An escalating pattern of threats and harassment
It turns out that Martin Shkreli isn’t just the kind of asshole who buys the rights to patented meds in order to inflate the price by 5000%, he’s also the kind of asshole who harasses and threatens women in public.
Martin Shkreli, the former hedge fund manager awaiting sentencing for defrauding his investors, should have his bail revoked after offering his Facebook followers $5,000 to grab a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair during her book tour, federal prosecutors say.
I saw that yesterday, via Twitter. I wanted to post about it but decided it might look too trivial or random. But the Secret Service doesn’t think so and the Post doesn’t think so, so ok then.
Shkreli’s conduct since his conviction in early August has escalated and he poses a threat to the community, the prosecutors said in a letter to the judge late Thursday. In addition to his Facebook post concerning Hillary Clinton, which drew the attention of the Secret Service, he has made harassing comments to other women online, they said.
“Shkreli has engaged in an escalating pattern of threats and harassment that warrant his detention pending sentencing,” prosecutors said in their letter to the judge in the case. “The Court should further find that there is no condition or combination of conditions to which the defendant will abide that will ensure that he does not pose a danger to the community.”
Interesting, isn’t it. We’re always being told that online harassment of women is just joking, just bants, just trolls, just free speech…but when it’s a convicted criminal doing it, finally people can grasp that it actually does pose a danger.
As a result of Shkreli’s Facebook post on Clinton, the Secret Service has “expended significant resources additional resources to ensure Secretary Clinton’s protection,” the letter said. “There is a significant risk that one of his many social media followers or others who learn of his offers through the media will take his statements seriously — as has happened previously — and act on them.”
Shkreli later amended his post on Clinton to say that the offer was “satire.” But prosecutors note that Shkreli’s apparent animus toward Clinton includes standing outside her daughter Chelsea’s home when Clinton was reportedly there recuperating after falling sick. Shkreli “spent approximately two hours live-streaming while providing commentary and heckling Secretary Clinton,” they said.
Is that “satire”? No it is not.
“However inappropriate some of Mr Shkreli’s postings may have been, we do not believe that he intended harm and do not believe that he poses a danger to the community,” Shkreli’s attorney, Benjamin Brafman, said in a statement.
But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what Shkreli’s attorney “believes.” What matters is the reality: that he put the offer out there, that there are millions of people who have been trained for decades to feel frothing hatred for Hillary Clinton, that there are people who act on their feelings of frothing hatred for public figures, especially political ones, and that violent hatred of women is in fashion.
Shkreli, 34, is best known for raising the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 percent but was convicted by a Brooklyn jury of defrauding the investors’ in his hedge funds. Shkreli lied to obtain investors’ money then didn’t tell them when he made a bad stock bet that led to massive losses, prosecutors argued…
…
Since his conviction the loquacious executive has kept an active — and combative — online presence. In addition to asking for someone to grab a strand of Clinton’s hair, he has bought the domain names of reporters’ covering his case and promised to “smack” comic Trevor Noah if he ever saw him on the street.
He was busily doing all this and more on Facebook yesterday. Doesn’t violate Facebook’s famous “community standards,” I guess.
I’ve been trying to explain this to youngsters I work with who don’t quite get it. They have drunk the Kool-Aid that says the problem is “Clinton has baggage”. Of course Clinton is not perfect! I don’t expect perfect from any candidate, and I don’t accept people expecting perfect from me. Yes, she has baggage. But that frothing hatred has a lot more to do with the shouts of “Lock her up!” than any of her baggage, which frankly isn’t that much more than most, and is something a man could easily have risen above in a campaign.
Some of these youngsters actually feel “frothing hatred” for Clinton, but can’t articulate exactly why (mostly because the messages we get are absorbed without us realizing half of them, like the sexist messages often are). They’ll give some vague “her e-mails” or “well, she’s just not very likeable”, and that will be it.
He sounds like cabinet material. He’d fit right in.
Being a pharma-bro, does he want to ‘prove’ the HRC health conspiracy theories using DNA analysis on the hair follicle? Or is it only in the movies that one can get DNA from hair?
“…which frankly isn’t that much more than most, and is something a man could easily have risen above in a campaign.”
Leaving aside his pre-existing conditions of boorishness and lack of experience, look how well the Trump survived at least half a dozen scandals and incidents during the campaign that would have ended the campaign of any normal person. How did that happen? This is where the real “fake news” comes in. Candidate Trump, given his obvious malignancy and his manifest unsuitability for the job, was treated better than any normal candidate making similar mistakes. Perhaps it was outside the media’s usual experience of their treatment of “normal” candidates, but treating him as such (a normal candidate) gave him infinitely more legitimacy than he was entitled. It gave him much too much benefit of no doubts whatsoever and set up the foundations a false equivalence, in the interests of “fairness” and “balance” between his obvious ignorance, corruption and narcissism and whatever missteps or baggage Clinton had or was perceived as having. Not knowing what the nuclear triad is? Jesus fuck but that’s an instant disqualification right there. If Clinton had come out with that, her candidacy would have gone up in smoke faster than you could say “nuclear football.”
Forgive my venting/preaching to choir, etc. None of this is new, but sometimes you have to rehash this stuff in your head to be sure it really happened and no, you’re not mad, and yes we have not woken up from this nightmare.
Sorbus, I think that it’s possible to extract DNA from the root of the hair, but it’s just as possible that I’ve heard that on CSI, Crime Scene Investigation and mistaken it as fact.
when it’s a convicted criminal doing it, when it is directed at a rich and powerful politician, finally people can grasp that it actually does pose a danger.FTFY
Obviously this is a case of backing down from a statement upon discovering that there might be consequences, but most people doing this claim it to be ‘just a joke’. But satire? Who or what does he claim to be satirising? Even by lame ‘
oh shitjust kidding ‘ standards, this is pathetic.