u/Roguestate00

Diddy, Weinstein, Alexander Brothers, Keith Raniere, Martin Shkreli, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Frank Carone (Eric Adams’ right-hand man) and now a Cornell rapist.

According to the article, the Agnifilo Intrater firm will resort to their usual strategy and claim the victim gave consent…to being gang-raped by 7 men.

Yeah all defendants deserve representation but it’s fucking weird if your law firm is picking the worst of the worst all the time. It’s the rule now rather than the exception. There are nicer client options but money and fame seems to be Marc‘s key driver. I am so disgusted by this law firm.

edited to include the Alexander brothers. Sorry, having a hard time to keep track of the rapists. Just so many of them.

interview with Marc & Karen about some of their clients

After a month hiatus, John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight with a look at United Healthcare, the largest insurance company in the US, which served over 50 million people last year. The company, part of the widely reviled private, for-profit health insurance industry in the US, was again under the microscope ahead of the sentencing of Luigi Mangione, who in August pleaded guilty to killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s in on 4 December 2024.

The shooting, outside a conference of health insurance executives in Manhattan, was “notably not met with universal sympathy”, Oliver recalled. “But it’s not just that Luigi was handsome. One reason many found it hard to completely condemn the murder is that so many Americans are furious with UnitedHealthcare.” Oliver cited a poll conducted shortly after the shooting, in which 69% of respondents in some part blamed denials for healthcare coverage by insurance companies for the killing.

But as coverage of the sentencing threatened to overshadow a more critical look at the company, Oliver turned to UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, “in the same way that Alphabet owns Google or Benson Boone owns backflipping”.

UnitedHealth Group brought in $447bn in 2025, making it the third-highest company by revenue in the US behind Walmart and Amazon and ahead of Apple. “It’s almost unimaginably massive,” the host explained, with subsidiaries in almost every aspect of the healthcare system.

“The very fact that one company controls so much of America’s healthcare is what makes it so infuriating when you see just how bad people’s experiences with it can be,” he added, noting that “telling UnitedHealthcare to go fuck itself has become an entire genre of internet video”, particularly on TikTok.

Oliver dug into the insurance company’s well-earned reputation for denying claims, such as in the case of one family whose disabled daughter Emmy required a chair for bathing; according her mother, an insurance rep advised her to “wipe down” the child rather than seek coverage for the chair. After numerous hours of back-and-forth, Emmy’s chair was eventually covered. But when she outgrew it and required a new one for $1800, her parents opted to skip the hassle of dealing with United again and paid for it with donations coordinated by his employer.

“And at that point, having insurance sure looks an awful lot like not having it,” Oliver noted. “Because if you are paying premiums but still having to take up a collection for medical equipment then what exactly is your insurance for? They’re just sending you mail you don’t want to open and forcing you to have phone calls that make you angry.”

“And far too often, United’s denials can seem to be completely at odds with medical advice patients are getting,” he continued, pointing to the case of one young woman with cervical cancer, whose proton therapy treatment, advised by six individual oncologists, was denied by United because it surpassed the “standard of care”.

“Now, in the end, her parents paid $95,000 out of pocket to cover the treatment, which in happy news did actually work, but having access to wealthy parents just cannot be the system to get badly-needed healthcare – even if it is apparently the system that lets you be in charge of HBO,” Oliver joked next to a photo of David Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and new head of Paramount Skydance.

“Yeah, my soon-to-be business daddy has a literal business daddy. And to be very clear: I deeply respect that and I would never make fun of you for it, unlike that pesky Stephen Colbert,” he added, referring to Paramount’s controversial cancellation of Colbert’s CBS show last year, as the company sought Trump administration approval for a merger with Warner Bros Discovery.

Just as concerning and infuriating as United’s care denials, Oliver argued, is its scope. The company has pursued “vertical integration” through acquiring more parts of the healthcare industry, with about 2,700 subsidiaries, including primary care clinics, surgical centers, urgent care centers, home health agencies, hospice care and pharmacies. The company even has its own bank, Optum Bank, which has over $20.8bn in assets, as part of its “massive data-sharing panopticon”.

