The young man who was wrongly identified by conspiracy theorists, and Elon Musk, as being a neo-Nazi and "fed" is being represented by Mark Bankston, one of the lawyers who won a massive case against Alex Jones.

A young man falsely accused of being a federal agent posing as a neo-Nazi by Elon Musk and a bunch of other right-wing trolls has launched a lawsuit against the one-time richest man in the world.

Earlier this year, college student Ben Brody, 22, had his life turned upside down when he was accused of being a part of a Pacific Northwest neo-Nazi group. The claims occurred after a neo-Nazi had his mask pulled off when his group had a small brawl with local Proud Boys in Oregon City on June 24. The unmasked neo-Nazi bore a passing resemblance to Brody, who once wrote on a website for his Jewish fraternity that he wanted to work for the government.

This, seemingly, was enough for some of the worst folks online to go to work, and for Musk to jump into the fray.

According to the lawsuit, and in an interview with VICE News at the time of the incident, Brody suffered a “severe degree of mental stress, anguish, fear, personal embarrassment, and psychological harm which disrupted his daily life,” and worried that being publicly connected to a neo-Nazi group will impact his future employment.

“The reality is that too many powerful people with enormous audiences are being reckless with their accusations against private people,” reads the lawsuit against Musk. “The damage they cause is not easily repaired by apologies or counter-speech, no matter how persuasive. Repair of reputations, compensation for harm, and effective deterrence can only occur in our courts.”

The young man is being represented by Mark Bankston, a lawyer who last year successfully sued Alex Jones for $49 million on behalf of the parents of children killed in Sandy Hook. The lawsuit was filed earlier today in Travis County, Texas, where Musk resides.

“I am honored to be assisting this brave young man in standing up against yet another one of Elon Musk’s reckless smears,” Bankston told VICE. “We look forward to restoring Ben’s good name and sending a message that Musk’s conduct is unacceptable.”

Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 and since has been roundly criticized for allowing conspiratorial content to flourish and allowing antisemitic and extremist figures back onto the site. Twitter and Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Online shitposters, misinformation peddlers, and the worst internet sleuths you could imagine seized upon the fact Brody had once written for his Jewish college fraternity that he wanted to work for the government. This was enough proof for some that Brody was a federal agent pretending to be a neo-Nazi and the group was a “false flag” orchestrated by the United States government—a favorite conspiracy of the far-right.

It wasn’t too long after the false allegations about Brody began swirling on Twitter that Musk, the website’s owner, replied with things like “very odd,” and “always remove their masks” under several tweets falsely accusing Brody and sharing his personal information and photos. These responses, according to the lawsuit, drew much larger audiences to the defamatory tweets because of Musk’s large following.

While the storm of misinformation swirled around Brody online, the reality of the impact upon his real life finally made landfall when he was enjoying a Dodgers game with his mother. After initially being confused about why strangers were attacking him on his personal social media page, he slowly began to realize what was happening as they drove home.

"In the car, I was freaking out and very nervous, very anxious, like 'oh my God, I can't believe this happened, you know, my life is over,’" Brody told VICE News in July. "Everything that I tried to work for and all this is just completely gone. And I genuinely felt very anxious, very nervous."

Brody said his family didn’t feel safe being at home that evening and fled for the night. To try to calm the situation, Brody made several Instagram posts explaining he wasn’t the man in the video and was hundreds of miles away at the time. To back up his case he posted receipts from purchases he made that day and time-stamped security footage. But facts play a limited role in this particular corner of Twitter and Brody’s response fell on many deaf ears.

On June 27, after several days of amplifying other people’s posts, the lawsuit states Musk personally committed defamation against Brody when responding to a news article by Zero Hedge—a far-right news outlet that was banned from using Google Ads in 2020 for its racist content and was integral in aiding the spreading of the Sandy Hook conspiracy—with the headline “Patriot Front ‘White Supremacist’ Unmasked As a Suspected Fed.”

“Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation,” Musk wrote. The lawsuit states this is a clear nod toward Brody. The tweet has been viewed over 1.2 million times since it was posted and while the Zero Hedge post and article were deleted, Musk’s remains up.