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.
Ah, right; MRAL could take a woman as long as she didn’t at any point get near him with a vagina because that shit is terrifying. 😀
I think NWOslave is under the impression that that’s the natural state of the world, and the only thing stopping it from being a reality is State indoctrination sponsored by the Rothschilds.
Normally I’m the last person to point fingers at silly online names, but Remorhaz? Really? If you’re going to name yourself after a D&D monster that’s kind of lame-ass. Why not just be Gyarados and be done with it? Or was that taken?
@Nobinayamu: That’s pretty SOP for these losers. They worship the Alpha Male stereotype they’re not, so when someone who actually fits that stereotype better than they do (say, by having actually touched a gun that fired something other than Nerf bullets) disagrees with them, they have nothing to fall back on but cattiness.
Polliwog –
I know exactly what you mean. When they did anti-violence education at my school, they came in and explained to us the concept of cavitation in gunshot wounds, showing us high-speed footage of ballistic gelatin being shot (this was before “Mythbusters”) and explaining exactly what that would mean for your body. Learning that a gunshot isn’t a tidy little 9mm hole and that there’s nowhere on your body that guarantees it’ll be “just a flesh wound” definitely put me off even watching action movies for a while.
I wish these guys could have that lecture, and I also wish they could come by the ER on a busy Saturday night, so they could learn just how slow and messy a death by violence can be. I think–I’d like to think–that no one could keep cavalierly saying “oh well, collateral damage, very sad but what do you expect” after they were faced with the nauseating reality of blood and pain.
There is one thing I find bleakly amusing about this, and that is that these assholes think they’re actually saying something new. Abusive partners murdering the ones who try to get away – and the people who try to help them get away – is an old, old story.
I really wish these fools would look up what their “golden age” was actually like. Somehow, I don’t think they want “Burning Bed” cases to go back to the levels they reached before divorces became easier to obtain.
I do not think that the MRM knew that this father had shared physical. There is no excuse for what this man did, and this is not an MRM issue.
This goes beyond “there is no excuse for violence in any situation.” This father “snapped” for nothing. He was threatened neither with loss of his children, nor with loss of his liberty. As far as I can tell, he was treated fairly by the courts (very unusual for a father), and he is simply a violent a-hole who should be punished according to the law. I feel sorry that his children will lose both parents, but there can be no excuse and no mercy for this individual.
Shared physical is the gold standard for the MRM, we have been asking for this for years. There is a mountain of evidence proving that shared physical is associated with better outcomes for the children:
http://www.fathermag.com/002/shared-parenting/
http://www.acfc.org/site/DocServer/SPBrochureImage3.pdf?docID=1361
Along with a huge majority of MRAs, I deplore what this individual did and I unambiguously condemn him and his actions as inexcusable and totally unfounded.
Presumption of shared physical continues to be the #3 MRM issue, after elimination of K-12 publicly funded misandry (#1) and elimination of multi-year felony prison for fathers who fall behind on support (#2). This case is tragic because this father had NO EXCUSE to be angry in any way. He should have seen himself as privileged and lucky beyond all hope, one of only a handful of fathers who are treated with dignity each year in the United States. Instead, he decided to turn to violence and stupidity. There is no excuse for him.
Incorrect. The previous mass shooting was national news as well, and it was workplace violence: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/08/ap/business/main20117593.shtml
@AntZ
“Along with a huge majority of MRAs, I deplore what this individual did and I unambiguously condemn him and his actions as inexcusable and totally unfounded.”
Have you read through the comment section? I know it may be a biased sample, but you’d think a huge majority of the comments would reflect the huge majority opinion. Instead, it’s reversed.
“I do not think that the MRM knew that this father had shared physical. There is no excuse for what this man did, and this is not an MRM issue.”
I refer you to a quote I posted earlier:
““Joint” custody does not mean “physical” custody and you can google both terms for clarification. “Joint” means every other weekend at best and only if the ex feels like it. Everyone should know this by now.”
They knew he had joint custody, they just think that joint custody is meaningless. He didn’t “really” have access to the son, even though by all evidence he did. And even that access was at the whims of the mother. Again, despite all evidence to the contrary.
