On Wednesday afternoon, according to reports, a man named Scott Dekraai walked into a salon in Seal Beach California and opened fire, killing eight people, including his ex-wife Michelle Fournier, his evident target. The two, who shared custody of their son, had been entangled in an acrimonious custody dispute. (Dekraai wanted to reduce his ex’s access.) Fournier had told friends she feared her ex would try to kill her.
It’s not, unfortunately, uncommon for angry or jealous exes to harass, stalk and in many cases actually kill the objects of their obsession. Usually the killer is a man, and the victim a woman, but women kill too, and same sex couples are hardly immune from this kind of violence.
I’ve been following this story – it’s a heartbreaking one — though I hadn’t planned to write about it. There’s no indication, at least based on what we know so far, that Dekraai’s shootings were ideologically driven, that he was anything other than a deeply troubled man, bitterly angry that he had to share custody of his son with a woman he hated. There seemed to be no clear connections between this story and the misogynist ideologues I write about on this site.
But then they started making the connections themselves, offering apologias for Dekraai’s violence and twisting the facts of the case to fit their ideological agendas. TRIGGER WARNING: Many of the comments I quote below are some of the most vile and vicious I have ever found in more than a year of writing this blog.
On In Mala Fide, Ferdinand Bardamu didn’t let the facts get in the way of his perverse ideological spin on the case, titling his post on the subject “Anti-Male, Anti-Father Divorce Laws Drive Man to Commit Heinous Rage Shooting Against Ex-Wife” and blaming feminism for “poisoning the relationship between men and women” in America.
Bardamu’s argument, such as it is, is utterly at odds with the basic facts of the case. Dekraai and Fournier had shared custody of the boy they’d had together; Dekraai was not fighting to see his child — he was trying to further limit his ex’s access.
As a local Fox News affiliate noted:
Dekraai’s former attorney, Don Eisenberg, told CNS that the two had a “typical” divorce, which was finalized on Dec. 28, 2007.
“This was not a remarkable case. It was a stipulated judgment and the parties agreed on these details,” Eisenberg said.
Under the shared custody agreement, Dekraai had the boy each week from Thursday through the weekend, and the mother had him Monday through Wednesday, the attorney said.
“It was almost an exactly equal split,” Eisenberg said.
There’s not much beyond the headline to Bardamu’s post; the real action is in the comments — many of which openly advocate violence and explicitly endorse Dekraai’s murderous rampage.
One anonymous visitor left this chilling comment:
[E]nough of this type of offensive action might just start making women and their supporters* think twice, especially if they also become targets. (* Divorce attorneys, child services workers and counselors, family court judges, and other enabling cogs in the feminist legal system)
Self-immolating Thomas Ball may have made a point, but the fact remains that he didn’t strike a blow, even as he advocated it.
Someone calling himself Remorhaz expresses a similar sentiment:
The only way this or any offensive action will make a difference is if it starts affecting the judges and lawyers. King John did not sign the magna carta because he was a kindly just ruler, he did it with a sword on the back of his neck while watching a grinning man holding an axe who was busy trying on black hoods. In Mexico entire police forces quit because a few officers go missing. If that started happening then the law becomes meaningless as there is no one to enforce it. …
Essentially men need to tell feminism to shut the fuck up, give it a vigorous slap across the face thus reminding it who is the biological superior, then order it back into the kitchen/bedroom.
In a followup comment he railed against those who expressed disapproval of the shootings:
What options other than overt acts of physical violence are there for a man to deal with a shrew ex and corrupt family court system? To those who are horrified and surprised at this one question…. why? Isn’t the real question – “How come this isn’t a lot MORE common?”. And please avoid the “Well… nothing justifies killing blah blah blah” as we’ve all voted, supported, and tolerated governments who kill over parking tickets much less loss of children. And if keeping your children isn’t worthy of killing what is exactly?
- Raymond, meanwhile, directed his opprobrium at Dekraai’s ex-wife:
Hopefully one of the dead carcess was his wife. The son will be better off without any parents than to have been raised by a single mother who would have gotten her vindictive way. And to Scott, when you mess with a real man’s child, blood will be spilt. Most men will just lay down and be resigned to the state-enforced kidnapping and extortion plot, but some are made of tougher stuff and for you to whine about this dead ex-wife or that is inconsequential and no loss to humanity.
Presumably he will be pleased to learn that she was one of those killed.
