The man who lit a fire at Comet Ping Pong, the Washington, D.C., pizza parlor at the center of the baseless “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, pleaded guilty to committing arson on Tuesday.
Ryan “Rimas” Jaselskis, a Los Angeles-based actor who entered the courtroom clad in an orange jumpsuit, admitted that he had started the Jan. 23 fire. The 23-year-old also pleaded guilty to resisting a law enforcement officer during a Feb. 4 brawl at the Washington Monument, where Jaselskis had jumped the chain-link fence and was tased by U.S. Park Police in a video captured by a bystander and posted on social media. Jaselskis was released after that incident and ordered to keep away from the monument, but jumped the fence again the next day and was caught. Jaselskis’s distinctive jacket connected him to a surveillance video of the pizza parlor arson, and a witness also identified him as the suspect. He was subsequently arrested.
Prosecutors and Jaselskis’s lawyer, David Bos, put together a 12-page guilty plea, which included an agreement that he’d plead guilty to arson and resisting law enforcement and with each side offering the judge a criminal sentence of
four
years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
Judge Timothy Kelly, who is presiding over the case, accepted Jaselskis’s guilty plea on Tuesday. But the judge said he wouldn’t rule on the terms of the plea agreement, including the length of his prison sentence, until Jaselskis’s sentencing hearing, which he scheduled for March 6.
Comet Ping Pong is the focus of an unfounded far right-wing conspiracy theory that the pizza parlor is merely a front for a sophisticated global codeword-based Satanic child sex-trafficking operation run by high-profile Democratic operatives and Clinton allies with a sex dungeon in the restaurant’s nonexistent basement. Since the conspiracy theory gained prominence in 2016, the restaurant has been the focus of countless internet videos and conspiracy theorizing, and the restaurant staff has been subjected to numerous threats.
A conspiratorial video connected to the similarly baseless QAnon conspiracy theory posted on Jaselskis’s parents’ YouTube account an hour before the restaurant arson pointed to the Pizzagate motivation.
Jaselskis is not the first person to carry out a dangerous act at the pizza parlor. Edgar Maddison Welch, a believer in the Pizzagate hoax, drove from North Carolina to D.C. in 2016 to “self-investigate” the conspiracy theory, searching the restaurant and firing his AR-15 rifle at a locked door in the pizza parlor and pointing his gun at an employee who fled. Welch was arrested after a peaceful surrender and was sentenced to four years in prison.
