A brawl outside a Tennessee restaurant left a woman with a bloodied forehead Saturday night after about two dozen white nationalists asked her to ditch her black boyfriend and join them.
The gang settled behind the 30-year-old woman and her 37-year-old boyfriend inside the Brentwood bar after a racially charged rally in nearby Shelbyville wrapped up, according to Nashville police.
The girlfriend said a member of the group asked her to “guess.”
She said, “White lives matter.”
“That’s right,” another person replied, before asking her to join their table at the Corner Pub.
The woman went outside the bar in an attempt to “de-escalate the situation,” cops said, but she was followed, according to footage of the violence. Several of the assailants surrounded her and one of the men slugged her in the face, causing a cut above her eye, police said.
The assailants soon bolted in vehicles with New York and Wisconsin plates by the time police arrived. The victims left as well, but the battered woman returned to report the assault, cops said. She refused medical treatment.
The victim, who was not immediately identified, questioned why a member of the “White Lives Matter” group would focus their aggression on her in a statement to WZTV-TV.
“What do these people stand for and how are they aloud to still assemble and protest,” she told the Nashville television station. “This society and government is truly broken! Our president is talking about players kneeling for a song about freedom, but WE are persecuted every day. We as Americans need to open our Eyes and come together stop this injustice and hate.”
White nationalist leader Matthew Heimbach was reportedly among the attacking group, but he claimed the woman’s boyfriend “swung first and started a confrontation.”
“We’d just arrived, no one had bought a beer yet. And our guy got attacked,” Heimbach told a Mic reporter.
Witness Annelise Werme said in a Facebook post she went to the Brentwood bar to “escape the rally chaos” that was scheduled in Murfreesboro.
“Guess who showed up at the restaurant I was at. I recognized them as soon as they walked in,” Werme wrote.
“These guys, maybe 20 of them, dressed in all black, paraded through to an adjoining room, and immediately started harassing a biracial couple there,” she said, sharing video of the attack that spilled into the street.
“When I left, the police were still there speaking with the biracial couple. I really wanted to, and wished I would have, gone over to give them a hug,” Werme added.
