniel said. “You can’t just bodyslam someone because you don’t like what they have to say.”
Caton’s version of events, and the fallout
The Sun News was unable to reach Caton — via voicemail and text messages — on Wednesday to comment on the lawsuit or the events at the ‘Rock the Red’ convention. However, Caton described his version of events at the convention in detail on a June 7 episode of “Dark to Light with Frank and Beanz,” a podcast hosted by Diaz and Frank Val in which the two discuss politics and popular culture.
In the episode, Caton said that when he saw McDaniel grab the microphone, he worried that he may have a weapon, and may have been trying to attack Flynn, who had just finished speaking and was walking off stage.
“I freaked out because am I looking at a possible operation here to take down General Flynn?” Caton said. “That’s where my head goes.”
So, Caton said, he intervened and moved to subdue McDaniel.
“I did a simple move, grabbed him up by his collar — and there’s a nerve there — and he kind of froze for a second. I was able to spin him around and when I spun him around that inertia — and I’m not a small person — we spun to the ground,” Caton said.
Caton, however, denied that he “body slammed’ McDaniel.
“When they’re saying I body slammed a somebody, I would never get a job at WWE for that body slam, because it was kind of a spin to the ground,” he said.
In his lawsuit, McDaniel noted that Caton is about six inches taller than him, and “nearly double the weight.”
In the podcast episode, Caton described McDaniel as “antifa-ish,” which McDaniel disputed in his lawsuit. Val, one of the hosts, also weighed in on McDaniel’s actions.
“He wasn’t a speaker. He was a protester that just injected himself into the mix,” Val said.
Later, after watching a video of the encounter, Val added: “No, that was not a body slam. That was just a 52-year-old baby that needed to be pulled away from the toy he just found.”
Caton, in the podcast, said he was trying to avoid trying to fight with McDaniel, and said he allowed him to pick up his glasses and phone, and even tried to protect him from angry attendees.
“Essentially, I’ve gone from eliminating the threat to protecting him because he’s been subdued,” Caton said. “And that’s where I’m just lost. Because I’m being made out to be this gorilla that just beat the bejesus out of this guy that was yelling “I’m Antifa” on the way out.”
Toward the end of Caton’s segment on the podcast, Diaz said she supported his version of events.
“Well, Chad, I needed to have you on today to talk about this, because it is making its rounds, I wanted to get out in front of it before it made any more rounds (and) make sure the story was straight (and that) everybody understood what happened,” she said.
Other statements made
In addition to the June 7 podcast episode, Republican leaders released several statements about the incident at the ‘Rock the Red’ event.
After the June 5 incident, a Myrtle Beach blog published a post about it, taking aim at Caton in the process. That post then sparked the statements from Stutts and the Horry County GOP leaders, which McDaniel cited in his lawsuit.
In the statement released by Stutts, who organized the convention, McDaniel’s actions are described as “an ANTIFA-style attack” and Stutts wrote that he thought McDaniel had a “martial arts weapon” in his hands.
“An individual who had infiltrated the event commandeered a microphone and began shouting out obscenities and reading from a prepared manifesto speech,” Stutts said in the statement. “It was a deliberate premeditated action.”
The statement also described McDaniel as a “crazed agitator.” McDaniel denied that he had infiltrated the event, saying he purchased a ticket, denied that he belong to any anti-fascist groups, and denied that he had any weapons in his possession.
Stutts’ statement also described McDaniel as creating a “volatile and perhaps deadly situation.”
“If the individual had a gun, the situation could have turned deadly,” Stutts wrote. McDaniel denied that assertion in his lawsuit.
Later, Slagle, Halpin and Diaz all signed a statement from the Horry County Republican Party about the incident. In that statement, the local GOP leaders described McDaniel as having infiltrated the event, posing a threat to Flynn, as a member of Antifa and said he had a weapon. McDaniel, in his lawsuit, denied all of those accusations.
Several days later, the South Carolina politics blog The Standard published an article echoing Stutts’, Caton’s and the Horry County GOP’s statements, and McDaniel similarly denied the allegations in his lawsuit.
“All of these claims were false, Defendants knew or should have known that they werefalse, and made these statements maliciously and with the intent to harm (McDaniel),” the lawsuit states.
The state of the Horry County GOP
On Wednesday, according to several members of the Horry County Republican Party, the local party’s Treasurer, Eric Santorelli, who also served as the chairman of the party’s Bylaws Committee, resigned from his positions.
Why Santorelli resigned from his leadership positions within the party is not yet clear. Santorelli didn’t return voicemail and text messages seeking comment Wednesday afternoon. Santorelli previously played a key role in raising concerns that the former Horry County GOP chair, Dreama Purdue, had misspent party funds. Purdue has denied those allegations.
Some in the party, though, believe the resignation is tied to McDaniel’s lawsuit.
Diaz confirmed that Santorelli resigned, but said the resignation wasn’t tied to the lawsuit.
Jim Furry, a retired FBI agent who ran for Diaz’ position during the party’s reorganization earlier this year, said Wednesday that he questioned the timing of Santorelli’s resignation.
“The timing is impeccable,” Furry said. “The proximity to me is not a coincidence. It looks like everyone is scrambling.”
Gerri McDaniels, the former state executive committeewoman for the county party, said that even if Santorelli didn’t resign because of the lawsuit, he’s probably better off for doing so.
“This is going to be a big deal,” she said. “I doubt (he wants) to be involved, especially when there are attorneys involved.”
This story was originally published July 21, 2021 at 5:55 PM.