When Lynchburg resident Beth White stepped away from the lectern in city council chambers Tuesday night, she was in tears and couldn’t stop shaking, she said.
That’s never happened to her before, and she’s spoken during public comment periods at least 20 times in the past five years, she said.
Tuesday was different, she said, because she was not only speaking her mind but also standing up for every survivor of sexual assault in Lynchburg. Tuesday was different, the retired youth group leader said, because she was picturing the faces of young women in her church whom she counseled and comforted after they were assaulted.
She gave her speech in response to a social media comment made by Vice Mayor Curt Diemer last week that compared Virginia’s current redistricting effort to rape.
“Sir, comparing a political policy or even a judicial opinion to sexual assault is not only unethical, it is morally repulsive,” she told Diemer during her public comment. She added that he owed survivors an apology.
A resident of Lynchburg for 40 years and a Liberty University employee for nearly 28 of them, White said she’s a Republican who opposes the redistricting effort, just like Diemer does. But the comparison of the political action to “a very violent and very personal attack” is not appropriate, she said.
When Lynchburg resident Rise Hayes began crying at the lectern while discussing her experience as a survivor of sexual assault, White pushed past her own shakiness to stand with her and place a supportive hand on her back. White did the same when Jordan Nesbitt got choked up during her speech about what she called “unacceptable and hurtful” language used by Diemer.
“When she started crying, I thought, ‘She’s up there all alone. Just go stand with her,’” White said. “You don’t want to go through something like that by yourself.”
The emotional public comment period was followed by heated exchanges between city council members that ended in Diemer facing no formal consequences for the political analogy. More than two and a half hours into the meeting, debate started to die down, and Diemer said, “I humbly apologize if anybody was offended by any of the words I’ve used, but they were all about an election, not a sexual act.”
White accepted his apology from her seat in the audience.
“I don’t think it was genuine, because it was forced,” White said after the meeting. “But that is between him and God.”
From a Facebook poll to city council controversy
If passed by voters, the redistricting referendum would enable Democrats in the General Assembly to redraw congressional lines before November’s midterms with an eye toward knocking out four of the state’s five Republican U.S. House members. Virginia Democrats have called the redistricting effort necessary, after Republican President Donald Trump called on conservative-led states to change their congressional maps in favor of GOP candidates ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Virginia Republicans have criticized the move, calling it a power grab and questioning the constitutionality of the redistricting effort.
Lynchburg, led by a Republican-majority council, sought court intervention in the referendum process last month. On March 2, a circuit court judge dismissed the city’s suit. The day after, local journalist Andre Whitehead posted a poll on his Facebook page asking how residents felt about the judge’s decision and the redistricting effort as a whole.
White responded to the poll, writing that “State Senator [Mark] Peake has stated multiple times that this was being addressed at the state level” but city council members “still decided to go ahead with the suit anyway.”
Diemer, from his “Curt Diemer for Lynchburg City Council” account, tagged White in his reply: “waiting till rapist is done is not the best option.”
She tagged him back and commented “excuse me?” Then she emailed Matt Freedman, the city attorney, to ask if she had any legal recourse. Freedman told her to seek advice from her personal attorney, and he forwarded her concern to the members of the city council, White said.
Diemer doubled down in a series of emails and subsequent social media posts. In emails to council member Chris Faraldi, Diemer said, “I will up my use of the Rape analogy because it is getting such great attention and bringing awareness to the crime being committed against Republicans,” and “I should have used murder as my political analogy since this is actually a ‘genocide’ against almost every Republican Voter in Virginia,” according to copies of the emails posted on Faraldi’s website. On his Facebook page, Diemer posted, “it’s like waiting till the rapist is done” and “I find it interesting that those defending the Democrat ‘rapists’ here are also trying to silence me.”
Some of the Facebook posts and comments were no longer publicly visible as of Wednesday. Screenshots of them were provided to Cardinal News.
Diemer emailed White on March 6, saying, “If my comment about the Democrats criminal election and the judiciary’s unwillingness to address it offended you, I am happy to discuss it with you. It certainly was not my intent to offend you.” He encouraged her to reach out to him personally if she wanted to discuss, according to a copy of the email White provided to Cardinal News.
Commenter: ‘This is not Lynchburg’
By the time Tuesday’s city council meeting began, Diemer’s comments had been widely shared on social media, White said — by her, the Lynchburg Democratic Committee, and other pages.
Four public commenters, including White, discussed the negative impact the comments made.
“What I have found the most frustrating is that despite recommendations from his colleagues, he has refused to acknowledge or apologize for his behavior. Instead he doubled down,” said Lynchburg resident Duane Yuhas. Near the end of his remarks, he addressed Diemer directly: “Vice Mayor, you’ve lost my trust.”