I’d like to be with you on this one, that these are just a bunch of crackpots being vocal. But these comments are not new to the MRM. We’ve seen these sorts of things time and time again.
Holly: These dickwads are all chicken hawks who have never seen deadly violence or what it can do. They enjoy vicarious thrills from other people being violent and stroke themselves with idealized images of carnage that they draw from video games, comic books and really bad Hollywood movies. I’d venture a guess most of them faint at the sight of real blood.
I’ve never been near guns or explosives, but my job involves going over copious hospital records, including those of stabbing and gunshot victims. Even on paper, it’s astounding how much messier this stuff is as opposed to how the popular Man-Child culture presents it: how bullets, instead of just leaving a nice, neat hole that feels no worse than a bee sting, actually pulverize bones and joints; how they shred internal organs, how they disrupt the blood vessels so that, long after the wound itself has healed, the patient continues to suffer from insufficient blood supply to affected limbs and eventually has to undergo an amputation; how replacement knees and hips on relatively young people quickly become worn out and have to be replaced three, four times over the course of a lifetime and still they end up in a wheelchair … it’s the stuff of nightmares.
If those MRA’s had any honor or honesty, they would do what Christopher Hitchens did: he argued that waterboarding isn’t torture, but volunteered to be waterboarded to test his own views. I think all those so-called “men”, who dismiss the victims as “collateral damage” and de facto endorse mass murder by calling it understandable, would do well to volunteer to be shot, and see what it feels like.
Antz: “I do not think that the MRM knew that this father had shared physical. There is no excuse for what this man did, and this is not an MRM issue.”
Ami: Amy (from the list): “He’s not an MRA”
That’s one square of my bingo card.
Go ahead, Antz. Clarify the shared custody on some of these sites and get back to us when they apologize and change their tune about this murder. My guess is they won’t.
“They basically see mothers as incubators for “their” children”
I can hardly blame you for trying to capitalize, given the magnitude of this blunder. After all, the MRM capitalized on your own mega-blunder of supporting the false accuser and murderer Crystal Mangum before all the facts were known.
However, you know that MRAs see children as equally shared by both parents. The MRM advocates for equal protection under the law and equal protection of government. If shared physical was a common legal outcome, there would BE no MRM. Shared physical is a clear recognition that each child has two parents. Maybe feminists should support shared physical … oh, wait …
Wait … Murdering eight people because courts won’t give you sole custody and exclusive control over all decisions is a mere “blunder” now? Gee, you make it sound so inadvertent — no worse than than accidentally saying “fuck” in front of a five-year-old — except for the “magnitude”. What’s next — claiming he made a “mistake”?
I know exactly what you mean. When they did anti-violence education at my school, they came in and explained to us the concept of cavitation in gunshot wounds, showing us high-speed footage of ballistic gelatin being shot (this was before “Mythbusters”) and explaining exactly what that would mean for your body. Learning that a gunshot isn’t a tidy little 9mm hole and that there’s nowhere on your body that guarantees it’ll be “just a flesh wound” definitely put me off even watching action movies for a while.
I wish these guys could have that lecture, and I also wish they could come by the ER on a busy Saturday night, so they could learn just how slow and messy a death by violence can be. I think–I’d like to think–that no one could keep cavalierly saying “oh well, collateral damage, very sad but what do you expect” after they were faced with the nauseating reality of blood and pain.
Yeah, that’s my hope, too. I think a lot of the “internet tough guy” types really think violence looks and feels like movies and video games, and so they imagine themselves easily and unhesitatingly being able to kill people they’ve decided are the “enemies.” In reality, there’s a reason why cops who have to shoot someone in the line of duty are sent to therapy afterward, why soldiers so often come home with PTSD, why people who witness or perpetrate real violence are not infrequently at least somewhat fucked up for life. I don’t think those dudes get that.
