Roy Den Hollander, a self-described anti-feminist lawyer who has been named as the chief suspect in the killing of a federal judge’s son, spent most of his life railing against women and left a massive online paper trail detailing his racist and misogynistic worldviews.
Den Hollander, who was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in the New York town of Rockland on Monday, also claimed to have worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.
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On Sunday afternoon, the 72-year-old, dressed as a FedEx delivery man, went to the home of Judge Esther Salas in North Brunswick where he shot and killed her son Daniel Anderl and shot and critically injured her husband, Mark Anderl. Salas, who is believed to have been in the basement at the time, escaped injury.
The FBI has not commented on a possible motive for the shooting, but in more than 2,000 pages of writings, Den Hollander railed against Salas, who presided over a 2015 lawsuit in which he claimed that women should not be excluded from the military draft.
Even though Salas allowed the lawsuit to proceed, Den Hollander said she was attempting to delay the proceedings and “trying to keep this case in her court until a weatherman showed her which way the legal winds were blowing.”
“Salas clearly wanted to further her career by moving up the judicial ladder to the Court of Appeals or maybe even the Supreme Court,” he writes. “After all, there was now a Latina seat in the form of Sotomayor on the Court.”
Den Hollander’s writings also contain several chilling warnings about the events that happened on Sunday.
“It makes no sense for men to disarm in the face of an evil that wants to exercise totalitarian power over them. They have a right to revolt against that tyranny, to take it down. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the tyranny of George III or the Feminists,” he wrote on page 1,880 of his screed.
Who was Roy Den Hollander?
Den Hollander graduated from Columbia University Business School with an MBA in 1997, according to a school spokesman. Prior to that, he graduated from George Washington University Law School in 1985.
A resume posted on his website says he worked for the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the mid-1980s, after spending two years as a producer and editor at WABC TV News in New York City.
From 1986 until 1989, Den Hollander worked at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York. During the 1990s, his resume says he was an attorney in New York, Russia, and Ecuador, where he “counseled companies, individuals, and nonprofit organizations on legal and business issues, including international financing and marketing.”
In 1999, he moved to Russia, where he worked with Kroll Associates, managing and upgrading the firm’s “delivery of intelligence and security in the former Soviet Union.”
He also says he married a Russian woman, but things turned sour quickly because, Den Hollander claimed, she was only using him to get a green card and was working as a “mafia prostitute.”
He returned to New York in 2000, and has since worked as an attorney and business consultant, “litigating civil cases, including men’s rights, immigration fraud, insurance subrogation, and RICO.”
Prior to Sunday’s deadly attack, Den Hollander had attracted notoriety for his various lawsuits, including a case alleging night clubs in New York City discriminate against men by offering “ladies nights” discounts. His outlandish cases resulted in appearances on MSNBC, Fox News, and The Colbert Report.
Den Hollander wrote that he had been treated recently for cancer and wanted to use the rest of his time to wrap up his affairs.
“The only problem with a life lived too long under Feminazi rule is that a man ends up with so many enemies he can’t even the score with all of them. But law school and the media taught me how to prioritize,” he wrote.
Racist and misogynistic screeds
In 2018, Den Hollander posted a collection of writings online, totaling more than 2,000 pages, which outlined his racist and misogynistic worldview.
Along with his attacks on Salas, Den Hollander also went after President Barack Obama, saying the former president had an “obsession to turn America into a banana republic.”
He claimed Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was “angry that nobody had invited her to her high school senior prom” while he described Hillary Clinton’s supporters as “teary-eyed, sad-sack, PC loonies watching their power of intolerance go down the drain.”
Describing female judges, Den Hollander said they didn’t bother him “as long as they were middle age or older black ladies. They seemed to have an understanding of how life worked and were not about to be conned by any foot-dragging lawyer.”
Writing about Salas, the first Hispanic woman appointed a federal judge in New Jersey, he claimed she traded on her Hispanic heritage to get ahead.
“Latinas, however, were usually a problem—driven by an inferiority complex,” Den Hollander wrote.
Salas was raised primarily by her Cuban mother, after her Mexican father left when Salas was very young.
When she was 10, Salas’ home burned down and her family lost everything. Throughout her childhood, Salas acted as her mother’s translator and advocate. She eventually earned her bachelor’s and law degrees from Rutgers University, became a public defender, and was elected president of New Jersey’s Hispanic Bar Association.
But Den Hollander didn’t see Salas’ rise from a disadvantaged background to the federal bench as something to be celebrated.
“It was the usual effort to blame a man and turn someone into super girl — daddy abandoned us, we were indigent, which means they lived off of the taxpayer, but we overcame all odds,” he wrote.
Salas’ “one accomplishment,” Den Hollander, wrote, was being a high-school cheerleader.
Trump campaign volunteer
In his writing, Den Hollander described himself as a volunteer for the Trump presidential election campaign.
He says that Trump was “telling the truth about illegal aliens in his bid for the Presidency.”
In one passage Den Hollander describes “leaving the law library in the early afternoon for Trump Tower, 12 blocks up Fifth Avenue, to make telephone calls during the primaries and the general election.” He describes almost all the other volunteers “were aging baby boomers like me. Once in a while, some hot young model chick would show up to make calls. They never sat next to me.”
The Trump campaign has yet to confirm that Den Hollander was involved in the campaign.
Den Hollander said his efforts to get Trump elected didn’t stop at making phone calls, however.
Drawing on his time in Russia, and his contacts there, Den Hollander said he came up with “what I thought was a great idea to help Trump.”
Following the revelation that Hillary Clinton’s email server had been hacked, he claimed, he called a contact in Russia’s secret service. “I contacted a GRU buddy requesting a few copies of the bleached or classified emails if they had them. Telling him, I’d make them public through my media contacts.”
The contact told him the GRU didn’t have the emails, Den Hollander claimed, adding that this was a sign that “they did not hack the server or they wanted Hillary to win.”
Then, just before the election, in August 2016, Den Hollander filed a lawsuit against seven prominent female journalists, alleging that they were part of a racketeering scheme against Trump.
“The PC-Feminists had taken over much of the news media since I had worked in TV News in the 1970s and 1980s as a writer and political producer,” he writes. He cited 30 pages of transcripts of the reporters being unfair to Trump as “evidence” of this crime.
Den Hollander says he was “elated” by Trump’s victory and attended the Trump inauguration in January 2017 wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat.
“I did volunteer work for Trump’s campaign because I hate PC-Feminism more than I hate America,” he writes. “If I had hated America more, I would have worked for Hillary’s campaign.”
Cover: Crime scene tape surrounds the home of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas, Monday, July 20, 2020, in North Brunswick, N.J. A gunman posing as a delivery person shot and killed Salas’ 20-year-old son and wounded her husband Sunday evening at their New Jersey home before fleeing, according to judiciary officials. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
