THE MIRACLE OF FORGIVENESS:

In Tennessee, his past was erased. His new friend introduced him as a budding white-supremacist leader. Damien was soon hanging out with highlevel members of the Aryan Nations and their wealthy financial backers.

One of them, the well-known music producer Jonathan David Brown, quickly became a kind of father figure to him, paying his expenses and inviting him to spend weekends on a big farm he owned outside of Nashville. Among the local skinheads, Damien was perceived as a kind of golden child, which he found intoxicating.

On the evening of June 9, 1990, Brown introduced him to Leonard William Armstrong, grand dragon of the Tennessee White Knights of the KKK. Brown vouched for Damien, telling Armstrong he was an up-and-coming leader and "our guy." With other skinheads, they went into downtown Nashville and as a group harassed some Black men who happened to drive by; Damien told them that he "had a ticket for them to go back to Africa." Afterward, Armstrong asked Damien to drive him to an undisclosed location. It turned out to be the West End Synagogue.

The shooting led to another turning point. Aware of the FBI's interest, Brown arranged for Damien to flee Tennessee, paying his expense as he lived on the road with a girl he was dating. After Damien returned to Tennessee toward the end of 1990, he fell into disputes with Brown and Armstrong, and set off on his own: In the space of a few months, he went to Hawaii to reconcile and live with his father, joined the Navy, underwent basic training, and was sent to a base in Virginia.

At about this time, he also reconciled with his mother and stepfather. In 1991, while he was living in Virginia, the law finally caught up with him. He was about to deploy to the Persian Gulf for his first of two tours of duty, but his use of his Social Security number as part of the deployment process allowed law enforcement to track him down.

He made a deal to return to Tennessee after six months of deployment to testify against Armstrong, who was sentenced to three and half years in prison, and Brown, who was sentenced to more than two years plus additional penalties. Damien served six months probation, and as a minor when the synagogue shooting took place was dealt with as a juvenile and his record was sealed.

Another re-invention followed: Damien would come to pretend he had never been a white supremacist. This was tricky at first. On Damien's first day of basic training, a Black drill instructor spotted the white-supremacist tattoos on his body and said, "Well, Robert E. Lee, looks like you and I are going to have some fun together." At graduation, after Damien had finished first in his class, that same drill instructor approached Damien's mother and stepfather and acknowledged what a tremendous transformation he had undergone.

By the time he was twenty years old, he was completely done with white supremacism. He spent several years in the military. Following his discharge, he pursued a love of auto racing and worked in NASCAR as a mechanic. He then taught himself to code and went on to become an extremely successful entrepreneur. A software company that he founded, Banjo, became a high-growth start-up that, over a period of years, attracted almost a quarter of a billion dollars in financing.

As Banjo's CEO, Damien gave well-received speeches at industry conventions and was touted as a success in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere. In his public appearances, he told an inspiring story about his difficult past, including his homelessness and gang activity, but omitted any mention of white supremacism.

But in April 2020, some three decades after the incident at the West End Synagogue, the technology-news website OneZero ran an investigative report detailing Damien's past, complete with a photo from a 1992 newspaper report showing him giving a Heil Hitler salute. Other media picked up the story, and weeks later, Damien resigned as Banjo's CEO, publicly apologizing for his actions. He withdrew for a year to take stock of his life and explore his past.

And that's how I came to know Damien Patton.

In April 2020, when the news about Damien broke, a friend of mine in Silicon Valley texted me and asked if I was available to talk. I found myself spellbound. I was the head of ADL; would I be willing to talk to him?

I agreed without hesitation. ADL as an organization has long tried to exemplify the Jewish concept of teshuvah, or repentance. Everyone has the ability to atone for misdeeds and seek forgiveness. All of us have the duty to help in that endeavor if we can and not write anybody off out of hand.

I quickly researched Damien online, discovered coverage of the allegations, and followed the trail on social media. I called my general counsel, a longtime ADL employee, and asked if he had heard of this story. He went into the files and, sure enough, found a hard-copy ADL bulletin from 1990 in which we had written about the incident.

I spoke to Damien late that same day. It wasn't an especially long conversation. I offered to speak with Damien again when he returned to Salt Lake City, where he lived with his wife and where Banjo was headquartered.

He agreed. A few days later, when we connected via Zoom, he rarely looked at the camera. His eyes were glassy and his mind seemed elsewhere.

Despite that difficult conversation, Damien and I struck up a friendship and began talking to each other on the phone almost every week--a relationship that, as of this writing, remains ongoing.

When people learn of my relationship with Damien, many of them ask why I have invested so much time in it. The answer is simple: I genuinely like Damien and believe that his contrition, his repudiation of white-supremacist ideology, and his desire for forgiveness are genuine. 

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