Earlier this year, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters briefly employed a man whose image was synonymous with the infamous “Unite the Right” rally that brought white supremacists to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
The Teamsters hired Peter Cytanovic for an administrative job at the union’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., before firing him during his probationary period, according to a source with knowledge of the situation. The union was unaware of Cytanovic’s past when he came onboard, the source said.
More than seven years earlier, Cytanovic, then a college student, traveled from Reno, Nevada, and marched among neo-Nazis in the “alternative right” demonstration on the University of Virginia grounds. The dramatic Getty photo of a screaming, white-polo-clad Cytanovic — then 20 years old, his face lit by tiki torches — became perhaps the most iconic image from the rally. He has since said he is not a white nationalist.
Cytanovic declined to discuss his stint with the Teamsters during a brief exchange outside his home on Wednesday.
“They can suck dick,” he said of the union, “and you can get the fuck out of here.”
The Teamsters declined to comment on the matter.
HuffPost has learned that Cytanovic told the Teamsters he had previously worked as an organizer for the Service Employees International Union, another powerhouse in the labor movement. SEIU declined to comment.
Cytanovic’s hiring at one of the largest and most powerful U.S. unions first surfaced publicly in an anonymous Reddit post last month. Someone who identified themselves as an employee at Teamsters headquarters said they learned about their new co-worker’s Charlottesville trip after googling his name. The poster said they reported their findings to a manager, and Cytanovic was terminated.
On Tuesday, John Palmer, a member of the Teamsters’ executive board, shared on Facebook a letter he had sent to the union’s president, Sean O’Brien, asking critical questions about the hire, including how the background check was done. Palmer is a vocal O’Brien critic who’s announced a run against the incumbent president in the union’s 2026 election.
“When we hire somebody at the international, they vet people and it takes at least three or four people signing off,” Palmer told HuffPost, referring to the main union, rather than its local affiliates. “I can’t speak to the vetting process.”
Cytanovic has maintained since the days immediately following the Charlottesville rally that he is “not the angry racist [people] see in that photo.” He said he was drawn to the rally in large part to defend the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as a symbol of white, European heritage. Anti-racist activists had urged local officials to remove the Lee monument from a Charlottesville park.
“I hope people acknowledge that being a party to the alternative right does not make me an evil Nazi, and that being pro-white right now is dangerous, and being pro-white doesn’t mean I’m anti-anyone else,” he told Nevada’s Channel 2 News after the rally.
That article described Cytanovic as a “self-proclaimed white nationalist,” a label he disclaimed in a 2019 interview with The Beaver, a publication at the London School of Economics, where Cytanovic was studying for a master’s degree at the time.
“I thought white nationalism at the time was American nationalism, being proud of our history without condemning,” he said. “Without being an atomised individual, being part of a wider community. I’m ethnically American.”
Cytanovic also said he and other rally participants bear blame for the death of Heather Heyer, the counterprotester who was killed when a far-right demonstrator drove a car into a crowd the weekend of the rally.
“I caused hurt. There’s nothing I can do to change that now,” he said.
The viral 2017 image of Cytanovic has dogged him professionally and academically for years, long before his brief time with the Teamsters.
As HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias reported in 2021, Cytanovic joined the Nevada National Guard but was quickly booted before attending basic training. Although he had passed criminal and fingerprint checks, a guard spokesperson said Cytanovic was expelled due to his “affiliations.”
Before that, fellow students at the University of Nevada, Reno, had pushed for his expulsion, though the school’s administration resisted such calls on free-speech grounds. However, Cytanovic did end up resigning from his job with a campus escort service that provides free rides to students at night.