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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@Big Titty Demon
Apologies, I thought you were referring to Hollander.
Yeah, that right there makes me suspicious of whether he was any good. Generally the company people attract is an indicator of themselves.
@WWTH
My general rule of thumb is: if conservatives are accusing someone else of something, chances are they’re doing it or planning to do it. They are very good at telling on themselves through their projection.
Have you seen this article apparently claiming that it is feminists fault? Fucking hell. That theory doesn’t seem to fit with the information we have now, but okay.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/07/who-killed-red-pill-lawyer-marc-angelucci-and-why/
“Whether this was a coven of feminist witches desperate to remove such a slick operator, or someone powerful who he successfully challenged, whoever ordered this hit is an enemy of equality, peace, harmony and fairness.”
Vice put out an article earlier today about this person. Check the link here.
Some key points that are in the article are that he worked as an attorney in New York, Russia, and Ecuador in the 1990s and even moved to Moscow in 1999. He married a woman that he eventually divorced, which the article goes on to say that he thought of her as simply in the marriage for a green card and was a “mafia prostitute”.
Then the article goes on to say that he worked in Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016 and made calls to GRU on his behalf following the Hilary server hack. Following that this was the guy who in 2016 filed the lawsuit accusing seven female journalists of creating and participating in a racketeering scheme against Trump. Finally, the guy also attended the inauguration in 2017.
Which can be wrong, mind you. Some these can be elaborate lies to enhance his street cred among the alt-right. But I can help but shake the feeling that some this is correct.
Vice also posted an article that essentially said that Russia was indeed behind Brexit and the government at the time consciously avoided looking into that issue, which is also a yikes. I really don’t want to buy into conspiracy theories which all of us know is a dark spiral, but with the Donbass-esque level of violence and gaslighting in America right now by a man that revels in it, something reeks about this entire situation that I think is going to get much darker as the election draws nearer.
Can’t find that one at MediaBiasFactCheck but its UK and American counterparts are listed as right-biased, and the UK one does not have a clean fact check record, apparently due to climate change denial.
I would suspect the Australian one to be significantly further right if they’re calling people like us “covens of feminist witches”, even in the editorial pages.
@Surplus
The Spectator is a right wing rag. They like to publish TERFs, alt right pseudointellectuals, and some mainstream conservatives. They’re less blunt about their agenda than Quillette, but similar in nature and location.
It doesn’t surprise me that they blame feminists for the shooting and somehow I imagine their TERF friends will let it fly.
Yeah I thought so too.
The Spectator’s theory that feminist witches murdered Angelucci with mind rays or hexes or whatever is something…
Given both murders were committed by a men dressed as Fedex drivers and Hollander was kicked out of the National Coalition for Men, which Angelucci belonged to, years ago would suggest a personal grudge. According to a friend of Angelucci and the leader of that group, “But I want to be real clear, [Den Hollander is] not a NCFM member. Why isn’t he? Because I threw him out five or six years ago, because he was a nut job.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/roy-den-hollander-judge-esther-salas-mens-rights-attorney-revenge-a9630706.html
I can’t imagine Hollander traveling all the way to Angelucci without there being some record of it, though.
They deliberately ignore all information because it doesn’t fit the agenda, that’s very clear.
This article say that, in 2010 he wrote on AVFM that they should take up firearms but I can’t find anything on their website. It is not possible to search for any articles on their site I guess. Has it always been like that?
“Den Hollander seemed to presage the violence that took place over the weekend in a 2010 article he wrote for A Voice for Men, a men’s rights website.
“The future prospect of the Men’s Movement raising enough money to exercise some influence in America is unlikely,” he wrote. “But there is one remaining source of power in which men still have a near monopoly — firearms.””
https://www.boston.com/news/national-news-2/2020/07/21/roy-den-hollander
@Painteyelash
I can’t find his article either, and I tried multiple search methods, which leads me to believe they removed it to make themselves look better. Despite this, AVfM published another article today that confesses that he wrote them an article before, but then claims they never liked him anyway and that the media is being unfair to MRAs by trying to link them to his murders. It seems like they’re trying to distance themselves from him, but still sound overly sympathetic.