“Owning all these companies is hugely helpful to United’s bottom line, and in ways that you might not expect,” said Oliver. Though United’s insurance arm is required by the Affordable Care Act to spend 80% to 85% of the premiums they collect, it’s often spending money to entities that are part of UnitedHealth Group, which can be on both sides of billions of dollars of transactions.

Whatever corner of the business you look into, Oliver argued, “you can find something appalling”. As a final example of many, Oliver looked at OptumRx, UnitedHealth Group’s pharmacy benefit manager for its insurance arm, which has a history of abruptly switching what drugs it will cover. He referred to the case of Cole Schmidtknecht, a 22-year-old in Wisconsin with severe asthma who showed up at a pharmacy for his preventative Advair inhaler, which usually cost $66, only to be told it now cost over $539 due to OptumRx suddenly dropping its coverage.

“That is a nasty surprise,” said Oliver. “There are things that you expect to cost $500, like a Nintendo Switch or tickets to see Ed Sheeran two weeks ago. They’re cheaper now, apparently! No idea why … But being able to breathe is not one of them.”

“Cole had to make a decision that night, of paying that over-price for his medicine or other bills,” Schmidtknecht’s father told local news, “and he walked out without it.” Shortly thereafter, he experienced a severe asthma attack that killed him.

“That is an absolute tragedy and it was completely preventable,” Oliver fumed. “This is the richest country in the history of the world, and yet for some reason our current health system still forces people to walk away from medicine that will literally keep them alive because they can’t fucking afford it.”

As for what could be done, Oliver argued, as he has many times before, for a single-payer healthcare system, though getting anywhere close to it “feels a ridiculously long way off”.

But “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that at the very least, UnitedHealth Group should not be allowed to exist in the form that it currently does,” he continued, pointing to a bipartisan bill, co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley, that would separate the payer and provider roles in healthcare.

“While that is clearly not going nearly far enough, it is at least a start,” he concluded. As for United, “what is clear is that everybody but them wants it to work very differently. Because right now the way companies like United exist, they are at best pointless time-wasting middlemen, and at worst algorithmically driven, ruthless arbiters of who lives and who dies.”

Disappointingly, Luigi's former camp mentee hasn't shared the defense's letter of support instructions, but I am resourceful and have found some good examples online.

• The letter should be addressed to the Judge but mailed to the defendant’s attorney. The defendant’s attorney will make sure the letters get filed in an appropriate manner.
• Who are you? Introduce yourself to the Court. Explain how you know (and how long you have known) the defendant.
• Make it personal when describing the defendant’s characteristics. Can you think of examples of good deeds done by the defendant (hard work, dedication to family/church/community, generosity, etc. 
• Only talk about what you know. Limit yourself to things for which you have personal knowledge.
• Be truthful.  Make it clear that you know why the person is in court.  If you are writing a letter of support for sentencing, guilt has already been decided, in many instances because the defendant pled guilty. There is usually no need to discuss in any detail the facts of the offense.
• Never attack the victims or law enforcement. This just doesn’t help.
• Never allow the defendant to write the letter for you. The court may contact you to verify that you wrote the words in your letter.
• If appropriate, detail how you will be part of the defendant’s support system following sentencing.
• Be concise.  Be Sincere.  One page is usually sufficient. 
• If you have questions about what to include or not include, contact the attorney handling the case.
• Always sign and date the letter, and provide contact information.

I didn’t think a deal would be offered because of the politics around the case. But I changed my mind when the state prosecutors wrote that letter to Carro saying they will interfere if there is a deal they don’t like. I am sure they have connections and trusted sources (spy buddies) among the Feds who gave them a heads up. But surprised it’s an open plea, so like a 7 on the scale for me.

I believe that once it became certain that Carro refuses to let the Feds go first, Luigi’s team ran him through all possible outcomes. I think his lawyers would have been ok to go through trial and appeal but my impression is he doesn’t want to hand Joel or the Feds all of the control and rather puts his life into Garnett’s hands. That’s why I think he was driving that decisiony.

At the end of June, ABC News reported that anonymous “sources familiar with the matter” told them plea discussions with Luigi Mangione had taken place before a recent federal court hearing, but no agreement had been reached. The defense team responded by attacking the leak, arguing that it was an effort to manipulate public opinion and deny him a fair trial. 