Frank saw the dead as “collateral damage” in a just war; his only complaint was that Dakraai hadn’t gone after public officials.
This man went to war. He caused much collateral damage and casualties have piled. And the people whose first reaction is to cry “those poor, innocent people” are people who will never change anything. Death is the way of the world. Violence or the implicit threat of it is what causes change. Go ahead, make it clear that you don’t have it in you to destroy life. The enemy will breath a little easier, because you certainly aren’t going to make any changes.
That said, he should have gone after judges and legislators. There’s no justice like a dead “justice”.
Tweell hoped the shootings would frighten women out of challenging their husbands or ex-husbands in court:
Gandi [sic] and MLK got what they were after via non-violent means, but they were dealing with people of conscience, people who would think about the issues they espoused and not just kill them. Non-violence only works when your opponent has moral character. …
I submit that women … are much more likely to pay attention when they’re being threatened. If it becomes obvious that claiming child abuse during divorce, withholding visitation and other such actions could result in their death, then they might think twice about such behavior.
Meanwhile, on Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit, more moderate MRAs weighed in on the case. While no one explicitly defended the shooter’s actions, numerous posters said they understood the violence, and (completely ignoring the basic facts of the case) blamed it not on Dekraai but on a court system biased against men.
A poster calling himself TheRealPariah embraced Dekraai:
He is one of us. You cannot throw men struggling out simply because they do something you disagree with.
Bobsutan predicted (and came very close to endorsing) more violence,
violent outburst[s] like this will continue to happen so long as ‘kidnapping by court’ and ‘sold into slavery by court’ (via CS & alimony) keeps happening. … fix the family court system and these murders wouldn’t happen.
Moderator AnnArchist – we’ve met him before – agreed, arguing that
To prevent this in the future the solution is clear: Mandate 50/50 custody without any child support as the default
Another r/mr regular, carchamp1, took it a bit further:
I don’t condone what he did. No sane person would. But, I understand it. … You steal someone’s kids with the help of our so-called “family” courts you’re a pig. You have it coming. Period.
I think it’s high time we put a spotlight on these kidnappers. They are NOT innocent people. They are the scum of the earth. I couldn’t care less about their “welfare”. I care about the millions of parents, mostly fathers, who’ve had their kids stolen from them AND their kids.
When I pointed out in the discussion there that Dekraai had hardly been denied access to his child, AnnArchist changed the subject, suggesting that it was Fournier’s accusations against Dekraai in court that had pushed him over the edge. In fact, both had made numerous allegations about one another in court; Dekraai accused his ex-wife of phone harassment; she complained that he was abusive, mentally unstable and had threatened to kill her. Obviously she was right to have worried.
But according to AnnArchist, Fournier was wrong to bring up his instability in court. As he put it: “Poking the bear is dangerous.”
When I pressed him on this, he responded:
If you really think someone is nuts, you probably don’t want to be the one to call them out in open court because if they don’t go to prison they might kill you. Its tough to do with kids involved, but if she thought he was capable of something like this, using it in a custody dispute would be considered by many to be risky.
Astonished, I asked him if he was really saying what it looked like he was saying, that if you think your ex is dangerous, and literally insane, you shouldn’t challenge them in court when they try to get sole custody of your kid? His reply:
I didn’t know what to say to this bizarre argument, so I stopped responding.
I don’t know what to say to any of this. It is beyond appalling.
What he says about fighting; the straight dope. I can think of only a couple of people I’d be worried about coming after me, and he’s one of them (used to be I’d say that if he were coming after me I’d cut to the chase and kill myself, but I’m scrappier now, and have more in the way of old and age treachery).
When it comes to the specifics of stories, he’s as inclined to embellish for narrative effect as anyone who makes his living telling that sort of tale. There is a (large) kernel of truth in the stories he tell, but (having been in some of them) I recall the details differently (and sometimes a bit more than a little).
On legal matters.. well he makes a fair chunk of change as an expert witness in self-defense cases: he know whereof he speaks.
He’s the real deal.
It’s weird how he current derail is MRAs attempting to distract us from an unjustified attack on women by bringing up… another unjustified attack on women.
Proving women are never victimized by men: you’re doing it really, really wrong.
