1 ene 2022 año - WaPo: Jan. 6 shattered her family. Now they’re trying to forgive.

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Jan. 6 shattered her family. Now they’re trying to forgive.
Peyton Reffitt has watched her family come apart after her father joined the Capitol riot mob. Now she and her family are confronting the perceived betrayals and broken relationships.

Peyton Reffitt in Plano, Tex., on Sept. 2. Her father, Guy Reffitt, is serving a seven-year prison sentence arising from the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Cooper Neill for The Washington Post)
By
Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
Sept. 9 at 7:00 a.m.


Deep Reads features The Washington Post’s best immersive reporting and narrative writing.

PLANO, Tex. — Seated at a round table on a hot Texas afternoon, Peyton Reffitt and her family were trying to figure out how to forgive one another for all that had happened since Jan. 6, 2021.

The family had yet to fully resolve the perceived public betrayals and failed attempts at reconciliation in the more than two years since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and Peyton, 18 years old at this latest gathering, wasn’t sure whether she was ready to confront her brother, Jackson, for everything that had happened since he secretly turned their father in to the FBI.

“Actions are actions. Dad went to the Capitol with a gun,” said Jackson, then 20 years old. “He walked up the Capitol steps with a gun on his hip.”

To understand how some families linked to the Capitol riot were trying to move on, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff spoke to a number of individuals who turned in family members or whose relatives or friends did so. One was Jackson Reffitt, who connected Rosenzweig-Ziff to his family.
Initial conversations were over Zoom and, in Nicole’s case, at the federal courthouse in D.C. and at the D.C. jail. The family spoke openly about the pain and isolation they experienced, helping Rosenzweig-Ziff re-create several significant moments since the Capitol riot. He also used hundreds of pages of court testimony and Reffitt family text messages to help readers understand in detail what happened.
The Reffitts agreed to let Rosenzweig-Ziff and Post Reports producer Eliza Dennis be present for the family conversation aimed at reconciliation. Rosenzweig-Ziff and Dennis sometimes asked clarifying questions that day, but the vast majority of the conversation was among the Reffitts.
In addition to interviewing several experts on extremism and reconciliation to contextualize the family’s efforts, Rosenzweig-Ziff talked over the phone with Guy Reffitt multiple times to review with him the allegations against him and to hear his perspective.
On an upcoming episode of “Post Reports,” we will take you inside the Reffitt family’s attempt to reconcile. Listen in as they try to work through the challenges unique to this family’s story, which is complicated but recognizable to so many whose beliefs are different from those of their loved ones. Subscribe or follow Post Reports.
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Peyton put down the journal filled with paragraphs of what she hoped to say today. She felt her breathing quicken. On Jan. 16, 2021, the FBI raided their house and arrested her father, Guy Reffitt, on charges of obstruction of justice and unlawful trespassing related to Jan. 6. Her brother was interviewed on CNN the next week, and it was then she found out that he had tipped off the authorities.

“Me, Sarah and Mom just felt a lack of empathy on our part from you afterwards,” Peyton said to Jackson as their mother and sister nodded.

“It’s not that I’m proud of it, or I’m so happy about it,” Jackson said.

After rioters stormed the Capitol, relatives and friends who disagreed with their actions faced a difficult choice: Should they turn their loved ones over to authorities? Could they continue to have relationships with people accused of trying to interfere with the peaceful transition of power? Divisions that had been growing since the election of Donald Trump to the presidency were torn even wider in living rooms and family group chats across the country.

Ever since, families have been having or avoiding conversations like the Reffitts were having on that May afternoon. What had once been political disagreements had become questions about loyalty, truth and patriotism.


Supporters of then-President Donald Trump swarm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress meets to certify Joe Biden’s election victory. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

As the Capitol is besieged, congressional staffers are evacuated by members of the U.S. Capitol Police. (Amanda Voisard for The Washington Post)
Some, like Guy Reffitt, were part of a violent mob. Others, like his son, Jackson, were informers.

And some, like Peyton, were caught in between.

[The Jan. 6 Attack: Before, During and After]

Since the Capitol riot, Peyton had watched her family come apart. Her brother moved out right before the CNN interview. Her mother, a former department store operations manager, left their Dallas suburb and moved to D.C. to attend nearly every Jan. 6 trial in support of the defendants. Peyton eventually moved in with her sister, Sarah, 26, after enduring regular panic attacks brought on by her family’s public falling out.

