By David Futrelle
On Sunday evening, a man dressed as a FedEx employee knocked on the door of the house of federal judge Esther Salas. When the judge’s husband and son opened the door, the man shot them both, killing the son.
According to the Daily Beast, law enforcement sources are saying that the shooter was Men’s Rights attorney Roy Den Hollander, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Monday morning.
Hollander, the New York Times reports, brought a case before the judge in 2015 concerning male-only draft registration. [See CORRECTION note below]
A publicity-seeking activist attorney, Hollander was perhaps best known for a series of lawsuits taking aim at “Ladies Nights” at bars and clubs, which he felt discriminated against men. (He appeared on the Colbert Report once as a “Difference Maker” eager to show off his hip-hop dance moves.) He also sued a nightclub claiming that it was a human rights violation to be forced to pay $350 for a bottle of vodka. In 2016, he sued an assortment of big names in the news business, claiming they had committed “wire fraud” by broadcasting “fake news” about Donald Trump.
I’ve written about him several times, describing the controversy over a “male studies” course he thought he was slated to teach in Australia (the University in question said it had never approved the course in the first place). Hollander later sued two Australian journalists — in the lawsuit he described them as “modern-day, book-burning, Bacchae reporters from down-under” — for allegedly posting falsehoods about him and getting him fired from the teaching gig the school says he was never actually hired for.
But among some Men’s Rights activists the man was a hero. Paul Elam of A Voice for Men once praised him for
putting his name on the line and his license to practice law at work, taking on everything from financial discrimination against men by nightclubs in “Ladies Nights” to Columbia University’s Women Studies Program which he contends more resembles a religion than not. …
[A]s much as I loathe the idea of anyone claiming authority on what a “real” man is, if I had to venture a guess, it would be men like Hollander.
A Voice for Men also published an article by him back in 2010, making him the first alleged murderer to be linked directly to the hate site.
Strangely, only a week ago another prominent Men’s Rights attorney, a man named Marc Angelucci, was gunned down outside his house in San Bernardino County, California. No suspects have been named, but I can’t help but wonder if Hollendar was somehow involved in this murder as well.
I will likely follow up on both of these stories as they develop.
H/T — @EyesOnTheRight
CORRECTION: I originally reported that the Daily Beast said he had a pending case before the judge; other news outlets, including the NYT, are saying it was in 2015, so I altered a sentence to say that.
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I’m actually surprised he’s the first. The site’s been around for years, and given the type of people it attracts I’m surprised there weren’t other murderers published there in the past.
Do we know for certain the gunshot would was self inflicted? WWTH pointed out in the other thread that there could be something else going on, but I don’t want to venture too far into speculation.
Do we know if the two men knew each other? If so, were they established enemies? MRAs have a habit of hating each other over slight differences, so that seems possible.
It’s reported as self inflicted, but it’s obviously too early for an investigation on fool play on his death.
Now you just KNOW the MRA crowd is already ginning up conspiracy theories to try and somehow shift the blame onto feminists, because God forbid MRAs should ever acknowledge that their ideology MIGHT just be a smidge toxic.
“Salas has also been assigned to preside over a class-action lawsuit brought against Deutsche Bank which alleges the financial institution had poor financial reporting practices and failed to monitor “high-risk” customers including convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/20/esther-salas-mark-anderl-shooting-new-jersey-home/5470802002/
Deutsche Bank gave some very dubious loans to Trump. I doubt that this is a coincidence.
Just a gut feeling, which means nothing, of course, but he doesn’t strike me as the type to kill himself.
And Salas is going to be presiding over the Deutsche Bank suit, which involves Epstein. So…
Note he was not found until several hours after the shooting, and he was 2 hrs away from the judge’s home. So he got in the car, after not killing his presumed target, and drove for 2 hours before deciding to kill himself. Like I said. My gut is not quite ready to believe this story.
Hi there!