But Holly, those latter women weren’t killed! So really that’s the kindest gentlest MRM imaginable, and they all deserve blowjobs of gratitude for only celebrating the brutal beating of some women rather than full-on cold-blooded murder. Yaaay…
@Eneya
“if there was no feminism ever, they would never receive full custody on the sexist ground that men suck as parents”
As Amused has so thoughtfully supplied, it isn’t men who flippantly regurgitate sexism it’s women…Golda Meir, “They’ll get custody more often and have better relationships with their kids when they start loving their kids more than they hate their ex-wives.”
A feminist woman in power. Repeating a lie often doesn’t change the lie.
—————–
@thebionicmommy
“A woman can’t just kill her husband or boyfriend for any reason. He has to be a threat to her.”
Case after case of women getting off for murder when the only evidence is their testimony clearly demonstrates the error in your statement. Dead men cannot rebut an accusation. Since he’s the one whose dead, she was the threat.
——————
@Eneya
“Yes, because as we know majority of physical attacks are from women to men and women are overwhelmingly bigger in size than men, so any attack pose a real threat for harm/death, so… oh… no, actually it’s the other way around… so any theorysing on the matter is utter bullshit, because we don’t believe in that world.”
No, every study shows women initiate aggressive behavior a majority of the time. The reason these women attacked is because they believed they were above retaliation from a man. Men do more damage, as the video clearly shows, when defending themselves from a womans attack. Which is why women are mis-percieved as being victims more often.
This man defended himself from the violence of two women. For daring to defend himself, these same two women will now wield the violence of the State to incarcerate him.
——————-
@hellkell
“Gosh, if only there were a movement out there focused on equality that’s concerned about EVERYONE affected by violence, so that no one would be afraid to come forward…”
There is, it’s called the MRM, Feminists always say they’re all about equality, however their actions are the opposite.
——————-
@Seraph
“Believe it or not, this is something we want to change. It really is. When feminists say patriarchy hurts men, this is what we’re talking about.”
Women changed “it” into the society we live in today; Women as a group, made the laws. Calling it patriarchy is shifting the blame from women to men.
——————-
@Bagelsan
“Hell, even self-defense books by and for women make it very clear that hitting someone on the ground does not constitute self-defense, and if you do it then you should expect to get arrested if/when the police show up because that’s assault.”
So if she slapped him, he should slap her back, and when they escalate to punching him, he can punch them back, when they further escalate to knocking him down, he can knock them down, and so on? Whatever happened to the almighty victim-blaming feminists are so fond of?
——————-
@Pecunium
“The women who attacked him are also being charged, and rightly so.”
Misdemeanors for the attackers and a felony for the defender. There is no way in hell that’d be the case if the genders were reversed. I’ll give 3 to 1 odds the defender gets a harsher punishment.
Misdemeanors for the attackers and a felony for the defender. There is no way in hell that’d be the case if the genders were reversed. I’ll give 3 to 1 odds the defender gets a harsher punishment.
That’s because the crimes are not the same.
The committed assault.
He left. At that point they were no longer assaulting him. At that point he was not committing any crime.
He came back. He had a weapon. He attacked them. That is a new incident. It was not a continuation of the same incident. He committed Aggravated Assault, or Assault with a Deadly Weapon, or whatever it is New York calls such a crime.
If the attack had been ongoing and he’d grabbed a pipe, or a basket of fries from the fryer, or some other ad hoc weapon: with no break in their attack I’d say he was, at the least, being overcharged. I might even say he was within his rights to use that ad hoc weapon in self defense.
But he didn’t do that.
He came back to attack them.
I’ll bet that had it been a white man who jumped the counter, and this black man had left, and come back, you’d be singing a different tune.
But go ahead, explain to me how this guy attacking a woman and breaking her arm, and fracturing her skull, shows that the the shooter in Seal Beach wasn’t all that bad.
@Pecunium
They followed him into the back where he got the weapon. They didn’t stop following him, they went after him. Stop making excuses for womens poor behavior.
Since he used force against a woman, in NWO world he is totally justified! Just like the Seal Beach shooter! Killing and maiming women is always justified by NWO.
NWO: Stop making excuses for his breaking the law.
Um, milkslave … hate to break it to you, but crimes have elements. If what the cashier did satisfied the elements of a felony and what the customers did satisfied the elements of a misdemeanor, that’s what the prosecutor was able to charge them with.
Not that you understand the law. You probably think that the felony statute is written in ALL CAPS, and that’s why the guy is getting a harsher punishment.
Wow. Zarat and I actually agree on something. Pecunium and I agree on many things.
