Lynchburg Councilman Marty Misjuns said he received a death threat Thursday night, two days after a city resident called some of his social media posts “hate speech” and went viral for it.
Misjuns received “a specific and credible written threat” that referenced dragging him from the council chambers and stated he was being watched everywhere he goes, he said in a written statement. He contacted the city police department immediately, and a report was filed. By midday Friday, evidence is preserved, there is a person of interest and federal authorities are involved, Misjuns said.
“I have a wife and young children,” Misjuns’ statement said. “Threats that target an elected official’s home and movements put the entire family at risk. That line should never be crossed. I will continue to do the job the people of Lynchburg elected me to do, and I am grateful to law enforcement for treating this threat seriously.”
The police department had not yet responded to a request for comment Friday.
During the public comment period of the city council meeting on Tuesday, Fable Forest, 26, stepped forward and criticized Misjuns’ social media posts made on X. Forest is the treasurer of the Central Virginia Young Democrats, moved to Lynchburg in 2018 for college and has lived and worked in the city ever since.
“Your bigotry and hatred has no place here. Your words can, have and will kill people,” Forest said at the meeting.
In an interview, Forest declined to cite any specific deaths out of respect, but they clarified that words have the power to create a culture in which people can feel excluded and unsafe, and that environment can affect mental health and lead to suicide.
“I keep those names with me, and I have to live with the fact that those lives were affected so strongly by someone’s hate that they are dead now,” Forest said.
They added that more people can be encouraged to use hateful language “when someone in power is emboldened to say things like that,” and that elected leaders have a duty to respect all their constituents.
Forest said in a written statement Friday that they denounce the death threat and are saddened to hear that Misjuns received one. They said they hope that Misjuns receives no more threats and that “everyone realizes there are more constructive ways to use passion than turning it into hate.”
“I did not say what I said to inspire hate in return. I don’t think hate can be used to fight hate. I recognize I spoke with anger and a lot of passion in defense of things that mean a lot to me but not to inspire the very same hateful rhetoric against him,” Forest said.
As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Forest said they have seen the impact of threats and hateful words before and “can empathize with [Misjuns] as I’m sure many of the marginalized communities he spoke against can as well.”
A video of Forest’s speech about Misjuns’ posts has garnered more than 1 million views on X and 550,000 views on a YouTube channel called “Occupy Democrats,” an online group founded in Florida that describes itself as “the largest and most influential social media organization advocating in support of the Democratic Party.” The video has also accumulated tens of thousands of views on local social media accounts.
“For the conservative base out there: If I’m getting trashed by Occupy Democrats, that means I’m doing something right,” Misjuns said in an interview.
He is up for reelection in November and said in his written statement that “Lynchburg is on the front lines of the fight to preserve liberty in Virginia and the United States” and that voters “cannot afford to put people in office who sympathize with, excuse or refuse to confront the radical elements driving this hostility.”
“Nobody should be out to try to assassinate people’s characters over their beliefs. That is a very dangerous place to go. It’s something that I will always stand against,” he said in the interview.
Misjuns regularly posts about local issues and national political topics on his X account, where he lists “GOP City Councilman” in his bio.
Recent posts about the national political climate include one that says “Join or Die,” in reference to joining the Republican Party. It was a reply to an August post from Tyler Bowyer, a conservative political activist, that said many groups of people, including moderate Democrats, Jews, and gay and lesbian people, should join the GOP or die because the Democratic Party has been “hijacked” by communists, followers of jihadism and transgender people.
Other posts in the past three months include references to specific people. Misjuns used a homophobic slur in a reply to a post about Abdul El-Sayed, this year’s Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan. Misjuns also replied to a post about Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist mayor of New York City, saying that “his soul belongs to a demon.”
“How is any citizen supposed to feel comfortable in this room or safe in this city?” Forest asked during the city council meeting after describing such posts. They described the council member’s behavior as “appalling” and “shameful.”
Misjuns said he has received more than 20 hate messages since the city council meeting, and none of them are from names he recognizes in Lynchburg. One came from as far away as Switzerland, he said.
“Over the past decade, left-wing violent extremism has risen and produced both successful and unsuccessful assassination attempts against public figures. Character assassination, threats and intimidation are tools used to silence anyone who refuses to accept their ideology,” he said in his written statement Friday.
This is not the first time that Misjuns’ social media posts have been scrutinized. In 2021, he filed a lawsuit against Lynchburg over his termination from the city’s fire department that year. He was fired after making offensive social media posts about transgender individuals, according to court records, and alleged a mix of constitutional, statutory and common law claims in the suit.
Misjuns, 43, won his at-large city council seat in 2022, coming in third place for three open seats with about 10,700 votes. The district court dismissed all of Misjuns’ claims in 2024, and Misjuns appealed. The federal court of appeals in Richmond affirmed the dismissal in 2025 because “Misjuns failed to sufficiently plead facts to state a claim of relief for each of his six claims,” according to court documents. This March, a federal judge denied Misjuns’ request to reopen the lawsuit.
“His transparently bigoted remarks gave rise to a reasonable apprehension on the part of Lynchburg’s citizens that the Fire Department’s emergency-response tasks would not be carried out in an even-handed and unbiased way,” a 2025 concurring opinion by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said. “The city, in turn, was fully justified in responding to the possible corruption of its basic services and to the negative effects on recruitment that the well-known views of a well-known Captain in the Fire Department would likely have.”
Forest drafted Tuesday’s speech by researching Misjuns’ posts and reviewing notes from previous city council meetings to find themes that stood out — and brought a packet of printed-out posts to the lectern to reference while speaking.
No one on the council dais addressed Forest after the speech.
Misjuns said the posts that Forest highlighted were “exaggerated, distorted or completely unsupported.” He called Forest a “political operative” with the goal of distracting voters from the policy issues of the upcoming election.
“Lynchburg has a decision to make, and that decision is whether or not they’re going to cave to these people on Election Day, or whether they’re going to continue to stand up against these people. Because these people are ready to just cancel conservatives at every opportunity,” he said.
Forest said the goal of the speech was to remind people that “you have a voice and you can use it” to counteract hurtful words via sharing new perspectives, supporting one another and voting come November.
Forest started routinely attending or livestreaming city council meetings about a year ago in an effort to better understand the decisions and policies that shape local government and has spoken at public comment periods before. The idea for this week’s speech came together at the end of September, Forest said, around the time that a Facebook group called “Left of Lynchburg” shared about 80 screenshots of Misjuns’ social media posts, appearances in the news and comments in meetings in a post that reads “so many examples over several years cannot be viewed in isolation.”
Forest’s address to the city council contrasted with other speakers during Tuesday’s public comment period — four of whom supported Misjuns’ recent call to conduct a forensic audit of pay raises given to city staff.
Misjuns is one of nine people running for three open seats on the Lynchburg City Council. He is technically running as an independent because the Republican nomination that he and two other candidates received in May was nullified in June. Early voting is underway, and Election Day is Nov. 3.