I looked up the case (Kyle v. Selective Service), and it *is* pending; it was filed in 2015, and it’s a class action on behalf of young women who would like to register for the draft. There were a number of class certification issues and motions to dismiss, so it was grinding through the courts for a while.
But!
Den Hollander (really, the guy he was working for, Michael Daher) was dismissed as plaintiff’s counsel in mid-2019 and replaced with someone from Boies Schiller, which is a really big-deal law firm. That’s a pretty good indicator that Boies Schiller realized that this was an interesting claim being mishandled by lawyers who didn’t know what they were doing (because, for example, it shouldn’t have taken four years for a class to be certified) and convinced the plaintiffs to hire them instead.
Den Hollander started off his career at a very prestigious white-shoe law firm and apparently burned out (I totally understand — same thing happened to me), but his career path seems to indicate not just burnout but a downward spiral, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the fact that he got bounced from representation on this case led to what happened, even though it wasn’t the judge’s decision and it wasn’t even Judge Salas, but the magistrate, who approved the substitution.
The wealthy and powerful have gotten better at cleanly disposing of their dupes since Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby. There is definitely more to this story than “random guy randomly shoots family of judge, who JUST RANDOMLY happens to be involved in an Epstein-adjacent case, and then randomly kills himself a random amount of time later in a random location far from the scene.” I’m not a conspiracy theorist but anything to do with Epstein and his very very powerful friends and clients is automatically suspicious.
I’ll be waiting for the rest of the story here. Somehow, I don’t think the general public will ever know it, though.
I wonder if this judge will recuse herself from the Deutsche Bank case now? I hope she doesn’t, but it wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened.
She’s likely in no emotional shape to continue with that case anyway. What a scary but sorrowful story. May justice be done for all involved.
Guy files three lawsuits that REEK of “entitled white man,” then he tries to kill the judge who ruled him a fool….
Call me shocked
Whelp can’t wait to here if there’s more to all of this.
The case Hollander had before Salas may have been originally filed in 2015, but the courts are not fast. Here’s a USA Today article about Salas making a ruling on the case in March of 2019. Hollander is quoted. Though the decision went his way, maybe something happened since because earlier this year Hollander published a screed against Salas.
And dear God, am I depressed by the conspiracy thinking on the left about Epstein. He killed himself. He just did! He didn’t want to go through a trial and prison! He had already tried to kill himself once! If you think that’s a conspiracy, you have to explain how it worked. Did They (whoever They are) make up the first suicide attempt? If so, then Epstein’s entire legal team has to be part of the conspiracy, because they reported the first suicide attempt. Also the prison staff, and even Epstein’s cellmate (an ex-cop charged with four murders… you know, a real easy guy to control). If They didn’t make up the suicide attempt, then why did They (who have perfect control over everything that happened in the prison, according to the conspiracy theory) stop the first suicide attempt? I mean… problem solved. But instead They used their infinite power to set up another, much more suspicious-looking suicide attempt that must have involved paying off a bunch of prison staff and other prisoners in the section, any of whom could potentially be witness against Them… because They’re both infinitely powerful and borderline incompetent.
And even if you think Epstein was murdered, that has NOTHING to do with the case that was going before Salas. It was about whether or not the bank was doing enough to stop money laundering, and therefore maximizing shareholder profits. Yeah, the filing mentioned Epstein, but only because mentioning Epstein in a legal filing is a great way to get publicity these days. Nothing in the case would involve material facts about Epstein, and killing the judge before she could hold a single hearing on the case achieves less than nothing.
Epstein’s neck was broken. Last time I checked that isn’t typically self-inflicted. And this attempted hit on a judge could delay the case past election day, which matters a great deal if it’s likely to dredge up dirt on Trump or anyone close to him. Trump, of course, received billions in shady loans from Deutsche Bank that quite likely are part of a money-laundering scheme of Putin’s, and Putin is well known for having people whacked here and there.