Hayes, who is the president of Central Virginia Young Democrats and made an unsuccessful run for Lynchburg’s state delegate seat this fall, spoke from her personal experience as a survivor of sexual assault and friend to other survivors.
“This is a disrespect to those of us who have to deal with this trauma every day, despite all of the efforts we do to do better and to feel better,” she said.
Yuhas said in an interview after the meeting that Diemer’s actions don’t represent the city.
“What I want the whole world to know right now is this is not Lynchburg,” he said. “We are a very welcoming community. We’re a very supportive community.”
The question now, Yuhas said, is “Where do we go from here, you know? How do we as a community heal and put faith in the very representatives that we have to now stick with?”
Lots of adjectives, no action
Tensions were high during Tuesday’s work session, which preceded the city council meeting. After Faraldi said the vice mayor’s political analogies were inappropriate, Diemer said that he didn’t intend to offend anyone with his social media comment.
“It may not have been the best word in retrospect, because it implies one victim,” Diemer said. “In reality, this election and this referendum and the disenfranchisement of almost 80% of the Republican party voters in our state, that’s not just one victim, that’s almost genocide, so maybe that’s —”
He was interrupted by Faraldi, who interjected, “You are absolutely disgusting.” Faraldi left the meeting later during Diemer’s speech.
Faraldi left the city council meeting just before it adjourned, too, after shoving his microphone off the dais and calling Diemer’s language “vile, deranged, twisted, sick, sinister.” As Faraldi spoke, Diemer laughed, interjected with comments, and checked his watch; Mayor Larry Taylor hit his gavel on the dais more than 20 times.
Council member Stephanie Reed made a motion to add an item to Tuesday’s agenda: to consider revoking Diemer’s ticket to fly to Chicago on the Lynchburg airport’s inaugural flight to the city later this month. The city planned to cover the cost of Taylor’s and Diemer’s tickets so they could represent the Hill City in the new aviation initiative.
“I think that your taxpayer dollars should not currently cover the vice mayor’s trip because I don’t believe he is a good representative of our city right now,” Reed said when she introduced the motion. The item was added to the agenda with a 4-2 vote, with council member Marty Misjuns and Diemer voting no and council member Jacqueline Timmer absent.
When it came time to discuss the new agenda item, Reed backpedaled, saying that Diemer’s lack of prompt apology speaks for itself. A motion to revoke Diemer’s ticket initially had a motion from Faraldi, a second from Reed and extensive discussion — but when Reed removed her second, the motion died.
Speaking to her idea to take away Diemer’s plane ticket, she said: “I think it’s going to end up being turned into something as a weapon, and I’m not going to give them that.” Then, speaking to the audience, she said: “You guys get the point of what should have been done, and when it should have been done, and how it should have been done.”
The meeting ended with no censure, demand for a public apology, or other formal consequences for Diemer. Throughout the meeting, he stood by his actions.
“I want to apologize — it might not be for what you think it should be for. But I want to apologize that we’re spending time on this tonight. I think we’ve got important things to do and I apologize we’re having to spend any time on this at all,” he said.
At the end of the meeting, he said, “I’ll choose my words more wisely next time, Mr. Mayor, I assure you, because I don’t want to waste this council’s time.”
Time was at the center of Misjuns’ comments as well. He said attempts to reprimand the vice mayor are “exactly the kind of stuff that we don’t need to be wasting our time on” — especially in March, the month when fiscal year budgets are traditionally presented and discussed.
“I did not agree with what he said. I did not support what he said. … But you know what? That’s for him to deal with and whoever he offends. It’s not for us to deal with. It’s not our job up here,” Misjuns said.
At times, voices of three city council members and the thud of Taylor’s gavel rang through the city council chambers simultaneously. Council member Sterling Wilder, the lone Democrat on the council, said “I’m embarrassed” to the crowd — including a representative of Framatome who was in the audience to support the sale of a city building to the engineering firm to expand its space for workforce training, staff offices, and research and development.
In a statement to Cardinal News on Wednesday morning, Diemer said that his goal is to continue to bring attention to the redistricting conversation and that he “will not allow the discussion to be diverted away from the substance of that concern.”
“Last night reinforced for me how strongly people feel about the integrity of our elections and the direction of our Commonwealth. I understand that the analogy I used in a recent post has drawn criticism, and I recognize that words used in public debate carry weight. My intention was to convey the seriousness with which I view the situation, not to distract from the underlying issue. And to the extent to which that happened and the time that was wasted, I am sorry,” he wrote.