It’s just below freezing on a Friday afternoon in February, and a group comprised mostly of women clad in green hats, shirts, and scarves has assembled outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse for Luigi Mangione’s first appearance before a judge this year. The protesters, a handful of whom are men, have gathered to show their support for the 26-year-old Ivy League graduate accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a midtown sidewalk. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) They unfurl signs that say “Health Care Is a Human Right” and “Murder for Profit Is Terror”; a woman wearing a “Cougars for Luigi” T-shirt holds up a banner that reads “Luigi Before Fascists.” In the background, someone plays the main theme song from the Nintendo video game Luigi’s Mansion on a speaker.
Since Mangione was arrested last year in Pennsylvania following a multi-state manhunt, part of the media frenzy surrounding his case has fixated on the female following. Tabloids such as the New York Post and Daily Mail call them “twisted young women” and “depraved devotees,” positioning the women as crazed fangirls taken in by Mangione’s square jaw and thick curls. “All of these big players, they’re trying to discount us just down into fangirl status,” says Lindsy Floyd, the media representative for People Over Profit NYC. The organization, she says, formed to advocate for Mangione and in the belief that “health care and the health-care industry should serve people and should serve humans over the interest of profit.”
One young woman in the crowd grills a male journalist who she believes is pushing the “crazed fangirl” narrative before telling me she deals with PCOS. “Every woman I know has suffered so much with doctors and conditions they know they have but aren’t getting help for,” Mikaela Zwyer says. “I’m sure they’re trying to focus women’s interest in how attractive he is to not talk about what he did, if he did it, because that puts the focus on health care and how much death and suffering it’s causing in America.” She concedes that Mangione’s looks and affluent background “might help a little” in bringing attention to the cause, but she says that’s not the point.
Nearby, a woman who asks me to call her Kim is selling T-shirts either depicting Mangione in religious garb or in a pink, babygirl-ified photo collage that includes at least one shirtless photo. “I’m making light of the situation. At the end of the day, I’m very passionate about class solidarity,” she says. “I think we’re in really dark times right now.” Fellow cheeky-T-shirt wearer Nadine Seiler, the self-proclaimed “Cougar for Luigi,” tells me she made her shirt with a group of friends on Valentine’s Day. They got together and ate red velvet cupcakes with gummy worms inside, which she says represent the parasitic ruling class. “It’s good to get together, have a serious discussion, and have people understand what is going on in this country and that we need to be doing something different,” she says. “I’m having fun while focusing on the serious issue at hand, which are these CEOs taking advantage of the masses and we’re still giving them our money.”
By mid-afternoon, the crowd has swelled to absorb the hundred or so hopefuls who had been waiting on line inside the courthouse, only to be escorted from the building just before Mangione was set to appear. (Chelsea Manning reportedly made it inside.) There are more signs criticizing the health-care system now, and significantly more men with microphones (and likely YouTube creator accounts) have shown up to film and livestream the scene. Passing through the crowd feels like walking into a high-school cafeteria, where each faction — women holding anti-fascism signs, people lighting up joints, and YouTubers hungry for a sound bite — awkwardly commingles on the sidewalk.
A former small-time actor turned meme-maker named Lionel McGloin wanders around flanked by his cameraman, trying to pull someone to say something salacious. He tells a blonde woman who is wearing a “Free Luigi” scarf and handing out Mangione-themed stickers that he “needs pretty girls” in his video. She walks away mid-interview. I overhear another male content creator, whose microphone is just a boom over a wooden spoon, ask a female livestreamer “What, you don’t like sex?” before she scurries away from him.
Then I’m distracted by two men cosplaying Sacco and Vanzetti, the Italian immigrants and anarchists who were convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the 1920s. (Mangione could face the death penalty if convicted on a separate federal murder-by-firearm charge.) They’re holding a “WOPs 4 Mangione” sign and speaking in fake Italian accents for an on-camera interview. “This is anti-Italian discrimination. He’s a patsy!” a man playing their “lawyer” says to the interviewer. Really though, he tells me later, the trio just came out to promote their new play. Mangione’s “fangirls” may be getting all the attention, but they’re not the ones thirsting outside his hearing for it.