A spiral of rage
Joe Morelli made threats against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene while in the grip of a mental health crisis, said Ruby Cramer in The Washington Post. Then came the consequences.
THE NIGHT HE made the threat, Joe Morelli was exactly where he is now two years later, on his couch.
The couch is blue and beginning to sag. It sits in the living room of his small apartment in Endicott, New York. Since Morelli, 52, also sleeps on the couch every night, he keeps a piece of plywood beneath the cushions, because the softness of the cushions makes his back hurt. At the foot of the couch, he stores a few stacks of old family photos, including several of his two children, and he looks at the photos sometimes when he is feeling lonely, which is not all the time, but does happen, because he lives alone and has not spoken to his children in more than 20 years.
When he wakes up on the couch each morning, he walks to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and then returns to the couch, where most everything else that he needs is on the table in front of him. His pills, which he uses to treat his bipolar disorder. His gum, his glasses, his phone, and his remote, which he picks up now to turn on the television and watch the news, which is what he had been doing the night he got so angry that he made the threat.
He opens YouTube on his smart TV. His usual channels appear on the screen, most of them left-leaning talk shows. Morelli’s life since the threat has come with conditions, mandated by a judge, including mental health treatment with a therapist who has asked him to write a list of “behaviors to decrease.” One is watching too much political news. Another is “Acting without taking a breath.”
“Imagine that you are a small flake of stone,” the therapist has told him. “Imagine that you have been tossed out onto the lake and are now gently, slowly, floating through the calm, clear blue water...”
He scrolls past a clip about a shooting in Kansas City. It began, he learns, when one group of strangers noticed another group of strangers looking at them funny and took it as a threat.
“How ridiculous,” Morelli says. He goes to the kitchen for another cup of coffee, sits back down and scrolls through more clips. He clicks on one about demonstrators with Nazi flags in downtown Nashville. He clicks on another.
In all the clips he watches, threatening behavior appears on the screen. There are threats every day now and no way to count them all. People make threats online, under screen names, anonymously, publicly. They threaten friends, acquaintances, strangers, and they especially threaten the politicians they see on TV. At the federal, state, and local level, threats against elected officials have risen to record highs. In 2023, there were 8,008 recorded cases of threats against members of Congress, according to the U.S. Capitol Police. In 2022, there were 7,501 cases, and Morelli’s threat was one of them.
When he made his threat, it was by phone, and Morelli spelled his name for whoever might be listening on the other end. “J-O-E. M-O-R-E-L-L-I,” he’d said from the couch. The threat had led to an FBI investigation, an arrest, a courtroom, a federal prison, and now back to the apartment in Endicott, N.Y., where Morelli has promised himself that he will not act without first taking a breath. He takes another sip of coffee. He pictures himself as the stone in the lake. He holds the remote and queues up the next video.
THAT’S HOW THE threat had begun two years before—in between video clips. It was March 3, 2022, 8:30 p.m., when a campaign ad came on the screen showing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) lying on her stomach, her finger wrapped around the trigger of a .50-caliber sniper rifle. “I’m going to blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda,” she said into the camera. She peered into the viewfinder at a Toyota Prius in an open field. On the side of the Prius, in large type, was the word “socialism.” Greene fired, and the gun kicked back against her body. In the next shot, the car exploded, disappearing into orange flames.
When the ad was over, Morelli had an idea. He was, at the time, in a mixed state of mania and depression. The depression meant that he had been shrinking away from the world, ignoring texts even from his sister, who lived nearby and knew all about bipolar disorder, because she was a psychiatric nurse who treated bipolar patients all the time. The mania meant that, alone in the apartment, Morelli felt his mind racing. He walked to his computer and Googled the phone number for Greene’s office on Capitol Hill.
He dialed the number and, when no one answered, waited to leave a voicemail. It was 8:32 p.m. “Hi,” he said, “My name is Joseph Morelli.” He spelled his name. He gave his phone number. He said, “Um, you should call the FBI field office in Binghamton, New York, and ask them how I deal with people who push hatred, influence hatred, and talk about how cool it is to own guns. Tell them my name, tell them I called you, and tell them that I told you that I don’t like you—and I would watch yourself with your f---ing hatred.”
Five minutes later, at 8:37 p.m., he dialed the number a second time. “Hey, Joe Morelli again. You spread hatred, and you’re gonna pay for it, b----.” Same calm tone. He kept talking. “Man, you better hope that I keep taking my medication.”
He laughed. “Keep blowing up Priuses.” A few things Morelli hated about that ad: He had especially disliked Greene ever since he saw a video of her heckling a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, outside the U.S. Capitol in 2019. He also hated guns, like the one she had pointed at the word “socialism.” Then there were times when Morelli hated himself, and his
connection to that word, because he relied on disability benefits, which he considered to be a form of socialism, one he believed in, but one that had been a source of some shame, too.
Another thing Morelli knew about himself: “I can be vicious with my words.” But nothing he’d ever said or done had amounted to a felony until that night on the couch, when, at 11:11 p.m., he picked up the phone and called Greene again.
