Inside the Cult of Luigi Mangione By Olivia Reingold
https://www.thefp.com/p/inside-the-cult-of-luigi-mangione
A Columbia grad, a cashier from Utah, and a Lockheed Martin engineer have one thing in common: They believe the alleged killer is a progressive American hero.
For the past few months, Nicole Haedo, a 36-year-old logistics coordinator, has been walking around her small town of DeKalb, Illinois, wielding an act of “quiet defiance” at her fingertips: a fresh manicure dedicated to progressive causes.
Ten nails, each a proverbial middle finger. On her left hand, her thumb bears the word TRUMP with a slash through it. On her pinkie: BLM. Her middle digit is an ode to The Handmaid’s Tale—an avatar for abortion rights. And the nail on her pointer finger is painted black with the words FREE LUIGI painted on top in bright green.
“It’s my small way of showing support,” she told me. “This is my way of keeping his story alive.”
She is talking about Luigi Mangione—the 26-year-old man accused of murdering a healthcare CEO in Manhattan in the early hours of December 4, 2024.
Haedo said her mom was shocked when she first saw her tribute to the suspect.
“She was like, ‘But he’s a murderer,’ ” Haedo told me. “I’m like, well, first of all, ‘He’s innocent until proven guilty—and second, whoever the shooter was, if his actions start to change the healthcare system, it saves lives.’ ”
Sure, “nobody wants to see bloodshed,” she admitted to me. But “the shooting of the CEO was just a small tip of the iceberg of what’s to come in America.”
“People are getting fed up,” she said.
When Americans learned that a man shrouded in black had fired three gunshots into the back of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Midtown sidewalk, the first reaction for most was horror. But within hours, a different emotion began to surface: glee. By the afternoon, when UnitedHealthcare announced the death of its top executive on Facebook, more than 77,000 online commenters found it so funny they responded with a laughter emoji. Meanwhile, Reddit users were discussing how to start a legal defense fund for the gunman.
To them, this was not a crime but justice. They believed Thompson, who was 50 years old, married with two kids, and had recently made $10.2 million in a single year, was the criminal. He was the one who—in their eyes—ran a company that denied chemotherapy for grandmothers in order to deliver the bottom line.
Then the online mob saw what the suspect looked like: not an incel or a disaffected basement dweller but a dark and handsome all-American hunk with washboard abs and a sharp jawline. The alleged shooter, it turned out, was Luigi Mangione—a man who looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch model but had the politics of a Brooklyn socialist, at least according to writings confiscated by law enforcement. That the three bullet casings from the scene were reportedly inscribed with terms associated with insurance claims—delay, deny, depose—only added to the murderer’s mystique.
Almost overnight, Mangione catapulted into folk hero status—especially for a generation stunted by the pandemic and on track to amass only a fraction of the wealth their parents enjoyed. When asked which of the two men involved in the crime—the alleged killer or the victim—deserved more sympathy, 45 percent of college students contacted for a survey said Mangione, while just 17 percent said the CEO. And a whopping 48 percent called the killing “totally or somewhat justified.”
I spoke to some of the women who comprise his army of supporters and infiltrated their private Discord server, where they discuss the logistics of sending him mail in jail, organizing future protests, and fundraising for their defense fund, which is approaching $750,000. This week, the moderators of the FreeLuigi community announced a new campaign for donations. Called “27 for Luigi,” it encourages supporters to contribute $27 or more as a “nice surprise and gift from us to him.” Their goal? Raise $1 million by the time Mangione turns 27 on May 6.
“Let’s show up in every way we can—through donations, messages, and in the streets,” a Discord moderator with the username “hottestpink” posted this week. “Solidarity is our strength!”
The supporters I spoke to—all of whom are millennials or Gen Z—admit that sure, he’s not hard to look at, but say this is deeper than that for them.
“He is cute,” Sarah Panes, a 21-year-old recent graduate of San Francisco State University, told me. “Whenever I see TikToks of him I’m like, damn, I feel like we would’ve been friends.”
She added that if he attended her college, they would’ve likely bonded over politics or philosophy. “I feel like it’s really hard to find people like that nowadays,” she said.
