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

“Do you remember that creepy guy who used to call the office and complain when we wrote about him?” I texted former co-workers at Bitch Media. Looking back on pieces I’d written about Hollander more than a decade ago, I was struck by my own tone. Calling Hollander “the Energizer Bunny of frivolous litigation” wasn’t inaccurate. But my tendency to turn him into a joke rather than treating him as a threat shows why it’s so easy for violent misogyny to hide in plain sight.

Hollander’s legal crusade against feminism seems to have started in 2000, when the young woman he met and married while living in Russia left him. In 2004, he sued both his ex and the strip club where she worked. The suit was dismissed, but Hollander found his calling. He sued to end, among other things, Columbia University’s women’s studies program; New York City bars and clubs that hosted “Ladies’ Nights” where women drank for free; and the United States and various officials over the Violence Against Women Act, which he believed incentivized deceitful hussies like his ex-wife.

Hollander’s lawsuits landed him in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section in 2007; on Fox News in 2008 arguing that “girls” were “a suspect class”; and on “The Colbert Report” in 2011 as the subject of the show’s satirical “Difference Makers” segment.

Hollander’s seething hatred for women was right there online for everyone to see, but those — including me — who wrote about Hollander more than a decade ago were more inclined to paint him as a deluded, litigious sad-sack. At a time when women who faced online harassment, stalking and rape threats were told to simply log off, a time before “feminism” became a marketing buzzword, patterns of misogyny were rarely considered the red flags they might be today. The best way to deal with men like Hollander, I figured, was to take him seriously but not literally.

Recent years make it abundantly clear that this sort of anger wasn’t just online posturing. In 2009, George Sodini walked into an aerobics class at his gym and opened fire, killing three women and injuring nine before fatally shooting himself. The online diary he left behind told of an inability to find dates and was filled with vile condemnations of sexually active women. Five years later, Elliot Rodger killed six people in Santa Barbara, Calif., after writing a 137-page manifesto against women. In a YouTube video he created shortly before the attack, he declared, “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.”

Such killers sometimes play to an audience of fellow men, whether by posting florid goodbyes or live-streaming their violence on social media. But even when these tragedies have a digital paper trail making clear references to ideas like “involuntary celibacy” or a specific brand of anti-feminist men’s rights activism that flourishes on sites like A Voice for Men and Return of Kings, it’s rare that they are considered anything other than “lone wolf” killings that no one could have seen coming.

Hollander’s antipathy to Salas, who oversaw a 2015 case argued by Hollander, was no secret. He posted racist, sexist screeds over the years referring to the judge variously as a “hot Latina” he wanted to ask out, and as “a lazy and incompetent Latina” whose biggest accomplishment, he decided, was having been a high school cheerleader. These dueling forces of lust and contempt were a faithful distillation of his views on women and power.

And yet, too many people simply don’t buy that misogyny can be a motivation for the murder of total strangers. For some, it’s too hard to acknowledge that yes, a high school boy keeping a list of girls he wants to rape and kill, or even a man arrested twice for groping women, really does hate his targets. Looking back on my own writing about Hollander suggests that, even for feminists like me, it’s sometimes been easier to treat men like him as fools rather than as real threats.

Hollander hid in plain sight because his views were exaggerated versions of normalized stereotypes and suspicions about women. But when men who have spent their lives denigrating women commit acts of violence against women, their motives are no mystery.

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Source:WP