I’ve been lucky enough never to see violent death firsthand. My partner, who is by pretty much any measure a big, tough, strong dude (and whom they’d probably call an “alpha” when they weren’t calling him a “mangina” for, y’know, thinking I’m a person and such) wasn’t so lucky, as he witnessed someone being shot in the head when he was a teenager. He doesn’t talk about it. He will talk to me about pretty much every other bad thing that ever happened to him, but the most he’ll tell me about that is that it happened and he really, really, really wishes he could forget it. I know he had nightmares for years afterward. I suspect he still does. I don’t wish his trauma on anyone else…but I wish the guys who prance around glorifying violence and talking about how they’d totally shoot all the women/judges/bad guys/whatever if THEY were in that situation could just experience it for a day or so, because I’d really like to believe that they have enough humanity hiding somewhere under the veneer of internet-tough-guy bullshit that it might flip the “this isn’t actually a video game” switch in their heads.
There is a difference between falling behind and letting the court know and doing what causes noncustodial parents to land in prison for failing to pay.
It also tends to take a long time for it to happen-years actually.
Amused – I think the “blunder” he means is MRA support of the mass murder, not the murder itself. Although that’s not much better.
Additionally, LOOK OVER THERE IT’S THE DUKE LACROSSE CASE! Magnificently subtle redirection, that.
Ding, ding, ding! One for Wisteria’s “How dare feminists use this to further their agenda!
Your assertion that “…there would Be no MRM.” without the issue of shared physical custody is both a lie and an interesting “tell”, Zarat. Most couples handle custody disputes without the court system at all and you know that perfectly well. You also know that a movement toward a default of joint custody (which this feminist supports, by and large) is becoming the standard state by state. And yet the vitriol of significant swaths of the MRM grows by leaps and bounds.
Now, it’s an interesting “tell” because I would argue that there are a great many issues that effect men more and more negatively that the MRM barely touches. Now I understand; you don’t care about them.
Myself and most self-identified feminists that I know DO support shared physical, but we also support and advocate shared child-care responsibilities within intact cohabiting relationships, and that seems to be an issue that the MRM and FRAs largely ignore.
You know “ninja-ed” and everything but still: “blunder”? Really, Zarat?
He made a “blunder” when he killed his wife and seven other people in cold blood?
blun·der/ˈbləndər/Noun: A stupid or careless mistake.
@AntZ:
“I can hardly blame you for trying to capitalize, given the magnitude of this blunder. After all, the MRM capitalized on your own mega-blunder of supporting the false accuser and murderer Crystal Mangum before all the facts were known.”
Oop, yup, you got us. We’re really the anti-MRA crowd, just looking for something to capitalize on to make them look bad rather than… ya know… pointing out horrific speech independent of who says it… It’s as if the subtext of the site were “MRAs. I mock them.”
“Shared physical is a clear recognition that each child has two parents. Maybe feminists should support shared physical … oh, wait …”
I can only imagine that at this point AntZ realized that feminists do actually support shared physical custody. Support. Not try to mandate in all situations independent of what would be best for the child. One can only hope.
Hmm, I think it was scrappy little MRAL who declared he would happily kick the shit out of a woman who is 5’10”.
DINGDINGDING!!! Although their response is just that cooking, cleaning, and wiping asses is the woman’s natural domain. Having a penis means you are biologically incapable of doing such things.
In the past five years, he’s been to Iraq. You’ve been to the mall.
Oooh, the burn!!
I think their intersection with other hatreds may also prevent them from tackling certain issues. Anti-prison activism, for instance, would certainly be relevant to men’s interests, but it’s also relevant to non-white men’s interests, and thus the MRAs can’t touch it or they’d lose all their white supremacist allies. Likewise anything having to do with gay men’s rights would frighten all the homophobes in their ranks. Anything having to do with poor men’s rights offends the far-right faction of the MRM. Anything that suggests working within the system is intolerable to the anti-government conspiracy theorists, and anything that involves collaboration with women… forget it.
When you’re trying to coalition-build with multiple types of hate group at once, you’re understandably somewhat restricted in what you can talk about. So it just keeps coming back to false rape accusations, custody battles, and not-getting-laid, because these are the “safe” issues, the ones that don’t offend Neo-Nazis’ delicate sensibilities.
Holly wrote,
“Thanks for sharing your sexual fantasies, MRAL.
“So, you know, mass murder. For or against?”
I think he’s saying he doesn’t care as long as it’s a woman getting murdered, Holly.