So, tell me something Zarat: other than deciding, fairly arbitrarily, that a select group of men should never be subjected to the brutality of the American prison system, what are you doing for the rest of the men who are sent to prison without violent criminal backgrounds or pre-existing gang affiliations? I mean, that was your big concern when you first showed up on these threads right? Fathers who face potential prison sentences as a result of nonpayment of child support and their imminent brutalization in the American prison system?
But our prisons are disproportionately filled with men.* And the majority of them are incarcerated on nonviolent drug offenses. Should men locked away on possession charges for marijuana be subject to brutalization? Surely, as you consider yourself and advocate for Men’s Rights and a soldier within the MRM, you recognize that a portion of the U.S. prison population suffers from untreated mental illness. Why, right here on this site you’ve held up the number of men suffering from untreated mental illness as one of the ill so feminism.
So what are you doing about this? What is the MRM doing about this?
*Despite the repeatedly raising the specter of the “pussy pass” the number of women incarcerated -many for violent crime- continues to grow.
Bee: No… you don’t understand.
Them slapping him is no different than him breaking their bones with a pipe.
It’s the misandry in the system that treats him so harshly for knocking them down and bashing in someone’s head and breaking her arm.
They hit him (with their hands) and he was able to walk away, it’s just the same as him hitting them with a piece of metal and knocking them down and beating them half to death.
Just like that woman in Seal Beach. The law let her abuse her ex (by not giving him exclusive say in their son’s medical treatment) so he defended himself by shooting her.
The McDonald’s attack was much discussed among the group of friends that I had dinner with earlier this evening. I wouldn’t really call it a debate as everyone agreed that the women were completely out of line and should be charged with the crimes they committed and that the man’s reaction went way over the line and he should be charged as well. Mostly we talked about the number of incidents like this, regardless of gender, and how brutally and quickly situations can escalate.
Somehow, a group of men and women discussed the incident and pretty much all agreed that the women were absolutely wrong and deserved to be punished by the law but still didn’t think that a cracked skull and broken arm were justified. Uncanny.
Tired typing: “Despite the repeated raising of the specter of the pussy pass…”
I should go to bed.
Oh, I get it.
SCENE: A police precinct.
OFFICER ONE: Hey. Someone did … A CRIME.
POLICE SERGEANT: Was it a man?
OFFICER ONE: No, a woman did the crime.
POLICE SERGEANT (scratching head): Hmmm, well, might as well give her a slap on the wrist and send her home then.
OFFICER TWO: Sure thing!
OFFICER TWO: Someone else did a crime too!
POLICE SERGEANT: Was it a man?
OFFICER TWO: Yes! Yes, a man did the crime!
POLICE SERGEANT: Lock him up! He shall never see the light of day again!
END SCENE.
Book of Learnin: All things that are crimes are treated exactly the same under the law, and only handled differently depending on whether the perpetrator is male or female.
You can use the force needed to get away and keep yourself from being harmed. He did that; he walked away. He was no longer being harmed.
You can’t come back later and start whaling on the original attackers with a weapon. He did that too; he started beating two people lying on the ground with a hunk of metal. He was now harming rather than trying to avoid harm. Get it? No? …Bueller?
Victim-blaming is when a woman gets assaulted or raped and everyone says “oh yeah, well what were you wearing? How were you acting? Were you drinking?” Victim-blaming is not when a woman gets groped and then comes back later and runs her assailant over with a truck and everyone says “what the fuck lady? Not cool!”
How is that not the title of a Nancy Drew novel? 😀
The incident was recorded. No one is wielding the violence of the state. The state is intervening as a reaction to the violence. Do you think murder victims “…wield the violence of the State…” when a suspect is arrested? Several crimes were committed and reported to law enforcement, in all likelihood, by bystanders.
When the police came to the scene should they have watched the recordings, told everyone to behave better, and left?
I’m not sure. But now I kind of want to write it.
The comments found on most news articles about the McD’s incident are disturbing. apparently, this guy is turning into some kind of folk hero, with people wanting to pay his bail, give him a job or help with his legal bills. His behavior is also completely excused and explained. He was right to keep beating them, because he told them to stay down and they didn’t. This means that they had a knife or a gun and were trying to get up to keep atttacking him. Most of what I saw was on Huffington Post and it still kinda makes me a little sick.