Fans have pieced together Mangione’s ideology based on his digital footprint and documents obtained by police at the time of his arrest. A Goodreads account revealed he had read the Unabomber’s manifesto—and considered it worthy of four stars. Based on an X-ray of his spine, uploaded to his X account, fans were clued in to his back pain, a chronic issue for Mangione, who has said he suffered from spondylolisthesis and underwent surgery for the condition. There is no evidence that he was ever insured by UnitedHealthcare—nor that he would even need health insurance to foot the bill for medical care, since his wealthy family is considered Baltimore “royalty.” But in a three-page statement obtained at the time of his arrest, he made his feelings about the healthcare industry clear, calling the corporations “parasites.”
“He could’ve gone on to be one of these evil insurance executives. But instead, he stood up as a man of the people.” —Progressive tech journalist Taylor Lorenz on the appeal of Mangione.
Panes told me she has her own frustrations with the healthcare system, starting with the $1,700 bill she says an urgent care clinic recently sent her in the mail. She said that’s what it cost to have one finger X-rayed after she injured it opening a door while working a shift at her retail job. She added that she wouldn’t be able to afford her own healthcare if she wasn’t currently enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state-run Medicaid program.
“I’m pretty much on my own in America,” said Panes, whose mother is a Filipino immigrant. “Murder is wrong, but what happened is because society failed to see and act upon the issue.”
As his supporters wait for his trial to begin this summer, they are typing up a frenzy of support posts on message boards across the internet, selling merchandise on Etsy, and organizing rallies in support of healthcare reform. Others write letters to him in jail, while one young woman on TikTok even professes to have outlined her ring size “just in case.” In fan art and on T-shirts and candles, Mangione is often depicted as a saint. But his fans aren’t just praising him online. More than a hundred turned up to his last pretrial court appearance at a Manhattan courthouse on February 21—including WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Many staked their place in line at dawn to catch a glimpse of him in the courtroom (he turned up wearing a cable-knit sweater, khakis, and handcuffs). Online commentators also swooned over his fresh haircut, performed by a fellow inmate.
But most of the action is online, where Luigi stans can congregate in private. When I tracked down a working link to the private Discord group, I saw that there were nearly 1,100 members from all over the world. Some introduced themselves with they/them pronouns and stated they were not yet 18. Others revealed they were lawyers, HR specialists, and janitors. On the Discord, there is a strict culture of anonymity, accompanied by constant reminders not to identify oneself, but I was able to trace the usernames to a grocery store cashier from Kaysville, Utah, a Columbia University graduate, and even a software engineer at Lockheed Martin. One FreeLuigi moderator is a single mother in Missouri who is trying to raise money for her mother’s healthcare treatment through GoFundMe.
“This journey has not been easy,” she writes on the GoFundMe for her mother. “I’m working full time, going to school full time, raising my daughter, and helping my mom through all this, so it has been difficult for us financially.”
In the two months it’s existed, the group has managed to develop its own culture, rules, and inside jokes. There are nicknames for Mangione: “the adjuster,” “the bird,” and “Lulu.” The color of his movement, they’ve decided, is green, since that’s the color worn by Luigi from the Super Mario Bros. franchise (this is a bunch that loves video games).
“KFA” means Karen Friedman Agnifilo, the defense attorney representing Mangione in New York, who fans also refer to as “the queen.”
“Luigi seems to trust her, and that’s all that matters,” the user “Bianca Amaro” recently wrote in a thread discussing whether KFA is adequately prepared to represent their hero.
Users reply to chatter with custom-made stickers of real-life characters from the Mangione universe. To throw shade or cold water on a theory, fans will respond with an emoji of Thomas Dickey, the defense attorney hired for Mangione’s Pennsylvania case, grimacing, which means “not pleased.” There is also a sticker of Mangione, peering over his shoulder with skepticism, entitled “side-eye Lulu.”
On the r/Degenerates_for_Luigi community on Reddit, I found moderator Marjorie Sutherland, a 24-year-old who told me that she has a younger sister with “health problems that need immediate attention.” When I messaged her, asking why she supported Mangione, she said she knows many say “violence isn’t the answer.”
“But this country is built on violence,” said Sutherland, a waitress. “Sometimes, the end justifies the means.”
She described American elites as hypocritical, the kind of people who condemn “the working class for doing things they do themselves.”
“Not everyone in this community supports him because they think he’s innocent. It’s because they think he did it, and I’m one of those people.”
