Ben Crump built a career demanding justice. Nolan Wells’ death has put his mission — and methods — back under a microscope

By Chelsea Bailey, Ryan Young, CNN

(CNN) — Ben Crump’s voice cut through the noise of a crowded convention hall like a thunderclap.

“Justice for Nolan Wells,” the attorney shouted late last month as he marched into the room with his fist thrust defiantly into the air. The crowd echoed his call: “Justice for Nolan Wells.”

As he made his way to the stage, Crump clasped the hand of Wells’ mother. In the weeks since her son died during a Fourth of July boating trip with friends, Christine Wells-Wonsley and her husband, Elmore, have become a fixture at the civil rights attorney’s side.

But this time, as they stood before a crowded room of journalists, they were not alone. Crump was flanked by three sets of grieving Black families who have all lost their sons in recent months.

The investigations into their children’s deaths have been fraught and flawed, they would later say. All three were 18 when they died. In all three cases, authorities have appeared to suggest their deaths were accidental.

And, crucially, Crump told reporters, all three died in “questionable” circumstances, surrounded by their White peers.

“We got to show that this is not a coincidence, that all these young 18-year-old Black men are ending up dead and nobody is being held accountable,” Crump said.

We “stand for the truth no matter who it implicates or who it exonerates. We stand for justice, no matter who it convicts or who it acquits.”

“And that’s all we want. We want answers.”

Time has shown where Ben Crump goes, the spotlight – and all the accompanying indignities it can bring — is sure to follow.

And his demand for answers has become a familiar refrain to anyone who’s followed the attorney’s rise to fame.

Crump made the same declaration when he represented the parents of Trayvon Martin in 2012, after the high school student was gunned down while visiting his father. He led the call for accountability in 2020 after Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police. And he demanded justice again months later when George Floyd suffocated under an officer’s knee.

At the height of the Black Lives Matter protests that came to define that year, the Rev. Al Sharpton called Crump, “Black America’s attorney general” – and it’s a moniker Crump has since come to embrace.

“My job is to get justice for the families who trust me with their loss,” Crump recently told CNN in an email, “and that means telling the truth about what happened to them and the systemic failures behind it.”

With his signature North Carolina drawl and an Eagle of Justice pinned close to his heart, Crump has become one of the most visible civil rights attorneys in the nation.

But the same steadfast pursuit that’s placed the attorney at the center of nearly every call for racial justice in the past decade has earned Crump more than a few detractors.

And while his media blitz has successfully kept Nolan Wells’ name in the national dialogue, it’s also exposed Crump to a familiar criticism: that he’s stoking racial tension and somehow profiting from his clients’ pain.

His supporters say the condemnation is merely a sign of Crump’s skill. In a world that is all too willing to turn a blind eye to the crimes and injustices committed against Black America, they say the country needs someone like Ben Crump to bring them into sharper focus.

“He is the modern-day Thurgood Marshall,” Gerald Griggs, a fellow civil rights attorney and the former president of the Georgia NAACP, told CNN.

“We know that without the pressure and the attention of the media, many of these cases go unheard and unknown,” Griggs said. “That’s why I respect Attorney Crump and others who are doing this work, day in and day out.”

But proximity to such a polarizing figure can come at a cost.

Wells’ mother, a nurse practitioner, has become one of the latest grieving loved ones to be subjected to attacks and criticism online. In early August, Crump said the Mississippi Board of Nursing opened – and then quickly closed – a professional misconduct investigation into Wells-Wonsley after receiving a barrage of anonymous complaints following her son’s death.

“This is a warning shot at a grieving mother, meant to pressure and scare her into staying quiet,” Crump said after the inquiry was announced. She has been forced to defend her professional record simply for demanding clarity on what happened to her son, he added.

After the board closed the inquiry, Crump said, “It was frivolous, it was unfounded, and it was never about patient care.”

“What Christine still does not have is the truth about her son. We intend to get it.”

