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When It Stops Being A Joke: Did We All Indulge Suspected Killer By Mocking Him?

It matters HOW we cover folks as much as the fact that we do.

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Authorities believe that Roy Den Hollander is responsible for killing the son of Judge Esther Salas and critically wounding her husband. He’s also linked to the earlier murder of Marc Angelucci. It’s a tragic turn in the story of a “men’s rights” activist attorney whose career served as a punchline for years as he sued night clubs for offering Ladies’ Nights and alleged a RICO conspiracy among the news media to malign Donald Trump.

But should the media be to blame for indulging Den Hollander’s attention-seeking career? Could the playful mockery have simultaneously inflated his ego and fed a dangerous paranoia that ultimately became deadly? These are the questions asked in an interesting Cracked article by Amanda Mannen.

Making fun of lawyers is the bulk of our daily routine at Above the Law. Between the industry analysis and exploration of legal tech advances, we treat the audience to some lawyer getting benchslapped into oblivion or tripping over obvious ethical rules. We’re also big fans of the nonsensical lawsuits from suing Apple over internet porn to adding a citizenship question to the census. And in that vein, we’d thrown our own shade on Den Hollander’s legal causes.

But is that bad? From the Cracked piece:

After filing a series of lawsuits against various New York City nightclubs arguing that “ladies’ night” specials constituted discrimination, he was granted cheeky profiles in The New York Times and The New Yorker and even interviewed by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central, who has been quick to take down YouTube videos of the segment since the news of the murder broke.

It’s telling that Den Hollander got his 15 minutes of fame over his night club fight but not his effort — in the case overseen by Judge Salas — to extend the draft to include women. The latter case had merit and, even if he necessarily didn’t see it, a feminist justification. But it’s not as funny as complaining over night club covers.

Offering Den Hollander a major television hit certainly awarded him unnecessary attention. Even with the ironic jabs of Colbert’s faux right-wing persona, the joke got far overshadowed by the attention. For the other cited sources, profiling the fringe as if it’s mainstream — or at best “just another viewpoint” — invites every bit of the risk of emboldening these folks. If Den Hollander didn’t seem like a violent guy 13 years ago, that required turning willfully blind eyes to the logic animating his misogynist agenda. Overlooking that smacks of malpractice.

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But what about straightforward mockery? Mannen’s article doesn’t explicitly get into this distinction, but does flag some articles that directly assail goofy lawyers and seems to suggest that the media should trust judges to toss these lawsuits and not stoke the paranoia of the lawyers behind them. For attorneys so psychologically stunted to see women as an existential threat, pushing them to the margins could dangerously exacerbate their already troubling tendencies.

It’s a fair point, but ultimately it seems to amount to letting the terrorists win. Misogyny is spreading and flourishing online regardless of anything media outlets do about it. Like most noxious philosophies, it feeds on radicalizing people who can’t put their personal setbacks into context. It’s arguably an obligation to present a steady counternarrative that, no, “edgelord69” who you just met on 8chan is not “the only guy really talking about the struggle for incel equality” — we’re all talking about it and we’re telling you it’s dumb.

The lesson for the media is not to disengage from these folks, but to engage them consistently and honestly. These lawsuits are dumb. People should know that they are dumb.

A ‘Wacky’ MRA Lawsuit Guy Shot A Judge’s Family; Maybe We Should Stop Indulging This [Cracked]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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