The “hangman’s fracture” is known to occur in deaths by hanging. Other bones in the neck, such as the hyoid, are also known to fracture in hanging deaths.
Is that article about the murdered men’s rights lawyer relatively reflective of reality? It says men’s rights movement = bad, but hasn’t much bad to say about the dude himself: from appearances it seems like he was the rare dude who actually did do something for real men’s equality issues such as lack of access to DV resources (although I have not followed up on how yet). Is anyone familiar with that guy?
@Ariblester
My opinion on Epstein notwithstanding, as a technicality is there really enough space inside a cell to produce the fracture that results from a drop hanging (in a small percentage of hangings)? Most (all that I know of) cell suicide hangings are strangulation hangings, where death results from sheer force of will to die more than anything else.
[source: related to doctors rotated through prisons]
Feasibly rich people get bigger cells with higher ceilings. Wouldn’t know, never been rich or in prison.
@Scott Hamilton : people who do an attempt don’t typically do another one, so you’re reading way too much into this.
Also, the ideal time to kill someone is when it’s publicly know he already tried once. Make the cover that much more believable.
Now, we don’t have any hard element to say he didn’t kill himself. It’s just that the theory he was helped on the way out isn’t out there. Especially not when though rationaly and not just as a strawman to deflate like you do.
Same thing for Hollander. No hard element for foul play, but really it would not surprise me, or anyone for that matter, if it had been “helped”.
As I understand it, he was found hanging from the top bunk. It is possible he threw himself off, though I am no pathologist, so I don’t know if that would have been sufficient either.
(Not that anyone asked, but my personal opinion of “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” is that it is at the very least less problematic than “Carole Baskin Killed Her Husband”, which was the other unnatural-death-related meme that was around the same time.)
@Big Titty Demon
Here’s a link with more details on what a misogynistic prick the guy was:
Lawyer Roy Den Hollander, who shot federal judge’s family, specialized in ‘anti-feminist’ lawsuits, had cancer
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-roy-den-hollander-20200720-lzpt76kihnby3bmvzyq7lhvpsy-story.html
I’ve fixed your link. It wasn’t displaying.
I wouldn’t say that the current administration is infinitely powerful, but Trump and his goons are certainly exerting a hell of a lot of influence on a wide variety of things (including bringing in all kinds of fascism and fascist-adjacent policies) while being borderline (or flat-out) incompetent, so I don’t think those two things are as mutually exclusive as you seem to believe.
The main argument I could see against “Epstein didn’t kill himself” is that Trump has had scandal after scandal revealed (foreign collusion, election meddling, extramarital affairs, quid pro quo, an impeachment, etc) without any of that so much as slowing him down, so why would the revelation that he’s a pedophile as well make any difference?
Though I would note that the people around Trump don’t tend to be quite so bulletproof…
@Catalpa : if someone helped Epstein, it don’t have to be Trump. Both the fact that it was well made and the fact Trump don’t seem to care about scandal mean it can be anyone else.
While Trump itself is a useless shitstain, some people in his administration *are* good at what they do. Mostly, that thing is being a kleptocrat.
The argument of Scott fall flat because he apply standard conspiracy pattern to make the thing look stupider than it is. Most likely, nobody have a perfect hold on prisons, but a lot of people have the ability to pay hits in prisons for example, which make the part about “they should have let him die the first time if they wanted him dead” rather moot.
If I were a thoroughly nasty person looking to remove an inconvienient judge, I think I’d get myself a list of people who the judge had ruled against. Then I’d try to find someone (or several someones) who could be persuaded that it was his/her own idea. Something between stochastic terrorism and a hitman.
Does anybody know (@Alan) if it’s illegal to say, “Bitch deserves to die” over beers? I suspect not.
@Sheila : it’s not, but also, the odds of working aren’t super high. Manipulating people into killing someone actually require either some heavy handed efforts or being lucky.
Few people, even among the hateful, are truly at one suggestion away from killing someone.