Trayvon Martin and the emergence of the Crump playbook

As Crump continues his search for the truth, attorneys representing three of the young men who were with Wells that day told CNN their clients have been inundated with false allegations and death threats since the case drew national attention.

“For these people on the outside to come in, in their slick suits, and tell us who we are and what we are, based on Mississippi’s history … That’s not us. That’s not what we believe,” attorney Tyler Cox told CNN.

“The truth of the matter is, we don’t know what happened to Nolan Wells. We had nothing to do with his death.”

“We’re telling the truth and if you continue to lie about these young men – and those lies are harmful to those young men – you will be sued in a court of law,” Cox said.

Although the attorneys declined to say whether they plan to sue Crump, he has previously dismissed any threats of defamation as a “distraction.”

But the attorney’s tendency to blend legal advocacy with public pressure campaigns has drawn lawsuits before, including in one of his earliest cases in the national spotlight: the killing of Trayvon Martin.

In February 2012, Trayvon, an unarmed Black teen, was shot and killed while walking home from a convenience store, by George Zimmerman, a volunteer with a neighborhood watch in Sanford, Florida.

Police questioned Zimmerman and later released him under the state’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law. Frustrated by the lack of charges in their son’s death, Trayvon’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, hired the Parks and Crump law firm to represent them.

Crump immediately launched a playbook he would hone over the years – holding a series of news conferences and making the rounds with news outlets to call for the release of the 911 tapes around the 17-year-old’s killing.

The media campaign elevated Trayvon’s death in the nation’s consciousness; a special prosecutor was appointed to oversee the case, and Zimmerman was indicted and arrested.

Trayvon was a catalyst for the early Black Lives Matter movement. And Zimmerman’s trial became a lightning rod for race relations across America.

But days after a Florida jury declared Zimmerman not guilty of murder, his brother, Robert, told CNN he felt Crump and his team were “injecting race into things” and that “crafty attorneys got away with fabricating a completely scripted narrative and selling it to the American people through the media.”

In 2019, George Zimmerman sued Crump and Martin’s parents alleging conspiracy and defamation. At the time, Crump and Trayvon’s family issued a joint statement calling the lawsuit “another failed attempt to defend the indefensible and a shameless attempt to profit off the lives and grief of others.” Three years later, a judge dismissed the case.

‘Holding America to its promise’

But Crump’s most vocal critics have continued to levy similar allegations of “race profiteering” and defamation, and his calls for justice have often put him at odds with state officials leading investigations.

“I’ve been dealing with Mr. Crump for five years on different cases in Mississippi, and you know, I don’t put a lot of credence in what he says,” Sean Tindell, commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, recently told CNN.

“I don’t think that he is down here for justice. I think he’s down here for himself.”

Conservative political analyst Melik Abdul agreed with Tindell, telling CNN as a Black Mississippi native he has been frustrated by how Crump has zeroed in on race in the Wells case.

“Whether it’s Ben Crump or Al Sharpton, a lot more people are considering them charlatans simply because of how they attach themselves to these issues and really foment a lot of division in the country,” he said.

Crump said he’s aware of the criticism he often receives, but it hasn’t shaken his commitment to his work.

“The thread that runs through my cases is achieving accountability from the powerful institutions that failed the families they were supposed to protect,” he said.

“Families call me when the system has left them nowhere else to turn, and I answer. That isn’t dividing America. It’s holding America to its promise of equal justice under the law.”

Crump’s focus on personal injury brings early legal victories

Daryl Parks and Crump met in law school at Florida State University and quickly became friends.

After graduating in 1995, Parks told CNN, the two decided to go into practice together, establishing Parks and Crump Law, a Tallahassee-based firm specializing in personal injury and wrongful death cases.

Even back then, Parks said, Crump was the kind of person who fought hard for his clients and cared deeply when he felt justice was on the line.