“I really think I’m gonna have to cause you harm—physical harm,” he said. “If you keep up with this hatred, and people get hurt, I’m gonna hurt you.”
“You promote violence,” he said, calling again at 11:18 p.m. “I’m gonna have to show you, to your face, right up front, what violence truly is.” He told Greene that even if he was in prison, he could pay two guys in Buffalo, where he had grown up, to “take a baseball bat and crack your skull.” It would cost him $500, he said. He hung up.
11:24 p.m. He picked up the phone again. “You’re just causing hatred. You’re gonna cause people to get hurt, so I’m gonna have to hurt you physically. And again, Joe Morelli. M-O-R-E-L-L-I.”
12:01 a.m. Another call. “Hey, Joe Morelli again.”
1:10 a.m. Another call. “Yeah, I—I’ve just come to a decision. I can’t have you out there inciting violence. You know, I’m gonna have to stop you, just as simple as that.” Then it was over. Seven voice mails in all. He fell asleep on the couch.
WHEN MORELLI WOKE up the next morning, he tried to remember what he had done. He knew he had given his name, his phone number, the name of his town and had encouraged Greene to call the FBI. He thought that if FBI agents were going to show up, it would be right away, but no one came. “Oh, well,” he thought. If he hadn’t been manic, he might have been more worried, though it wasn’t until later that he realized just how manic he had been.
Eight days earlier, he had received electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, to help pull him out of his depression. In the hospital, before the anesthesia took effect, he began grasping for his neck. He would remember later feeling like he couldn’t breathe. He woke up in the recovery room afraid. He told his sister he didn’t want to do ECT anymore.
Now it was March 4, 2022, and one of Greene’s aides, Travis Loudermilk, heard the voicemails and forwarded them to the U.S. Capitol Police, as he did with all the threats his boss received. The Capitol Police ran a search on the phone number associated with the calls, and what came back was a description for Joseph F. Morelli, White, bald, green eyes, 69 inches tall. On March 15, a special agent at the FBI’s Albany division requested an arrest warrant from a judge, and the next morning, at dawn, Morelli woke up to a bang outside his door.
He thought his oven had exploded. He opened the front door and saw FBI agents and at least one armed law enforcement officer. He looked down and saw a red laser point on his chest. Outside the front of the house, two police cars blocked off each side of the street. He was cuffed, put in a car, and taken to an interrogation room, where a video camera began to record the conversation.
Across the table, two FBI agents told him he was being charged with making threats against Marjorie Taylor Greene. Morelli laughed. “What did I say?”
“Well, it’s funny you should ask,” the first agent said. They began to play the voicemails.
SOON AFTER THE interrogation, Morelli met his lawyer, a public defender named Gabrielle DiBella. When they listened to the voicemails together, Morelli told her he was surprised by how cold and level his voice sounded. He could understand, he said, how law enforcement, and probably also Greene herself, might hear that voice and imagine a man who was serious about acting on his threat.
He spent a few nights in jail and was released on house arrest. As the months went by, and periods of depression came and went, he thought about what a trial would be like. In January 2023, he met with DiBella to make a final decision. She told him the jurors might lean politically conservative, and that, if he testified, a prosecutor would try to provoke him into losing his temper. He decided to change his plea, and on Feb. 1, in a courtroom in Syracuse, he told a judge that he was guilty.
Six months later, Morelli received his sentence: three months in prison. Seven days after that, at a town hall in August, Greene told a crowd about “a man up in New York” who had threatened her. “He pled guilty. He didn’t even deny it,” she said, adding, “He’s gonna be met with a big wall of bullets if he comes to my house.”
On Oct. 2, Morelli reported to a federal prison in New Jersey. He was in prison for 81 days. On one of those days, an inmate pulled him aside and told him there was someone he should meet. It was another prisoner, Patrick Stedman, who had just arrived and was serving four years because he was part of the insurrection on Jan. 6. He had been convicted of obstructing an official proceeding at the U.S. Capitol, where, according to the Department of Justice, he roamed the halls for more than 40 minutes, entered Nancy Pelosi’s office, took photos of himself on the Speaker’s Balcony, shouted, “Let us in!” outside the House chamber, and later posted on social media, “The storm is here.”
“You should talk to him,” the inmate told Morelli. “Two sides of the same coin.”
Morelli said OK, but as they introduced themselves to one another, here was the embodiment of all the people he’d seen on TV who had made him angry. But Stedman wasn’t on the TV. He was standing across from him, face-to-face. Morelli expected him to sound the way he imagined all Trump supporters—as a radical, “hating everybody.”
And yet, the more they talked, the more Morelli liked him. He didn’t seem hateful at all. He seemed smart. He had a business and a young family at home. He said he planned to spend his time in prison reading and detoxing from the news, and Morelli thought that was a good impulse, to get away from the anger that had surrounded them both.
“I got caught up in the moment,” Morelli remembers Stedman saying, and he understood how that felt.
A version of this story was originally published in The Washington Post. Used with permission.