I understand that there’s a little bit of sheudenfreude going on here, because almost everyone has wanted to beat the living piss out of an annoying customer, at some point in their lives but it’s gotten ridiculous. Bear in mind that the guy served 11 years for killing a classmate and accidentally shooting an 8 year old bystander. They had an argument, so he pulled a gun and shot the guy. I don’t think the prison system did this to him. I think he’s a violent guy with little self control.
The only issue I have with the charges leveled is that the woman who slapped him should be charged with simple assault. Otherwise, both of the violent ones need to serve their time and deal with their anger issues. Not sure about the other woman who didn’t hit anyone, but she sure as hell should have stayed on the right side of the counter.
In all fairness, that 8-year-old was probably totally standing upright at the time. Asking for it.
@Bagelsan: The child also had mom and dad with him so, he was with his posse and was a serious threat. They were all walking and one of them could have had a gun or a knife on them, so shooting him was totally justified.
Calm your tits, I didn’t come here to pick a fight. I could give the example of that guy who got his wiener cut off by his wife and the whole thing was made into a joke, like, 2 months ago. But even without that, you’d be naive to think that this would be treated the same way with the genders reversed. Most people would be sympathetic towards the woman, that’s just how people think.
Actually, maybe that’s not true. I’ve started seeing more sympathy for the guy as well, and many people gave a pretty fair assessment of the whole situation so I stand corrected.
Anyways, Pecunium already said everything better than I could, so I’m gonna stop derailing.
Owly, what do you mean “a lie”? Have you NEVER opened a history book or checked old court grams about gaining custody especially in the 20th century? The sheer ammount of sexism toward men is overwhelming, most of it reeks from the stereotypes that women are nutruting and the main caregiver and that men are simply unable to form such a bond with a child.
The first attempts of men to gain ful custody over their kids have been… unsuccessful to say the least especially fi they didn’t have new wives.
You can’t bash feminism for the fact that a sexist society thinks that men suck at parenting, you can criticise the society. Do you really not get it? A society which believes that women are primary mothers automatically excludes men from the family and diminishes a man’s abilities to be a parent. Sheesh, at least you some logic and know you own fucking history… seriously, I am so irritated when people don’t know their own history but love to argue about stuff they have only tangential knowledge about.
You want to be able to gain full custody if needed? How about fight the society and believes that gender defines a person and that gender means a set of unchangable traits which are wired for the chromosomes. The same idea that argues that men are more logical is the exactly same argument that men are less emotional, thus being unable to care for a child.
Damn dude, go check your Freude and the rest of the gang, because I am tired of you. You are simoultaniously whining that feminists are trying to break the stereotypes, repeating like a broken record how women are prone to do this and do that, and men are genetically this or that but when it actually hurts you, somehow feminism is in fault because…. they are arguing that people are not just their gender and men could be fathers, could have emotions and could care for someone else besides themselves?
How do you live with that in your head? It is completely illogical.
Violence is the way of the World. Feminism needs a violent government to enforce it, and for changes to be made, violence will need to be committed or at least threatened. I think a lot of the MRAs quoted on this blog are moronic assholes, but you feminists are no better, and in some ways, worse. Just because you get the government to do the beat downs for you, doesn’t make you innocent, just like the wife who hired a hitman to kill her husband isn’t innocent either.
@Eneya
“You want to be able to gain full custody if needed? How about fight the society and believes that gender defines a person and that gender means a set of unchangable traits which are wired for the chromosomes. The same idea that argues that men are more logical is the exactly same argument that men are less emotional, thus being unable to care for a child.
Damn dude, go check your Freude and the rest of the gang, because I am tired of you. You are simoultaniously whining that feminists are trying to break the stereotypes, repeating like a broken record how women are prone to do this and do that, and men are genetically this or that but when it actually hurts you, somehow feminism is in fault because…. they are arguing that people are not just their gender and men could be fathers, could have emotions and could care for someone else besides themselves?”
Men and women are different on a biological level. Men being more logical would approach child rearing in a logical manner and men are quite a fun bunch. Women being more emotional would approach child rearing in an emotional manner. Both are neccesary for a childs development. It is women who claim a womans way of child rearing is singularly neccesary and a mans way is irrelevant. Why not celebrate diversty like you always promote?
Gender differences never hurt. What hurts is unequal treatment before the law. Feminism is the cause of this unequal treatment. Until you celebrate the differences of men as feverently as you celebrate everything woman, you’re preaching hatred. That fact that men and women are genetically different doesn’t hurt anyone. The hurt comes from feminisms misguided belief that there aren’t any genetic differences.