“Ben has decided that if there’s a hint of wrongness, he’s going to do something about it,” Parks said, “and that may only be just bringing it to the light because there’s so many situations that happen in dark places that don’t get attention.”

Among the firm’s biggest victories was Curtis Jones v. Martin Electronics, Inc., a landmark workers’ compensation case that Crump successfully argued before the Florida Supreme Court.

In 2000, Curtis Jones suffered catastrophic burns over most of his body when an explosion occurred at his workplace. He was in a coma for two months following the blast. His employer, Martin Electronics, and its workers’ compensation carrier voluntarily stepped in to pay for his medical bills and treatment.

In their lawsuit, Crump and his team argued Jones had been forced to work in unsafe conditions, and making him choose between immediate, life-saving medical care and his ability to sue the company over those alleged work conditions in the future was unfair.

At the time, Martin Electronics argued under Florida state law that employees who agreed to receive workers’ compensation following an injury were prohibited from later suing the company in civil court.

The Florida Supreme Court sided with Jones and Crump, upending a decades long practice that had effectively granted companies civil immunity in workers’ compensation cases. Jones and his family ultimately received more than $10 million because of his injury.

“It takes someone like a Ben to say, ‘No we’re not going to let you marginalize this life, or discount it,’” Parks said of his friend. “We’re going to give it the level of importance and justice that this situation requires.”

Crump hits back on allegations of profiteering

For nearly two decades, Parks and Crump successfully litigated cases across Florida, often securing settlements worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in 2017 – after jointly representing Trayvon Martin’s family – Parks said they decided to amicably split into separate firms.

A news release announcing Crump’s new firm noted the attorney would be partnering with Morgan and Morgan, one of the nation’s largest plaintiff’s law firms specializing in personal injury and consumer litigation cases.

Crump touts winning numerous multimillion-dollar settlements on his website. One family was awarded $779 million in a wrongful death settlement; more than $600 million was awarded in another personal injury settlement for residents of Flint, Michigan.

Although he is licensed to practice in Florida, Tennessee and the District of Columbia, Crump often partners with local attorneys to help elevate cases across the nation.

While he’s best known for his civil rights work, personal injury, workers’ compensation and medical malpractice cases continue to form the backbone of his caseload.

“When I take on these corporate giants, I am very clear that we’re going to hold them to account; that we are going to affect their bottom line; that they are going to feel the pain just like you are feeling the pain,” Crump said in a recent video posted to social media.

But the successful settlements have also exposed Crump to allegations that he’s cashing in on his cases.

In a commentary for the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research, Horace Cooper said he finds Crump to be “more sophisticated than the local ambulance chaser — but ambitious in a similarly distasteful way.”

“While money could not bring back a lost family member, multiple million-dollar payouts to those represented by Crump was a felicitous outcome. But no one was as satisfied as Crump,” Cooper said, before speculating how much the attorney stands to profit from these settlements.

Crump bristled at the allegation that he takes on cases for profit, telling CNN much like other civil rights and personal injury law firms, his law firm works on contingency, meaning “if we don’t win, the family pays nothing, and we carry the risk.”

That’s the only reason everyday Americans can afford to take on corporations and government entities, he said.

“The institutions we go up against spend millions on defense lawyers, and no one asks whether they’re profiting. That question only seems to come up when a Black family wins,” Crump said.

“What our firm earns is a fraction of what these families are owed, and it lets us take the next case, including the many where there’s no money at all, and we take those cases because it’s the right thing to do.”

Lee Merritt, a fellow civil rights attorney, worked alongside Crump to represent the family of Ahmaud Arbery after he was murdered by three White men in coastal Georgia. The allegation that Crump takes on cases solely to make money is offensive, he said.

“The presumption of wealth has to do with a long-standing stereotype about any Black male who is engaged in activities that is supposed to be for his community,” Merritt said.

“Just like they criticized Dr. King or Medgar Evers … these are men of their time. Ben Crump is a man of his time.”

CNN’s Alisha Ebrahimji contributed to this report.

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