CONTENT WARNING: This one is just brutal. If you’re feeling even the slightest bit queasy about the headline, please don’t read any further.
By David Futrelle
Sunday morning, a young man named Brandon Clark allegedly murdered 17-year-old Instagram “e-girl” Bianca Devins, apparently a friend of his, brutally slashing her throat and then slashing his own in an attempt to kill himself. Sometime between the murder and the attempted suicide, he took a photo of her bloody body and uploaded it to 4chan.
The photo quickly spread across social media, including the Incels.co forum, where it was evidently found by a commenter calling himself canino1997, who reacted to the horrific tragedy by masturbating to the picture of Devins’ lifeless body and sending a picture of the resulting “cum tribute” to the girl’s mother (or perhaps her stepmother) as a sort of ‘”lesson” for her.
He attached a screenshot of what he said were the messages he’d sent to the mother along with his “tribute.”
Naturally, other incels applauded canino1997’s initiative. “[Y]our doing god’s work,” wrote one commenter. “Based as fuck,” added a second. “Based kikebook Stalkercel,” agreed a third, which is the Incel way of saying he thought that canino1997 is was an excellent Facebook stalker.
On Facebook, Bianca’s stepmother didn’t say anything about
canino1997’s particular act of malicious harassment, but she did post at length about the anguish of seeing the photos of her stepdaughter’s corpse — an anguish amplified by the knowledge that countless strangers were passing the pictures around in an attempt to shock others and, in some cases, to garner new Instagram followers.
It is absolutely disgusting that people are sharing, screenshoting the pictures of Bianca’s (tragic) death!! Wtf is wrong with you people!!?? … I will FORVER have those images in my mind when I think of her. When I close my eyes, those images haunt me. …
Imagine sitting there, in disbelief and praying to God that this is all some mistake and that your baby will walk through the door any minute. Now imagine seeing those pictures and having everything in you break. Imagine not even being able to yell out and scream or cry because your soul has now just been broken.
After writing this blog for eight years, and watching the political developments in the US over the last three, I can’t say I still have a lot of faith left in humanity. But discovering the incel and his “cum tribute” hit me like a punch in the gut; in some ways it feels as gratuitously cruel as the murder itself.
There’s a lot more to say — none of it good — about this case and the assorted reactions to it online. But I will save that for later posts.
NOTE: Canino1997’s original post was taken down by the Incels.co mods, though evidence of it remains in the responses to it from other commenters. I borrowed the screenshots from a post in IncelTears, a subreddit devoted to monitoring and mocking incels.
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How do you get so debased, so detached from any notion of common human decency and empathy that you’d even contemplate this jerkwad’s actions? How much longer before this guy is actually fucking a corpse?
NOTE: Just want to reiterate, given the nature of the post today, that any sort of advocacy of violence is not allowed in the comments here and will be deleted; you may also be banned or put on moderation.
I struggle to leave a comment that doesn’t condone violence against incels in some form.
Just fuck incels. How dare they exist and do this shit? I hope to see the last incel pass into eternity in my lifetime.
For the late Bianca Devins and her family, I offer condolences:
https://youtu.be/VN5bxKsAMRc
For her killer, may he get all the punishment the law allows.
For those passing around photos of the dead girl’s body for shits and giggles, a massive dose of empathy for what they’ve done, and an eternity of shame over actions they can never make up for.
Incels are now the literal worst. That is all.
Nope
@Doomcup
I know the feeling, specially given this latest development. They really need to be tried and jailed as a terrorist group.
Outlawing Hate Speech would be a deadly blow to Far Right extremists, who draw and organize their support based on these sort of messages.
On the other hand…
Or don’t, because I feel like that would make them happy.
I bet. I’m going to pretend that canino1997 is under 20 years old, and knows not what he does. It could be just bravado BS.
But seeing is believing. There’s no other way to believe this, and it must be recorded, remembered or it will be forgotten. Swept under the rug.
I dated an abuser for about 7 years (back in the 1980’s). I kept “forgetting” the worst, pretending, disbelieving. Something inside me wanted to leave a lot earlier, but guilt, shame, a tied-up head, kept me there. Eventually protective instincts shut down (probably earlier than I remember). Anyhoo, this is the exactly the kind of thing which should never be swept away, the little evils beyond belief. Evil wants to break the mirrors which show its truth. This site keeps the mirrors up.