I tend to agree with the defense here that the story is serving only to suggest that Luigi is guilty and looking for a way out, and the vague information reported doesn’t support that conclusion. 

Without specificity, we don’t know if these “discussions” were a detailed back-and-forth negotiation or the prosecution conveying a plea offer and receiving “See you at trial” as a response. And in any event, plea offers that don’t culminate in a deal are routine and ordinary parts of our criminal processthat mean nothing more than that the prosecution would like to avoid the necessity of a trial, and the accused intends exercise his right to make the State prove it.

But then this week, a new document, originally filed under seal in New York state court, was unsealed and publicly released. The document is, as I will explain, peculiar; it is a letter from lead state prosecutor Joel Seidemann to state Judge Gregory Carro, expressing concern that a possible federal plea could interfere with the state prosecution:

This letter is peculiar because there is no obvious purpose for it. Judge Carro has no authority over what happens in federal court, so whether the state prosecutors intend to lobby the federal prosecutors or district court over the possibility of a federal plea is immaterial to anything happening in state court. 

FULL ARTICLE LINKED.

After insisting upon an August trial date to a federal judge, Frank Carone, a former aide to ex-Mayor Eric Adams, pushed his trial date back to next May, sparking some annoyance from a federal judge Monday.

Carone, who was arrested by the FBI on June 24, is charged with allegedly accepting $120,000 in bribes from Long Island City hotel Microtel to push top city officials to give Microtel a roughly $7 million city contract to house immigrants during the height of the 2022 migrant crisis after City Hall repeatedly turned the hotel down, citing its small size and location. He was indicted alongside his brother, attorney Anthony Carone, who’s charged with helping funnel those alleged bribe payments through a firm he worked for, and Microtel owner and employee, Yan Po Zhu and Crystal Chen. 

Frank and Anthony Carone’s attorneys pushed for an Aug. 24 trial date at their July 1 hearing, saying the brothers did nothing wrong and didn’t want to delay the trial.

U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto expressed skepticism at that early July appearance, saying she didn’t believe Aug. 24 was a “real date,” but issued the scheduling order as Carone’s attorneys said they had every intention of going to trial then. 

During Monday’s hearing, she referenced that skepticism and let the defense team know her court’s calendar was packed, so last-minute changes and document filings would not necessarily be welcome.

“As I — we all — knew, this trial that we had scheduled is not going to go forward,” Matsumoto said. If the earliest the defense teams wanted to start trial was March, the judge went on to note, then the earliest her schedule could accommodate would be a May 3, 2027, start date.

“May 3 is certainly much further out than Carone wanted,” Frank Carone’s attorney, Andrew Goldstein, told the judge, “but given the circumstances and court schedule,” the defense team consented.

The defense team says the reason they were pushing the trial back is because Chen and Zhu’s attorneys wanted more time to prepare. The Carones and their attorneys have been aware of this investigation into their conduct for years, so they were ready to start trial immediately, they claimed, but that wasn’t the case for the Microtel duo.  

Setting court dates proved difficult, as the four defendants have amassed a team of roughly a dozen busy defense attorneys. 

Carone’s also brought on to his defense team Marc Agnifilo — the attorney representing Luigi Mangione, accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; and who previously represented the Alexander brothers, high-profile realtors recently found guilty of federal sex trafficking.

Goldstein said that Frank Carone hiring a large contingent of attorneys should speak to his innocence.

“As you can see, Frank Carone has assembled a formidable legal team, and that is because all of us on this team believe in his innocence,” Goldstein told reporters outside the courtroom. “The evidence – which we have reviewed – is going to show what we all know to be true … Frank Carone followed the law and was a dedicated public servant [when in office].”

“We will soon be making motions [filings] exposing weaknesses in the government’s case,” he added.

Frank Carone’s attorneys have consistently maintained there’s “no evidence” of him partaking in any misconduct. Another of his defense attorneys, Arthur Aidala, said the indictment was “based on assumptions” and he expected to “rip it to shreds,” after Carone’s June arraignment.

“Our system of justice is supposed to be better than this,” Aidada said in June. “If you really look at the facts that are alleged here, there is not one fact that indicates Frank Carone did anything specific to influence anything in our government.”

