Heroization of New York Murderer: Victim-Perpetrator Role Reversal Charts a Fatal Course*

Rarely has a violent criminal received so much sympathy as Luigi Mangione, who allegedly shot the CEO of the United Healthcare insurance company. It is a perverse moral reversal of values.

Olive green jackets with a hood and conspicuous breast pockets are hot items in American department stores. Surveillance cameras recorded Luigi Mangione wearing a jacket like that when he lay in wait for the CEO of United Healthcare in New York and allegedly shot him. The murderer had written, “Delay, Deny, Depose” on shell casings to protest the alleged delay, denial and deposing of treatment by insurance companies. Now you can read those words on T-shirts, caps and mugs for sale online.

A killing has rarely, if ever, elicited such a wave of sympathy. A crime has never been commercialized so quickly and so shamelessly as an appeal for sympathy for a murderer.* In record time, a criminal turned into a Robin Hood who carried out a heroic deed against the allegedly equally criminal health insurer.

Even American author Joyce Carol Oates has taken the murderer’s side. She clearly called his action a murder that should be prosecuted accordingly.* But in the same breath, she accused health insurers of accepting patients’ deaths in order to maximize profits. It is not any less deplorable, she writes, it is just not being punished.

She doesn’t justify the murder by explicitly referring to insurers’ practices, but by declaring her understanding for Mangione’s sympathizers, she is helping to erase boundaries.* Those who see Robin Hood in the graduate of an elite university and son of an Italian immigrant family from Sicily that has accumulated substantial wealth in three generations also suggests that some murders have more exalted motivations.* The victim’s alleged crime — being head of a health insurance company making billions in profits — would, in this perverse moral reevaluation, give the deed the semblance of legitimacy.

The victim-perpetrator reversal has, since a massacre by Hamas, recently charted a fatal course particularly among leftist American intellectuals. The idea that the victim is the actual perpetrator and the murderer acted out of self-defense or other lofty reasons has long been a strategy to legitimize terrorist activity. It is a depressing symptom of this society that Mangione’s sympathizers don’t recognize the trap that they’re falling into and with whom they share this way of thinking.

Maybe Americans are even less capable of recognizing this connection because America has always cultivated the heroism of Robin Hood. He was already written into the American soul as a founding myth. Just as one admires the self-made man for taking his life into his own hands, one admires those who take it upon themselves to defend their lives when they are in danger or take up arms when their freedom appears under threat.

But those who like to think of Mangione as someone who exacted a higher justice also link themselves to those who have until now managed to preserve the right to bear arms by calling upon the right of self-defense. Because sympathy for this murderer* means nothing less than applauding someone who, acting according to allegedly loftier motivations, took justice into his own hands.

One doesn’t want to know what signals this is sending to possible imitators who are just waiting to play the hero Robin Hood themselves and to exact their justice for supposedly loftier reasons. You don’t want to get accustomed to a society that frivolously values perpetrators more than victims.

*Editor’s note: Luigi Mangione has been arrested and charged with crimes related to the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Mangione has not been tried for or convicted of murder.