Mangione isn’t the first jailbird to hijack American hearts. Rewind to 1989, when Lyle and Erik Menendez, two wealthy and attractive Beverly Hills kids who gunned down their parents in the living room of their family mansion. The ensuing trial was a media circus (a Netflix series based on the saga has reignited interest in their story—and in their case—a new hearing for the brothers is scheduled for April 11). In 2013, the Tsarnaev brothers, two Russian immigrants with thousand-yard stares, turned the Boston Marathon into the U.S.’s largest terrorist attack since 9/11. Three died, and more than 500 were injured, but that didn’t stop Rolling Stone from turning Dzhokhar, the younger brother and a Jim Morrison lookalike, into its cover boy with this headline: “The Bomber.”
But, in our politically polarized times, Mangione has become more than a cause célèbre. He’s an avatar for a suite of progressive politics held by increasingly radicalized youths who want to “eat the rich.”
Mangione, who graduated valedictorian of the prestigious Gilman School in Baltimore in 2016, may seem like a strange emblem for Marxism. But Taylor Lorenz, a progressive tech journalist who has publicly called former President Biden a “war criminal,” told me Mangione has captured the American imagination because many view him as a “class traitor.”
“He could’ve gone on to be one of these evil insurance executives,” she said, referencing his “privilege.” “But instead, he stood up as a man of the people.”
She said that the average American drawn to his cause is not “dissimilar” to most Trump voters in that they’re both angry.
“They’re not right or left, they’re antiestablishment. They’re sick of the little man getting screwed.”
Mangione now faces three separate criminal court cases—one in Pennsylvania, one in New York, and one in federal court—that could cumulatively land him behind bars for life or even be sentenced to the death penalty. His New York State case, which is expected to proceed first, includes various murder charges and a terrorism charge.
The only supporter I spoke to who seemed to be genuinely grappling with the alleged actions of Mangione is Zoë Dean, a 26-year-old aspiring actress living in Brooklyn.
“Although I don’t agree with the act of murder itself, it was extremely refreshing for the first time to hear people take notice and be open about their critiques with the healthcare system,” she told me.
She calls Mangione a “victim of the healthcare system,” and considers herself one, too. When she was 19 and a college student, she told me she was walking out of a café when she tripped and sprained her ankle. Dean says she rested for a week but felt she “needed to make money again” and get back to waitressing. Seven years and three surgeries later, she says her ankle is no better. “Some days I wonder if I had just kept resting, if it would’ve healed,” she told me.
Since then, she guesses she’s seen about two dozen specialists, including chiropractors, therapists, and rheumatologists. In July, she says she was finally diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that makes her prone to strains. Hardly a day goes by, she says, without having to call insurance, a pharmacy, or a doctor’s office. When she recently turned 26, it meant she could no longer be covered by her parents’ insurance plan—and she would have to provide it for herself.
“It was a huge fear of mine,” she said. “I was really scared—my mom was really scared for me as well. I was like, ‘How am I possibly going to afford insurance?’ ” (She eventually found a free, state-funded plan.)
Nicole Haedo says she’s also been failed by the healthcare system. Eight years ago, she was working a shift at the local Aldi on Halloween, unloading boxes of milk, when she was overcome with “excruciating pain” in her lower back. For the next four or five months, she said, she was unable to work.
“All I could do was lie on the couch all day and maybe do dishes for like five minutes,” she said.
Her chiropractor, she said, fought with her insurance provider “for months” just to cover an MRI, which ultimately showed inconclusive results. She now believes the pain stems from arthritis, which she said she keeps in check with an “anti-inflammatory diet.”
“It’s still something that affects my everyday life, but after eight years, it’s kind of just. . . ” she trailed off for a moment. “Normal.”
Her back injury, and her subsequent fights with insurance, she said, is one reason why the alleged vigilantism of Mangione “really resonated” with her. To her, and other supporters, the accused murderer is a beacon of hope—and not just because she finds him “hot.”
“He’s not hard to look at,” she said. “But he could be five-foot-two, unattractive, and his message would still stand.”
“What’s that message?” I asked.
“Hope.”
Luigi Mangione is not the first alleged bourgeois terrorist to be feted as a rock star. More than 50 years ago, Ulrike Meinhof threw her life away for the thrill of political violence. This week on Breaking History, Eli Lake unpacks the Luigi Mangione moment and the unsettling phenomenon of turning killers into icons.
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