Nina Kouprianova, Richard Spencer’s wife, has filed for divorce from her white supremacist husband.
First reported by BuzzFeed, the filing details Kouprianova’s allegations of emotional and physical abuse by Spencer, which include instances in which Spencer beat her while she was pregnant with one of their two children. At one point, Kouprianova said, Spencer “had me down on the ground smashing my head into the floor.”
While Spencer has denied the allegations, the divorce filing comes on the heels of a series of setbacks for the young white supremacist. After watching his planned college tour implode earlier this year, Spencer has been kicked off numerous fundraising platforms, and had his website removed from GoDaddy’s network. Spencer has denied the allegations.
Kouprianova, originally from Moscow, has managed to keep a lower profile than her husband, but her views often appeared firmly in line with her husband’s neo-fascism and white supremacy. While she has never claimed to be a white supremacist, she wrote for Spencer’s white supremacist Radix Journal. She’s also defended her husband from public criticism, claiming last year that Spencer’s critics were akin to the people behind the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Last year, she co-authored at least one additional article with Manuel Ochsenreiter, a neo-Nazi.
Kouprianova also did as much as she could to defend the Kremlin at every turn. While Spencer was claiming that Russia was the “sole white power in the world,” Kouprianova was specifically promoting the works of Russian neo-fascist Alexander Dugin. In addition to translating Dugin’s work into English, she described the neo-fascist as one of the “greatest minds of our time,” and a man with a “rare intellectual caliber.”
Dugin is one of the greatest minds of our time, and Pushilin strikes me, a Russian, as brave. 🙂 @BBCDanielS @miloslazaNBG22 @verafilatova
— Nina ☦️ Byzantina (@NinaByzantina) June 13, 2014
The divorce filings and abuse allegations follow similar developments among one of the other faces of the so-called “alt-right,” the cohort of young white supremacists who rose to prominence in 2016. Earlier this year, Matthew Heimbach was charged with assaulting his step-father-in-law, after having been caught sleeping with his step-mother-in-law. Heimbach is now out of prison, and has since joined the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement.