Matthew Frederick Hale (born July 27, 1971) is an American white supremacist leader. Hale was the founder of the East Peoria, Illinois-based white separatist group then known as the World Church of the Creator (now called The Creativity Movement), and he declared himself its Pontifex Maximus (Latin for "highest priest") in continuation of the Church of the Creator organization founded by Ben Klassen in 1973.
In 1998, Hale was barred from practicing law in Illinois by the state panel responsible for evaluating the character and fitness of prospective lawyers. The panel stated that Hale's incitement of racial hatred, for the ultimate purpose of depriving selected groups of their legal rights, was blatantly immoral and rendered him unfit to be a lawyer.
In 2005, Hale was sentenced to a 40-year federal prison term for encouraging an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant to kill federal judge Joan Lefkow. and raised in East Peoria, Illinois, a city on the Illinois River. After his parents divorced when he was nine years old, Hale was raised solely by his father, a police officer. By the age of 12, he was reading books about Nazism, including Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, and had formed a Nazi-themed group at his school. In August 1989, and attempted to form a chapter of the David Duke incarnation of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, but the chapter was not recognized by the national organization. In 1992 he declared himself the National Leader of the National Socialist White Americans' Party, without having any local members; In 1992, Hale attacked a security guard at a mall and was charged with criminal trespass, resisting arrest, aggravated battery and carrying a concealed weapon. For this attack, Hale was sentenced to six months of house arrest and 30 months of probation. The COTC's founder, Ben Klassen, committed suicide on August 7, 1993, Attorney Glenn Greenwald represented Hale in a failed federal lawsuit to overturn the licensing decision.
During a television interview in the summer of 1999, Hale stated that his "church does not condone violent or illegal activities".
Court trials and federal convictions
In 2000, a religious group in Oregon called the Church of the Creator sued Hale's organization, the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), for trademark infringement.
On April 6, 2005, Hale was sentenced to a 40-year prison term exactly one year after the trial began for attempting to solicit Lefkow's murder. U.S. District Court Judge James Moody presided over the sentencing. During the trial, jurors heard more than a dozen tapes of Hale using racial slurs, including one in which he joked about Benjamin Smith's shooting spree. According to prosecutors, Hale had asked one of his followers named Anthony Evola to kill Lefkow. Hale demanded that his attorney Thomas Durkin push for non-whites to be stricken from the jury, and later pushed Durkin to argue that Hale was being persecuted because the government was retaliating against him for "proving" that the 9/11 attacks were committed by Israel; Durkin told Hale he would do neither and for Hale to fire him and find a new attorney or represent himself if he was determined to pursue those avenues. Hale and his few supporters have demanded since his conviction that the DA's office give him a lie-detector test to show his innocence and be released from prison, the office ignoring said demands.
In June 2016, Hale was transferred out of ADX Florence to medium-security federal prison FCI Terre Haute, Indiana, but by late 2017 was back at Florence.