They had all staked out their corners: The sisters, fiercely loyal to their father but “disturbed” by the attack on the Capitol, as Peyton said, thought Guy had been given an unfairly long sentence. They blamed Trump for how that January day in 2021 had played out. Jackson did, too, but he also believed his father was an “active threat” and an adult who was responsible for his actions. Nicole thought her husband was standing up for a president who had been cheated out of an election victory.


An image from video of the Jan. 6 attack, during which police deployed tear gas, shows Guy Reffitt in a helmet and rinsing his eyes. (Courtesy of FBI)
The four Reffitts had rarely seen one another since Guy was sentenced in August 2022 to seven years in prison.

Peyton missed cracking jokes with her family while eating their mother’s special chicken curry and watching K-pop YouTube videos in their living room.

“I am to blame,” Guy said in a recent interview from the Fannin County jail in Bonham, Tex., where he is being temporarily held. He says that although he does not regret going to the Capitol that day, he worries about Peyton. “I own this right here, right now. I’m the only one that can.”

Before the conversation in May, Peyton had started meditating to better control her anxiety. She was still forming her identity and political beliefs. After her father’s trial, she had read “Mending America’s Political Divide,” a book self-published by a neuroscientist seeking to explain and resolve political tribalism. It helped, she said.


She hoped this conversation could lead to some type of forgiveness, or at least to their figuring out a way to spend time together without arguing. But now, in a white-walled common room of Sarah’s apartment complex, her mother began defending the reason that Guy had gone to D.C.

“So you’re happy he went up there, did what he did, came home, got arrested and is missing from his family?” Jackson said, his voice rising. “You’re proud of that?”

“That is absolutely not what I said,” their mother responded.

Peyton fidgeted with her notebook, fearful that they might start yelling.

The road to Jan. 6
Peyton and her family had moved back to Texas in 2016 after four years in Malaysia, where her father had worked as a consultant in the oil industry. His six-figure salary had allowed them to eat their way through Thailand and travel to the Malaysian islands. They even once went to a Thai drag show, all of them, including Peyton, who was 10 or 11 at the time.

“It was entertaining,” Nicole said. “And a tiny bit raunchy.”

Coming back to the United States at age 12, Peyton struggled to make friends and adjust to American middle school. She developed an eating disorder, and her chest started tightening because of a growing anxiety.

Her father would calm her down, sometimes brushing her hair and making her feel that he would protect her from anything. He could be loving, one time telling the family while driving in the mountains that his whole life was in the car. That made Peyton proud. Their bond felt special.

But her father also could shout at his family, the Reffitts said.

He once threw a ceramic mug at Jackson and, when Peyton was a toddler, fired a gun next to Nicole, according to Nicole and her children. No police reports were filed. Guy said in an interview that he didn’t remember throwing the mug and that he had fired the gun at the ground. Nicole said she didn’t consider the gun incident abuse, but Jackson said he did.


Nicole Reffitt prays outside the D.C. jail March 29 with other supporters of Capitol attack defendants being held there at the time. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)
“No family’s perfect, and I wouldn’t want to be,” Sarah later said. “But we were super, super close.”

The most vocally political person in the family always had been Peyton’s mother, a stay-at-home mom for 17 years who enjoyed reading Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and other texts on political ideology. Then Guy started following the reality TV host running for president.

Peyton’s father loved how Trump spoke — frank, he thought, and to the point. As the Republican went from candidate to president, Guy fell harder.

[Tracking the Trump investigations and where they stand]

When the pandemic began three years later, Peyton’s school moved online, and she and her family found themselves isolated from friends and relatives.

Guy, who had lost his job, moved further to the right, feeling that the country needed stronger borders and more police resources, he told The Washington Post. Jackson, who also started spending more time online, lurched to the left, moved by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the racial injustices he said it exposed.

With all of them penned up indoors by the pandemic, Peyton heard her father and brother argue. About Trump. About Black Lives Matter. About the coronavirus.

“You can’t tell them apart when they open their mouths, except for, you know, their ideology,” Nicole said, a view that Peyton seconded.

Guy was gruff. Jackson was sensitive. Both were stubborn.


