MALEVOLENT
Killer of judge’s son was ‘men’s rights’ attorney obsessed with her
▪ ‘Ladies’ night’
▪ 'Women’s studies’
▪ Guy-only war draft
Disguised in a FedEx uniform, lawyer Roy Den Hollander (above) went to the home of New Jersey federal Judge Esther Salas Sunday night, shooting dead her son, Daniel Anderl, and critically injuring her attorney husband, Mark Anderl. Hollander called himself a crusader for men’s rights, and his latest case — pending before Salas — was against a men-only military draft. Police say Hollander later committed suicide.
The man who shot and killed a federal New Jersey judge’s son and critically wounded her husband was an “anti-feminist” lawyer who penned racist, misogynistic screeds rife with sexual fantasies about the jurist, it was revealed on Monday.
Roy Den Hollander — whose Web site calls for clients to “help battle the infringement of Men’s Rights by the Feminists” — was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the Catskills town of Rockland on Monday, law-enforcement insiders said.
By his side, sources said, were a gun investigators believe was used in the attack and a package or envelope addressed to Judge Esther Salas, who was overseeing a pending 2015 case in which Hollander argued that the military’s menonly draft was discriminatory.
In an online manifesto first reported by NBC News, Hollander, 72, spelled out a bizarre lust-hate obsession with Salas.
“The case began over the July 4th weekend of 2015, and was assigned to this hot Latina Judge in the US District Court for New Jersey whom Obama had appointed,” he wrote, referring to the draft case.
“At first, I wanted to ask the Judge out, but thought she might hold me in contempt.”
But he alternately bashed Salas as “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama” and belittled the résumé that landed her a federal judgeship while he toiled on the fringes of the law.
“Salas worked as an associate in an ambulance chasing firm doing basic criminal work. Left that firm to work as a public defender in the New Jersey District Court representing lumpen proletariat ne’erdo-wells,” he wrote.
“Joined 135 politically correct organizations trying to convince America that whites, especially white males, were barbarians, and all those of a darker skin complexion were victims.”
Hate apparently won out and, disguised in a FedEx delivery driver’s uniform, Hollander came to the door of Salas’ home on a tranquil North Brunswick cul de sac at around 5 p.m. Sunday, gun in hand, sources said.
When the door opened, the attorney immediately opened fire, hitting both Salas’ husband, Mark Anderl, 63, and their son, Daniel, 20, according to authorities.
It was unclear how Hollander had obtained the uniform.
“At that time, I didn’t realize it was a gunshot,” neighbor Jenny Wang said on Monday. “It sounded like fireworks: pop, pop, pop. And [then] it stopped.”
Anderl, a prominent criminaldefense attorney in his own right, was hospitalized in critical but stable condition.
But Daniel Anderl was killed on the spot by what North Brunswick Mayor Francis Womack told ABC News was a “shot through the heart.”
Salas, believed to be in the basement at the time, was unharmed.
The elder Anderl made his way outside, evidently calling for help from his driveway, a neighbor said.
“At that moment, my husband was about to leave the house . . . and he saw the husband sitting on his driveway, making a phone call,” Wang said, noting that her husband didn’t notice anything amiss from the distance — and didn’t think anything of a FedEx truck parked nearby.
But as emergency vehicles arrived, it became clear to all that tragedy had struck.
“All of a sudden, I collapsed. I just couldn’t believe it,” neighbor Marion Constanza, 76, said of learning of Daniel’s death. “I went out into the street to tell the neighbors, and I just sat on the sidewalk. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Salas had said in a 2018 interview that her son aspired to follow in his parents’ footsteps into law.
“I don’t want to dissuade him, but I was pulling for a doctor,” Salas told New Jersey Monthly of Daniel, then a high-school senior. “He’s been arguing with us since he could talk — practicing his advocacy skills.”
He had big shoes to fill. Salas, an Obama appointee, is the first Hispanic woman to serve as a federal magistrate judge in New Jersey and has presided over several prominent cases.
They included a class-action lawsuit from Deutsche Bank investors who claim the company failed to monitor “high-risk” customers, including the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The case had been assigned to Salas just four days before the assault.
While Salas and her family had everything to live for, Hollander, apparently, had little left to lose.
In a January e-mail to reporters titled “How Not to Treat a Dying Man,” Hollander wrote that he was “painfully dying from metastasized cancer” and suing NewYorkPresbyterian Hospital, its lawyers and his doctor under a federal antiracketeering law.
Acknowledging that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is most commonly used to take down organized crime, Hollander vaguely likened the defendants to gangsters while detailing his treatments.
“The hospital exploits the image of a caring family, when in reality, it acts like a vindictive Mafia family,” he wrote. The doctor “promised that the resulting intense pain would go away in 2 to 3 weeks—it lasted for 10 weeks.”
Investigators were exploring whether he decided to take out his rivals before the cancer claimed him, according to The New York Times, which said detectives were also probing any ties to the killing of another men’s-rights lawyer, Marc Angelucci, in California by a gunman wearing a FedEx uniform.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the suit Hollander described was ever filed, or what type of cancer afflicted him.
Either way, he vowed to go down fighting.
“They want to fight, fine,” he wrote. “I’ll fight them to my last dollar, my last breath and if there is anything after death — for eternity.”
Now is the time for all good men to fight for their rights before they have no rights left.
— On the Web site of Roy Den Hollander