I’m going to log off the internet, play with my cats & my wonderful husband of 20+ years, and maybe read some Harry Potter or Dresden Files therapeutically. Good Nite.
Having to remind myself once again that eugenics generally goes bad places.
You know what I wish would happen to this guy? I want him to develop a sense of empathy and introspection, because for someone like him, the worst punishment possible would be truly realizing who he is and what he’s done.
When we take this country back, we must realize that Jefferson was wrong, and Popper was right, and so we must strangle hate speech–and maybe just abolish social media, too.
Long time lurker. Not sure if I’ve ever posted before…
I too felt a visceral reaction to this. I’m a former soldier and currently work in corrections/ juvenile justice, and had begun to worry that I was becoming immune to the horror of just how debased people can be. For better or worse, this incident and the reactions across social media have proven that I’m not.
Fuck…this was effectively a child, a very troubled child, and keyboard warriors worldwide are celebrating and using her death as clickbait. Just…no.
The hardest part is that I have a daughter the same age, and pictures I have seen of Bianca’s selfies are eerily similar to hers.
I agree with personalpest about the perpetrator developing empathy, but fear he’ll be lauded as a new incel saint.
I need to go home, hug my kids and pat my dog.
Having to live with themselves, as miserable and sorry as they are, is the worst punishment I can imagine. I do wish there were a way to isolate them from each other, though.
I don’t want to do anything that would prompt David to swing the banhammer at me, so instead I’m going to hope that Bianca’s stepmother hears from all the people who are decrying the incels’ actions. I hope she is comforted by all the people who support her in her time of grief. I hope her memories of Bianca are stronger than the vile images the incels have been spreading.
Personal Pest – I agree but I sincerely doubt it will happen. As a child, I was deeply religious and prayed people would understand what they were doing.
@Victorious – I echo that wish in the most heartfelt manner.
I cannot even imagine how Bianca’s family must be feeling. 🙁
As much as I’d like to see her killer tried and executed, and the incels glorifying her death to suffer, I’m reminded of what decades of criminology has shown: It is not the severity of the punishment that deters crime but rather, it is the certainty of the punishment.
sometimes I just can’t stand that this is the world my fiancé and I are going to raise children in.
I’d say that this is the most disgusting thing I’ve read about all day. But, Trump.
As someone who cannot morally wish cruelty or violence upon these people, and as a commenter who is prohibited from wishing harm on these people, I will instead say to the parents of the dead girl: I am so sorry. I am so sorry for how harrowing this is. I am so sorry you lost your little girl. I am so sorry the internet age has allowed these undeserving people to interject themselves into your grief. I am just so deeply sorry for everything.
Oh David…I’m really having trouble exercising restraint on this one, but I took a break, counted to ten, took a sip of wine and here it goes:
My heart hurts for her mom – this reminds me of what the WBC did to Matthew Shepard’s family. It’s like incels are 1 step away from picketing murder victims’ funerals with signs like “God Hates Women” and “Stacey is burning in Hell”. They really are like a crazy cult whose members are in desperate need of deprogramming.
I can only take a tiny speck solace in the fact that they are so utterly terrified of 50% of the population that they have reduced themselves to the absolute nadir of human existence. How much do you have to hate yourself before you think this behavior makes you powerful? How little respect do you have to have for yourself that begging strangers on the Internet for negative attention is your favorite past time?
I hope for some karma for them – some day they will slip and accidentally message or post some of this bile to the wrong person in their Real Life, like their employer or family members or classmates or church group. Maybe then, some one will be able to convince them to seek help with ceasing this destructive, self-loathing, yet narcissistic behavior.
I just can’t even begin to understand wanting to look at something like that at all, never mind thinking it’s enjoyable.
What amazes me is WTF makes these guys think they can get away this? Social media has some good aspects: it makes bad behaviour easier to track and to identify the perpetrators.
I do think that law enforcement needs a cyber division to go undercover on alt social media and track these guys and find out where in cyberspace they like to hide and hang out.
@Lainy,
Your folks raised you in this nasty, mean , vicious world. And evidently you survived. So if you and your fiancé have kids, you can teach how to do the same.
I barely react to the depravity of manosphere goons these days, after having been a reader since shortly after the creation of this blog.
The casual cruelty in this post shocked me.