The indictment contains text messages between Frank Carone and Microtel staff Chen and Zhu, and messages between Carone and City Hall officials that allegedly show Carone pressuring City Hall officials to grant Microtel a contract, even after Carone was told Microtel’s bid for a contract had been “taken this as far as it could go.” 

After Carone allegedly continued pushing for the contract, messages between the city officials say Microtel “had come directly from the top” and they should “assume it is approved.” 

Goldstein maintained in court Monday that government prosecutors hadn’t provided exact dates and times of Carone’s misconduct and that he did not believe the case should be designated as “complex,” a marking that typically comes with high-profile trials and creates greater leniency in granting delays for preparation. Prosecutors have said the indictment contains that information but they would discuss this with the defense later this week. The judge said she would reserve her decision on whether the case was that complex.

All four defendants remain out on bond. They are due back in court on Oct. 16 for a status conference, though it appeared likely that date would get pushed due to the defense teams’ packed schedules.

Joe Tacopina is a famous defense attorney who represented Trump and A$AP Rocky in their criminal cases. I believe he is also currently representing Wendy Williams. He is like a smarter Mark Geragos. A little bit less thirsty too.

A recent study published in Public Opinion Quarterly suggests that highly publicized, morally framed acts of violence can influence public attitudes toward political aggression. The research provides evidence that the arrest of Luigi Mangione, following the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare chief executive officer, led to an increase in support for partisan violence among Democrats.

The study was conducted by Chiara Vargiu, an assistant professor of political communication at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Alessandro Nai, an associate professor of political communication and journalism at the University of Amsterdam. Vargiu and Nai also co-authored the 2026 book The Psychology of Attack Politics: Perceptions, Evaluations and Effects. Their research regularly examines political hostility and how it shifts public opinion.

“In our research, my co-author and I have looked at different forms of aggressive political rhetoric, focusing, among other things, on when and why citizens come to see it as acceptable,” Vargiu said. “But over the past few years, we have witnessed not just aggressive rhetoric, but numerous episodes of actual political violence.”

“In a polarized context, such as the US, where political opponents are increasingly seen as enemies or threats (partly due to that same aggressive rhetoric we have been studying), this raises the question of how people respond to such violence,” Vargiu explained. The political landscape in the United States features rising polarization and occasional acts of politically motivated aggression. In this environment, scholars want to understand what drives ordinary citizens to justify violence against political opponents.

“There are longstanding theories in social psychology suggesting that violence on one’s in-group generates hostile reactions toward the group seen as responsible, sometimes to the point of supporting aggression in return,” Vargiu noted. “But the actual research on this is a bit mixed, with recent studies not finding evidence for such a retaliatory response in the context of inter-partisan violence.”

Previous research into attacks on political figures showed that such events do not usually increase the public appetite for violence among the victims’ supporters. Supporters of victimized politicians tend to pull back from endorsing aggressive tactics. The December 2024 assassination of UnitedHealthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson presented a completely different scenario. The perpetrator, Luigi Mangione, targeted a corporate executive rather than a politician or elected official.

The health insurance industry is highly unpopular among many Americans, who view it as a broken and exploitative system. A public narrative quickly emerged online that framed the shooter as a vigilante fighting back against institutional corruption. The researchers had a unique opportunity to test how this specific narrative impacted partisan animosity. “We happened to be in the field with a survey when the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassination occurred, which allowed us to explore this question directly,” Vargiu said.

To explore this dynamic, the scientists used data from a two-wave survey of American adults. The first wave took place between September 4 and November 5, 2024, and included 3,100 respondents. A second wave followed from November 6 to December 17, 2024, retaining 2,479 of those participants. The researchers worked with the polling company YouGov to recruit a sample that reflected the demographic makeup of the country based on factors like age, gender, and education.

The survey utilized a rolling cross-section design. This means that small, random subsets of participants were invited to take the survey every other day over a span of time. This method is highly beneficial for studying unexpected events. It avoids the problem of people choosing to take a survey simply because a major news story broke. It allows researchers to compare the attitudes of people who took the survey just before a specific event to those who took it immediately afterward.

The assassination occurred on December 4, right in the middle of the second wave of data collection. A few days later, on December 9, authorities arrested and publicly identified Mangione. The researchers used these two dates as specific dividing lines to measure shifts in public opinion.

