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On 15 April 2017, President Trump's supporters and detractors clashed on the streets of Berkeley, California. That day, the group We Are Change posted a video of the chaotic scene. The video quickly went viral, in large part due to an incident at the 30-second mark which showed Nathan Damigo, the founder of a white supremacist group, punching Louise Rosealma, a protestor: The web site DrRichSweir.com provided this version of events: Although the post portrays Damigo as a veteran heroically intervening to prevent violence, his past is more complicated than that. He is the founder of a white supremacist group called Identity Evropa (which he was promoting at the event) and has served jail time for armed robbery. Still, we found no record of Damigo claiming that he saw Rosealma putting an M80 explosive inside a glass bottle and throwing at it protesters. No quotations from Damigo were provided, nor any evidence that the bottle was actually filled with explosives. In fact, the photographic evidence does more to disprove this claim than to support it. The photograph of Rosealma holding a glass bottle was taken by Stephen Lam of Reuters and has not been altered (other than the red circle). However, a close-up of the bottle appears to show that it's empty: In addition to this photograph, the claim that Rosealma was using an explosive device made out of a glass bottle may originate in a video featuring an interview with the anti-fascist protester that shows at least one explosion during the rally, but it's unclear what exactly it was or who set it off. During a hiatus in the chaos, the interviewer asked Rosealma if she condemned the use of M80s. Without addressing the ethics of using explosives, she responded: The interview appears at the 3:30 mark: The Washington Post reported that there were small explosions (most likely firecrackers) during the riot, but explosives were absent from a list of weapons that were confiscated by police compiled by Mercury News: Rosealma was not arrested over the incident, but the Washington Post noted that more arrests were expected as investigators review videos of the event.Although the Reuters photo shows Rosealma holding the bottle, images of Damigo punching Rosealma clearly show that her hands were empty at the time of the incident. Here is a clear shot of her empty hands moments before she gets hit: So when was Rosealma holding the bottle? The photograph that shows Rosealma with empty hands is actually the second time that Damigo hit Rosealma. The first incident can also be briefly glimpsed in the viral video, but it is easy to miss. If you slow down this footage and watch the left side of the screen you can see Rosealma holding a bottle, and Damigo punching her a first time, at the 22-second mark: This series of screenshots shows that Damigo actually punched Rosealma twice. Once when she was holding the bottle (around the 22-second mark) and a second time when she was not holding anything (around the 30-second mark). When we reached her for comment, Rosealma said that she never threw an explosive, and that this rumor was invented by the alt-right to justify Damigo's actions. Rosealma also told us that the only time she held a bottle during the event was when she was cleaning up trash, and that the images of her with a bottle (both the Reuters photograph and the stills from the video) had been doctored: Although Reuters has taken criticism for doctoring photos in the past, it is highly unlikely that the photograph of Rosealma was manipulated. We compared the Reuters image and stills from the video and found that they were taken at the same time and place (a man in a skeleton mask can be viewed in the background of both images), making it highly unlikely that they were faked. It's possible that Rosealma was simply cleaning up trash when a fight broke out. It's also possible that the bottle was being used as a weapon (either in defense or aggression). However, the claim that this bottle was filled with explosives is completely unfounded.
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