Of course they scrubbed the site. You expect anything less from the pathetic wee rageplum as runs the place?
@Threp
I’m not surprised they scrubbed it, I just thought it was weird then that they would then mention and quote the article today in their response.
O/T: It’s old news that Joe Rogan is a transphobe, but he’s now digging even deeper by saying we retain “gross” “male” qualities like aggression and competitiveness. And at a time when HUD issued guidelines on how shelter workers should spot trans* women to discriminate against them. Remember, this is the man that a lot of the “dirtbag left” thought we should welcome with open arms. Now see what he’s doing. He’s got 9,000,000 subscribers, this will get someone killed.
Nah. That bit’s common sense arse covering. Get your version out up front.
The internet’s forever – bet David here, for one, has local copies of about half their articles, as well as dozens of internet archive links. He’s far from the only person who’s keeping an eye on these tools – though he’s probably the first one to emphasise how dangerous they can be.
Anyone try the Wayback machine to find ‘lost’ AVFM articles?
Ooops, Threp beat me to it.
I haven’t really been following this thread, so apologies if this has been brought up already, But just in case.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/21/anti-feminist-lawyer-suspect-roy-den-hollander-new-jersey-fbi-california-killing
I know this has become a “line,” but I disagree. The feminist movement was (rightly, in my view) at the time more focused on the religious Right than the noisy MRA contingent that would eventually evolve into the manosphere, which itself is in at least some respects affiliated with the alt-right.
And IIRC, the articles that I read about eg Hollander at sites like Feministing circa 2007-8 took a more bemused and amused approach to his antics.
What I will certainly grant is that some individual feminists have long been sounding the alarm about online MRA harassment and abuse. As a society, we should have paid more attention – and that includes more established feminists who tended to dismiss the skirmishes between younger bloggers and this weird MRA subculture. But what I’m saying is that Hollander’s tragic end is emblematic of the way in which we have come to understand the real dangers of fringe radicalism that might at first glance seem ridiculous, as well as the downstream effects of cranks, conspiracists, and extremists finding each other online.
I mean, would Hollander have done this if he hadn’t had his obsessions encouraged and validated for literally decades by the MRAs? We can’t know yet – we don’t even have a motive – but I’m certainly interested in learning more.
What the fuck are you doing, Ford?
https://www.cp24.com/news/new-covid-19-cases-surpass-200-in-ontario-for-first-time-in-3-weeks-1.5032641
Getting people killed, from the look of it. The trend reversed about four days ago and the incubation period has to be added to that, so presumably whatever you screwed up, you screwed it up about a week ago. So, whatever COVID-related things you did a week ago, Ford, you will undo them immediately and revert all relevant policies to the status quo ante.
We want this thing eradicated in this province and were on track to do so until whatever-it-was-that-you-changed.
@Surplus
Are things reopening in Ontario? That’s causing a lot of spikes in the US, but governors are fiddling while Rome burns. And the president is predictably damaging to all efforts.
@Surplus, Naglfar:
Yes, last week pretty much all of Ontario aside from Toronto, Peel Region (including Mississauga, and most importantly, Pearson Airport), and Windsor-Essex got to Stage 3 on the re-opening plan, so still restrictions, but relatively minimal ones. Those three regions were still in Stage 2. (Several parts of Ontario have been in Stage 3 for a couple of weeks or more now, because there never had been many cases. Stage 3, among other things, allows businesses to open as long as social distancing guidelines are set up, along with public gatherings of up to 50 people.)