It reminds me of a case in 2006 of an 18 year old woman’s brutal car wreck death, after which 4chan edgelords endlessly tortured her family with leaked photos of her mangled body. (Some of you might remember that; I’m deliberately leaving names and keywords unwritten since the photos might still turn up in a Google search.)
David and WHTM mods, please take care of yourselves. 💔
Photos like this of deceased individuals should be as legal as child porn photos(go figure). anyone caught posting them should be given a mandatory prison term of at least 1 year. It’s wishful thinking that they develop empathy. Instead we need to lock em up.
Mels, you’ve reminded me of something I read in Readers Digest back in the late 90’s-early 00’s. It was an expose on websites dedicated to showcasing people dying horrible deaths, the messier the better, for their users’ enjoyment. When a grieving father contacted one of these sites to take down footage of his daughter’s death (she was killed by a train, I think), he was essentially laughed at and told in so many words that if he didn’t want that death posted there then his daughter should have chosen a blander way to die.
Stuff like this has been around since the earliest days of the Internet age. It’s just easier these days for that kind of person to spread it to folks who don’t ever want to see it for shits and giggles.
He knows what he does; the cruelty is the point. And people under 20 are perfectly capable of having empathy and understanding how their actions affect others. It’s truly disgusting that you give this absolute horror of a human being the benefit of the doubt when his actions have shown he cares NOTHING for a grieving mother on the day her child was murdered.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” -Maya Angelou
@Redsilkphoenix
Yes, I remember hearing from classmates about whichever shock sites were popular when I was in high school (the early 00s), and I’m sure this sort of thing has been around as long as the internet has.
I think it’s shitty to gawk at photos of dead bodies, even if it comes from a place of natural curiosity and anxiety about our own mortality (e.g. rubbernecking, of which I admit I’ve been guilty on the road).
It just feels next-level-nasty to knowingly, pointedly torment the loved ones of the dead. I can’t wrap my mind around it.
I hope Ms. Devins’ family and friends are able to access whatever counseling they need to get through this. And whatever legal assistance, for that matter, to tackle the sisyphean task of getting the photo taken down wherever possible.
Remember, folks, it’s an incel’s looks that make people despise them….
I hope her family can remember the good in Bianca’s life easier than the bad. I hope this starts a campaign to pull all these nasty incels into the light. It’s easy to be a internet nazi when you’re anonymous, it’s not so easy when everyone who looks you in the eye knows what you’ve said.
Building on what Pyxxxie said, I hope this follows canino1997 to every employment interview he is given.
TO Canino: Enjoy your future saying, “You want fries with that?”, sociopath–assuming that even a fast-food joint will have you.
@Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Hey, let’s not debase fast food workers. They’re undervalued enough for working hard and receiving scant pay and customer disrespect to boot.
I wouldn’t want a guy like this jackoff handling my food order, either.
I usually just read, smirk a bit while bewildered at the psychology shown by the people you post about here since I usually just see them as harmless, if entirely wrong-headed, and move on but man this hit real hard.
Even now while they’re trying to distance their culture from this event, they’re still calling her an e-thot and trying to come up with any possible excuse why she might have possibly deserved it. Do they even realize the contradiction in that? If you want people to genuinely think you disliked the event, move on from these shitty online communities since for every 10, 100, whatever people who are “just joking”, 1 is serious about it and just emboldened by the shit you post, not deradicalized by the sense of community.
As much as I enjoy many of the trolly aspects of internet culture, this shock jock stuff like its radio equivalents draws in the most anti-social kind of people every single time. Check out shit like the well-known Opie and Anthony fandom which has had a crossover between both formats for a while as an example.
@Mels
He sounds like the kind of guy who would spit in your food – or worse. (Although that is probably true of incels in general)
How can they do that? I lost faith in humanity.
Apparently one of the more recent incel memes is 🤡🌎 (clown world). This seems to be basically like “dumbest possible timeline”, except from the point of view of the more awful incels. They’re like, the normalest normal of normals, or the knowers of the truthiest truths, and yet… reality utterly fails them. People don’t act like their concept of people, society doesn’t act like their concept of society, and society doesn’t even act like other people’s apparent concept of society. (Not that they have a good grasp of other people’s concepts.) And there are a small number of men who appear to successfully act mostly like their concept of men, but imitating them doesn’t work.
