Roy Den Hollander was a self-styled “anti-feminist” lawyer who inundated the courts with apparently frivolous lawsuits seeking to eliminate women’s study programs and ban nightclubs from holding “ladies’ nights.”
In one of his most recent cases, he openly confronted a federal judge in New Jersey, Esther Salas, whom he described in a 1,700-page published book as “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge named by Obama.”
Mr. Den Hollander dropped the case, in which he challenged the U.S. military draft for men only, last summer, telling a lawyer who replaced him that he had terminal cancer.
On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Den Hollander appeared at Judge Salas’ home in North Brunswick, New Jersey, and fired multiple shots, killing the judge’s son and seriously injuring her husband, who is a criminal defense attorney, they said. investigators. The judge, who was in the basement at the time, was not injured.
New York State Police found the body of Mr. Den Hollander near Liberty, New York, about a two-hour drive from the judge’s home after he committed suicide, authorities said.
The surprising sequence of events was a reminder of the dangers faced by judges, who generally do not receive special security outside of court unless they face specific threats. Judge Salas worked in one of the country’s busiest courts, overseeing dozens of cases while involving a wide range of defendants and litigants.
The FBI contacted New York State Chief Judge Janet M. DiFiore on Monday to notify him that Mr. Den Hollander had his name and photo on his car, according to his spokesperson, Lucian Chalfen. Agents did not indicate whether Mr. Den Hollander intended to attack her as well, he said.
Investigators were exploring whether Mr. Den Hollander had decided to “kill” some of his enemies, given his cancer diagnosis, before he died, according to a law enforcement official.
Mr. Den Hollander, 69, identified with a broader movement of men who often scoff at abusive, misogynistic and hateful language against “feminazis”. He wrote numerous online rules, some of which spanned a thousand pages.
Mr. Den Hollander had a long history of filing lawsuits against programs that he believed favored women. In 2008, she told The New York Times that her anger at feminists was due to her bitter divorce from a woman he married in Russia.
He called women “the real oppressors” in a Fox News appearance in 2008 and wrote online about his complaints against the judges.
When investigators discovered Mr. Den Hollander’s body, they found a package nearby that was addressed to Judge Salas, according to a law enforcement official. The package was empty.
Sunday afternoon, the judge’s husband was home when he looked out the window and thought he saw a FedEx delivery man.
Carlos Salas, an older brother of Judge Salas, described an account of the shooting that he said was provided to him by federal authorities. After the doorbell rang, the couple’s son opened the door and was shot. When the judge’s husband went to see what was happening, he was shot several times.
The judge ran up the stairs from the basement when he heard a scream and gunshots.
The judge’s husband, Mark Anderl, 63, was in hospital in stable condition, Mr. Salas said. The couple’s son and only son, Daniel Anderl, 20, died of a gunshot wound to the heart.
Daniel Anderl was about to start his third year at the Catholic University of America in Washington and was interested in pursuing a legal career as his parents had.
“It’s surreal,” said Salas. “He was a vibrant, young and handsome man. He had so much promise. “
The FBI has been conducting the investigation with United States Marshals along with other federal and local authorities. A FedEx spokesman said in a statement that the company was “fully cooperating with authorities in their investigation.”
Two law enforcement officials, warning that the investigation was in its early stages, said federal authorities were examining whether Mr. Den Hollander could be related to the July 11 murder of another US rights lawyer. men, Marc Angelucci, in San Bernardino County, California.
Angelucci was shot on the doorstep of his home by an armed man wearing a FedEx uniform, one of the officials said.
Judge Salas, 51, is the first Hispanic woman to serve as a federal judge in New Jersey. President Barack Obama nominated her to the United States District Court for New Jersey in 2010. She had previously served as a magistrate judge and assistant federal public defender.
Judge Salas met her husband when he was a prosecutor with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, according to a 2018 profile of her in New Jersey Monthly. After a decade as a prosecutor, Mark Anderl became a criminal defense attorney and now works at his own law firm, Anderl & Oakley PC
According to the federal record, the only case Mr. Den Hollander had before Judge Salas was a class action lawsuit filed in 2015. He accused the Selective Service System, the independent government agency that maintains a database of eligible Americans for a possible eraser. , to violate the rights of equal protection of women by requiring that only men register in the service.
In a 2018 ruling, Judge Salas allowed the case to continue, a victory for Mr. Den Hollander. But in his online writings, he criticized the judge for not taking the case fast enough.
Nicholas A. Gravante Jr., a partner at Boies Schiller Flexner, said Den Hollander had called him in May 2019 and asked him to take over the case. The two attorneys had overlapped as associates at the white shoe law firm Cravath Swaine & Moore in the late 1980s.
Mr. Den Hollander said in the phone call that he could not pursue the case because he had terminal cancer and suggested that he did not have much time to live, Mr. Gravante said. The case is ongoing.
Mr. Den Hollander has also sued several nightclubs, alleging they violated Amendment 14 by having “ladies night” discounts for women. After the case was dismissed, Mr. Den Hollander petitioned the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.
“Of course, all three women on the court probably voted against it,” Mr. Den Hollander told the Times in 2011. “The fight for men’s rights is not a very popular thing in America these days.”
In 2008, she accused Columbia University of trying to establish feminism as a “religion” at school through its women’s studies program and proposed creating a men’s study program that could “train men to recognize and wield the power that women often use to manipulate them. “
Shortly before the 2016 presidential election, he filed a lawsuit in Manhattan accusing multiple news reporters of conspiring together in violation of the federal organized crime law to spread “misleading news reports” about President Trump.
Mr. Den Hollander’s online writings identified with the men’s rights movement, which gained momentum in the late 1980s and 1990s in response to feminist criticism of traditional masculinity.
The movement encompasses “a celebration of all things masculine and a close infatuation with the traditional masculine role itself,” wrote sociologist Michael Kimmel in his book “Angry White Men.”
In a 150-page document posted on his website, which has since been withdrawn, Mr. Den Hollander wrote a lengthy comment on how to fight feminists and their supporters, describing the judiciary as “useless to men.”
“Courts support the violation of men’s rights whenever it benefits women,” wrote Mr. Den Hollander. “Men just don’t count for the courts.”
Mr. Den Hollander seemed to presage the violence that took place over the weekend in a 2010 article he wrote for A Voice for Men, a website on men’s rights.
“The future possibility that the Men’s Movement will raise enough money to wield some influence in the United States is unlikely,” he wrote. “But there is one remaining source of power in which men still have a close monopoly: firearms.”
Mr. Den Hollander graduated from George Washington University School of Law in 1985. He later received a degree from Columbia Business School, according to a LinkedIn profile under his name.
In the epilogue to the online book he published in 2019, Den Hollander alluded to his cancer diagnosis, describing a visit to a surgeon and the need to turn his cases over to other attorneys. “The hand of death is on my left shoulder,” he wrote, adding that “nothing matters in this life anymore.”
He said he had enjoyed fighting against people who violated his rights.
“The only problem with a life long lived under the Feminazi government,” he said, “is that one man ends up with so many enemies that he can’t even score with all of them.”
Kevin Armstrong, Jo Corona and Alan Feuer contributed to the reports, and Kitty Bennett contributed to the investigation.