Right now, Windsor-Essex has been the biggest hotspot, mostly due to the fact that significant numbers of trained professionals living in Windsor are doing necessary jobs across the bridge keeping the Detroit infrastructure running. If nurses from Windsor didn’t show up, the Detroit health care system would be in far worse shape than it already is.
Toronto and Peel Region are hot spots mostly by virtue of density and clusters of poverty. (The by-neighbourhood CoViD map of Toronto tracked the ‘poverty’ angle really well.) We’ve sadly got several anti-mask idiots up here, too. From the article, it looks like Peel Region was the main source of the spike, though Peel officials say it was due to clearing a backlog of previously unreported cases. Which, yeah, if the number of cases drops back down after that, it’s possible. The fact that the busiest airport in Canada is mostly in Peel Region can’t be discounted, though.
@ jenora
I have a mask on order. I’m hoping it will arrive by Friday. That’s when they become compulsory here. It was nice of the virus to agree not to become dangerous until then.
@Alan Robertshaw
People in Britain haven’t been wearing masks yet?
@Alan:
I’ve been using a bandana that I got at an SF convention I went to, admittedly. (This year’s iteration of that convention would be in a week and a half if it hadn’t been cancelled.) Not as good as a full mask, but as long as it covers the nose and lower face it’s still doing what it needs to do.
A friend of mine has been making cute custom masks, including one with a drawing of a crouched cat ready to pounce on one side of the nose, with a rolling ball of wool on the other side.
Masks have been… sort of required for a while now? It’s a bit of a patchwork. Public transit systems require masks, but most of that only hit in the last couple of weeks, because previously it was just ‘don’t use public transit unless you have to’. The province and city set minimum requirements, but individual stores can be pickier and often were.
Nobody up here that I’ve seen have been pushing ‘you must open!’ the way it’s been happening in the U.S., aside from a few people who even our demagogue-in-practice of a premier has called ‘yahoos’.
On the flip side, Doug Ford was actively pushing for some percentage of high school education to go online as a cost cutting measure, allowing them to reduce the number of in-person teachers (and physical school buildings) by attrition. With the pandemic on, nobody’s arguing against that the way they were last year, so he may consider some of the fallout a plus.
@ naglfar
I can’t speak for the rest of the country, but down in Cornwall they’ve been pretty rare. I think you were supposed to wear them on public transport, and I have seen some people doing that. It’s all been a bit casual down here though. Everyone is very polite about the rules, but it’s a bit performative. Like everyone carries on as normal then suddenly remembers we’re meant to be keeping our distance and apologises and backs away. Then five minutes later everyone is back together chatting away again.
There’s only two roads into Cornwall though and the police literally set up checkpoints and turned people back from day one of the lockdown. And it’s a low density place with pretty clean air and a fit population so we haven’t been hit that bad. Apparently the virus has been down here a long time, we have a lot of people commute by air from up country, so it looks like we did the herd immunity thing by accident.
The county is now open again for visitors though, so be interesting to see if that has an effect.
There were antimask protests in Saskatoon and Regina over the weekend. I didn’t see the Saskatoon protest in person, but from the news reports I saw it looked like they got maybe 10 or 12 protestors at most. The Regina one appeared larger. Of course having an antimask protest is harder when the Saskatchewan government hasn’t mandated mask wearing.
@ jenora
I have a couple of shemaghs; so I was willing to improvise if necessary. But as mentioned, it’s been pretty relaxed down here. TBH, it’s been a bit of a holiday vibe. Best summer in years and no tourists. So the locals have been making most of empty surf beaches, horsey stuff, walks in the countryside (I’ve clocked up 1,700 miles since lockdown, I could have gone to Kiev, or thrown a ring down a volcano or something), the pubs have been doing takeouts, and our biggest industry is farming, so of course that isn’t something you can do by Zoom, so the farmers still out in the fields. It’s all been pretty chilled.
Taking a comedic tone to discussing this sort of asshole doesn’t necessarily mean dismissing the threat they pose. See: this entire blog you are on right now.