So I guess some of them figure that the best way to live in “clown world” is to take inspiration from the Joker? Or a least their idea of a wacky, rapey murderclown.
Oh, it’s meant to be a lesson? You’re teaching the mother that she should have taught her daughter morals — then the daughter wouldn’t have ended up murdered and you wouldn’t have felt compelled to use her image as pornography?
And here I was thinking that you did something really stupid and revolting just to get attention. I wondered why a person would sink so low just because he was lonely. Doesn’t he have any better ideas? I thought. ‘Cause this is disgusting.
This is all that I can think of:
Socrates: But no one tries to seek evil, nay, none truly seek to spread it. Everyone is the hero of their journey, so tell me, is there objective evil in this world if none shall be its agent?
Me: Yes, over there with the Incels.
Socrates: But think about the philosophy! How can they be truly evil when they-
Me: *shows this post*
Socrates: . . . I rest my case. . .
This would drive me to murderous action if I were personally affected. As it is: sickened but not surprised – so many of these arseholes are in competition with one another to be the most vile man on the planet.
Well done shit head, you’re up there in the top 10.
On the subject of this kind of behaviour always having been around – absolutely. There is an Old way of swearing in some parts of England: ‘sweet FA’. I always used to think that f a was fuck all, but it originally came from Fanny Adams, a child who was murdered in London in the 19th century. She was chopped up, so the fa part is referring to there was nothing left of her.
But I am pretty sure that this gallows humour was not used to torment her family.
I can’t comment on your post today without breaking every rule. Consider it said anyway.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be a human being, given the things some of us get up to.
Time to wheel out Mr Rogers again:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.””
[looks at Facebook’s and Twitter’s moderation policies]
I dunno, you tell me?
Literally the only positive take on this – and even then it’s a piddlingly positive element when offset by the overwhelmingly negative stuff – is that this post proved too much even for an incel forum.
Although when you consider what they not merely routinely let through but actively encourage people to post, this is hardly encouraging. And I also suspect that the motives behind the deletion weren’t so much a sudden attack of conscience as fear of being cited as an accessory in the event of a lawsuit.
@Mel:
One of the websites with the picture of the girl’s remains after she died in a car crash in 2006, was R*****.com.
I was going to post the full name of the website, because it’s been defunct for years now, but I suppose you still might be able to find it on the Wayback Machine.
I remember reading the comments from the site’s regulars, and even they said that tormenting her family with correspondence was completely vile.
The man who murdered this beautiful young girl…I wish he someday realizes the horror of what he’s done, and lives the rest of his life locked up. Which is what I wished for Timothy McVeigh, rather than the death penalty.
The incel who masturbated on the girl’s picture…I have a feeling his day-to-day life is punishment enough.
I really fear that people have become desentisized to this sort of thing, to a great extent.
Please report this loathsome toad to the FBI. Sounds like a hate crimer waiting to happen.
I needed THIS like a brick in the back of the head this morning…
We will never reach the end of our depravity as a society.
…
To lighten the mood (if I may), did y’all know aliens (the outer space kind) play baseball?!?!?
Yup, at “Area 51”, they built a baseball diamond.
GoogleMap “Groom Lake, Nv”
canino1997 sounds like a future serial killer.
There seems to be no end to the ways we’re fucked, and it’s increasingly hard to have hope for the future. So, please: if you (any of you) are feeling as despairing as me, and you have time and opportunity, get out into nature for a few hours. Grab a good book or a camera and get among some trees. The world will still be fucked afterwards, but self-care is important.
Under Trump’ DoJ, there’s no freakin’ point.
Cheeto Jesus would probably give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Others have spoken far more eloquently than I feel at this moment.
Suffice to say, words cannot convey the depth of my loathing–and my rage–at these miserable, putrid wastes of carbon, both at the murderer and those who chortle at this family’s pain. For me, it brings 2 mind the suffering like-minded fucktards subjected Zelda Williams 2 when her father Robin took his life: shriveled, constipated feces where their souls should be.
I’ve probably said this before, but I am a card-carrying, dyed in the wool witch & believe in Lady Karma: I have seen Her handiwork in action. I will also say, as a witch, I have 1 curse that I keep in my arsenal, but I will abide by the comments policy & merely say I have deployed it towards these vermin who wear human skin & delight in human misery.
May Lady Karma find you quick (&, no, that’s not my curse).