Sarah Reffitt, shown in Plano, Tex., this month, is the older sister of Peyton and Jackson Reffitt. (Cooper Neill for The Washington Post)

Jackson Reffitt, Peyton and Sarah’s brother, who told the FBI before Jan. 6 of his concerns about his father, is shown at his home in Wylie, Tex., on March 30. (Emil T. Lippe for The Washington Post)
Peyton sometimes unwittingly escalated arguments between her father and brother by expressing her political views, which often aligned with Jackson’s. Her chest started hurting more as she grew anxious of saying the wrong thing. Her mother, who had returned to work, was often out of the house.

Soon, Peyton’s father was hosting an event for the Texas Three Percenters, and her mother was cooking brisket for members of the anti-government movement, which bases its name on the never-proved theory that only a small portion of American colonists fought against the British in the American Revolution. Peyton, meanwhile, started having trouble sleeping, wondering whether a civil war was possible and if that would separate her family.

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During the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020, Peyton heard Jackson ask their mother if he could borrow her car to go to a protest 10 minutes away. Nicole said yes. Then Guy — who was ready to stand outside a museum and defend it from looting — told Jackson he had better not take his mother’s car to join what Guy described as a group of potential rioters. A screaming match followed.

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Guy started talking about going to Washington.

“Too many lines have been crossed. Too many years this happened,” he texted his family the afternoon of Christmas Eve 2020.

Guy Reffitt

12/24/2020, 1:09 PM

That’s what we all want but the machine just keeps grinding us down. Too many lines have been crossed. Too many years this happened. We are about to rise up the way the Constitution was written. Look up Maybury v. Madison 1803. Read it well and it will help explain this scenario.

Jackson

12/24/2020, 1:09 PM

I’m more of, im voting for someone new

Peyton later found out that on that same December day, her brother went to his room, closed the door and filed an online tip to the FBI, warning that “his dad was going to do something big,” according to prosecutors. On Christmas morning, he gave Sarah an anime comic book and Peyton a Himalayan salt lamp as gifts.

Twelve days later, Peyton saw a picture on social media of her father on the Capitol steps.

Peyton

dad please be safe !! You know you are risking not only your business but ur life too and that isn’t just something to through away lol

Dad

I have no intentions on throwing it away. I love ALL of your with ALL of my heart and soul. This is for our country and for ALL OF YOU and your kids. God Bless us one and all…

At the Trump rally before the attack on the Capitol, Guy recorded himself saying the mob would drag lawmakers including Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was speaker of the House at the time, out of the building.

According to court testimony, Guy confronted officers at a key choke point at the Capitol and used a megaphone to encourage people to push through the barricades, a move prosecutors said helped the mob overrun the police lines. He was not seen entering the Capitol building or assaulting officers.

Days after the attack on the Capitol, Guy had returned home and warned Peyton and Jackson: “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor and you know what happens to traitors,” according to a supporting affidavit for his arrest warrant. “Traitors get shot.” Guy said in an interview that he would neither confirm nor deny saying this.

Peyton thought it was just her father talking big talk; she said she couldn’t count the number of times he’d made threats and not followed through.

“Daughter asked Reffitt why Reffitt was making them choose sides and threatening Son and Daughter,” the affidavit read, referring to Peyton. “Daughter did not feel that Reffitt was a threat to anyone in the family.”

Her brother thought otherwise. No one responded to his FBI tip until Jan. 6.

[Read more about the Jan. 6 insurrection]

Five or so days later, on the same day that Guy allegedly threatened Jackson and Peyton, Jackson met with an agent in the parking lot of a Rosa’s Café. He shared text messages and recordings of private conversations in which Guy talked about carrying a weapon on Capitol grounds, how he motivated people to move forward that day and why he couldn’t “let his country fall.”

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On Jan. 16, a Saturday, Peyton watched authorities arrest her father and raid their house. Agents searched her room and took Peyton to what she assumed was an FBI van, where she realized the trouble her family was in.

The next week, on Jan. 22, Nicole was at home when a friend of Peyton’s called, saying that Jackson was on TV. Sarah was serving tables at Hooters when her brother’s face was suddenly plastered on the screen above the bar.
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Other families that spoke to The Post said they’re suffering emotionally and losing touch with relatives with little desire to reconcile. Some said their family members charged over Jan. 6 still didn’t know they were the ones who had reported them.

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