The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion For years, Roy Den Hollander was a joke. Now, he’s accused of misogynist murder.

By
July 24, 2020 at 8:30 a.m. EDT
New York State Police block off a road near the scene where the body of Roy Den Hollander was found on July 20 near Livingston Manor, N.Y. (Jim Sabastian/AP)

Andi Zeisler is the co-founder of Bitch Media.

After a man posing as a FedEx employee allegedly shot the husband and son of New Jersey federal judge Esther Salas, conspiracy theorists on Twitter began furiously connecting dots: Salas had recently been assigned to oversee a lawsuit against Deutsche Bank brought by investors over its handling of compliance fines related to Jeffrey Epstein’s accounts. But when news broke that the shooter was a self-described “anti-feminist lawyer,” different alarm bells went off in my head. Authorities identified him as Roy Den Hollander, and said he apparently died by suicide shortly after the shootings. (Hollander is also being treated as a suspect in a second slaying.) As a veteran of the feminist blogosphere, I knew exactly who Hollander was — a man who spent years portraying himself as the victim of a different conspiracy, one in which his rights as a white man were continually impeded by the scourge of feminism.