Jan. 6 rioter who stormed Pelosi’s office ordered to pay $50K for defaming student

Twelve days after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election, police arrested Riley June Williams for several federal crimes.

It wasn’t hard to identify her — cameras clearly caught the young Harrisburg woman in the rampaging throngs, and she outed herself on social media as the thief of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s laptop.

But Williams tried to dodge accountability by publicly trashing the ex-boyfriend who tipped investigators to her identity — and for that, a New Jersey judge this week ordered her to pay ex-beau Michael Prodanov $50,000 in damages for defamation.

Superior Court Judge Douglas H. Hurd also ordered Williams’ friend Cyrus Sanders, who repeated her claims on Facebook, to pay $50,000 in damages for defamation, too. Neither Williams nor Sanders responded to Prodanov’s defamation lawsuit, and Hurd filed his default judgment on Monday.

Lori Ulrich is the federal public defender who represented Williams in her Capitol case. Ulrich told the New Jersey Monitor Friday that she found Hurd’s judgment “very troubling,” given that Williams had no attorney in the defamation case and could not defend herself. Williams was sentenced in March to three years in federal prison for six crimes.

“They exploited that fact that she was not represented and the fact that she’s in prison,” Ulrich said. “She was not able to defend herself in that.”

Federal prosecutors had accused Williams of trying to evade capture by fleeing her home, deleting her social media accounts, and changing her phone number after the riot.

But she said she did so to hide from Prodanov, telling authorities he was an abusive stalker against whom she’d secured a temporary order of protection from abuse. Sanders also misidentified Prodanov as Russian, suggesting he was a spy, according to Prodanov’s lawsuit. He is an American-born citizen of Bulgarian ethnicity, the complaint says.

Several media outlets, including the Britain-based Daily Mail and far-right international newspaper The Epoch Times, published Williams’ and Sanders’ claims.

But Prodanov’s attorney, Christopher J. D’Alessandro, called those claims “false” and said Williams sought the protective order only after she learned authorities were seeking her.

She lied to “deflect liability … under the pretext of victimhood” and “exact vengeance” on her ex after he alerted authorities to Williams’ identity and informed them she planned to give Pelosi’s laptop to a Russian citizen, D’Alessandro said.

“He fulfilled his duties as a responsible citizen, and he paid the price of getting a (protection order) filed against him, which was then utilized to justify someone’s flight from the FBI,” he said.

Ulrich denied that Williams lied about her relationship with Prodanov, saying: “we disagree with that.”

Prodanov, a Rutgers University student, feels vindicated by the verdict but disappointed the false claims remain findable online, D’Alessandro added.

“He’s a young man who’s in college and he’s got a whole life ahead of him, but now he has to live with this burden of having these comments out there for the rest of his life,” he said.