Blamed for Benghazi: Filmmaker jailed after attack now lives in poverty, fear

Four Americans died in the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, and those who survived saw their stories of heroism told in a Hollywood movie, but the filmmaker whose work was wrongly blamed for touching off the event lives in obscurity, poverty and fear, FoxNews.com has learned.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the Coptic Christian whose short video “The Innocence of Muslims” was initially faulted for sparking the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack at U.S. diplomatic compounds in Libya, is now living in a homeless shelter run by First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif. He has served time in prison, been shamed publicly by the White House and threatened with death.

“I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” Nakoula told FoxNews.com. “I don’t think there is such a thing as freedom of speech.”

In the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seized on the anti-Islamist film as the cause of a spontaneous protest that turned violent. U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed when armed terrorists laid siege to the compound and set it ablaze.

Nakoula’s video trailer, posted online and credited to “Sam Bacile,” mocked the Islamic prophet Mohammad – depicting him as everything from a bozo and womanizer to predator and homosexual. Although Obama and Clinton were later forced to acknowledge that the attack was an organized assault by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists, Nakoula was soon charged with eight counts of probation violation, jailed without bail and deemed a “danger to the community.”

Nakoula had previously been convicted of charges relating to bank and credit fraud, and federal prosecutors found his use of the Internet to post the video violated his terms of probation.

Nakoula, who is in his late fifties and has been in the U.S since 1984, declined to elaborate on his post-jail experiences, but said he plans to write a book about his ordeal.

For now, he deferred queries to the Rev. Wiley S. Drake, pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church. In August 2013, Nakoula was relocated from prison to a halfway house – a kind of house arrest although it’s a government facility – to serve out the remainder of his time, and a year later was released into Drake’s custody. For the past three years, Nakoula has been living at the homeless shelter on church grounds.

According to Drake, the federal government was concerned about the potential threats at the halfway house due to Nakoula’s presence, and agreed to release him to the church. Amid the hoopla sparked by his film and the finger-pointing, Nakoula indeed became a hot target for Islamic fatwas. In 2012, an Egyptian court sentenced him – in absentia – to death for defaming the religion and a Pakistani minister issued a $100,000 reward to have him killed.

Drake said that they have received a few anonymous phone threats – the last being about a year ago – but he refuses to back down.

“I have purposely not hidden that Nakoula is here,” he continued. “I’m not afraid of anything.”

Kenneth Timmerman, author of “Deception: The Making of the YouTube Video Hillary and Obama Blamed For Benghazi,” asserts that Nakoula was ultimately “the first victim of Islamic Sharia blasphemy laws in the United States.”

“He was collateral damage, as were the actors and actresses who became subject to death threats and fatwas,” Timmerman said. “Nakoula takes the fatwas seriously because he understands they are still active and cannot be rescinded.”

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