During the survey, participants read a hypothetical newspaper article to measure their tolerance for political violence. The text described a man violently attacking a political opponent with a baseball bat following an ideological argument. Respondents then answered five questions using a scale from 0 to 100 to indicate their level of support for the fictional attacker. They rated whether they could support the act, if the violence could be justified, and if they believed the attacker was likely provoked.

Participants also rated if such things happen all the time in America, and whether the perpetrator should face criminal charges. The scientists combined these answers to create an overall index of support for partisan violence. When looking at the entire group of respondents, the overall support for political violence did not change much. Splitting the data by political affiliation, however, revealed a different pattern.

“First, violence itself didn’t immediately trigger more support for violence,” Vargiu told PsyPost. “In fact, right after the killing, Democrats actually became slightly less supportive of partisan violence, not more.”

“The shift only happened later, after Luigi Mangione was arrested and identified, and public discourse began reframing him as a ‘folk hero,'” Vargiu noted. “That suggests that it wasn’t the act of violence itself that mattered most, but the narrative that followed.”

The reaction to the corporate executive’s murder also crossed over into the political sphere. “Second, and maybe more unsettling: even though the killing was not explicitly linked to partisan politics (the victim wasn’t a politician and the shooter wasn’t acting on behalf of either party) people still filtered it through a partisan lens,” Vargiu explained.

“Democrats became more supportive of violence against Republicans specifically, not violence in general. This shows that in a country as polarized as the US currently is, a formally non-partisan act of violence can still generate partisan reactions.”

“Third, the direction of that shift is itself telling,” Vargiu said. “We might have expected Republicans, whose side was more associated with the victim, to become more supportive of retaliatory violence (acting in defense of their own side). But that is not what happened.”

“Instead, it was Democrats, whose views aligned more closely with the perpetrator’s cause, who became more supportive of violence,” Vargiu explained. “This suggests that public acceptance of political aggression may have less to do with in-group defense, and more to do with hostility toward the opposing side. That is, people may not become more willing to endorse violence because their side was attacked, but because they already feel enough animosity toward the other side that violence against them seems justified.”

To analyze the data over time, the scientists also used an interrupted time series analysis. This statistical technique examines data collected at multiple points in time before and after a specific intervention to detect any changes in the underlying trend. The analysis confirmed that Democrats became more likely over time to say the hypothetical attacker was provoked, specifically after Mangione’s arrest.

To ensure their findings were accurate, the scientists tested additional psychological and personal factors. They looked at whether a general desire for social chaos, feelings of relative deprivation, or a person’s physical health status played a role in how they answered. The concept of Need for Chaos describes a desire to disrupt or overturn established social hierarchies.

Individuals with a high need for chaos showed an increased tendency to justify the hypothetical violence and were less likely to want criminal charges for the fictional attacker. Participants reporting poor physical health also displayed more support for the fictional violence, possibly reflecting negative personal experiences with the medical system. Even after accounting for these variables, the partisan differences remained a consistent finding across the analysis.

The researchers note that this data requires appropriate context to avoid misinterpretations. “We want to be very clear that our results should not be read as ‘Democrats are violent’ or ‘liberals are more prone to political violence,'” Vargiu cautioned. “That would be a misinterpretation of both our data and the broader research on this topic.”

“In fact, prior research (including some of the work we discuss in our paper) suggests that people on the left tend to be, on average, dispositionally less inclined toward aggression, thanks to traits like empathy and openness to experience that are more common on that end of the spectrum.”

“What our findings actually show is something different, and in some ways more concerning, namely that a compelling narrative around violence can be powerful enough to shift attitudes even among groups who are generally less likely to endorse violence in the first place,” Vargiu said. “The real takeaway is that moralizing narratives about violence can move public opinion regardless of where people start out, and not that one side is inherently more violent than the other.”

It is necessary to consider the limitations of this natural experiment. The study measured stated attitudes toward a hypothetical scenario, rather than actual violent behavior in the real world. Expressing sympathy for an attacker on an anonymous survey does not necessarily mean a person would act aggressively in real life.

The specific details of the Mangione case are also highly unique and might not apply to other situations. The viral appeal of the perpetrator, the intense unpopularity of the health insurance industry, and the specific polarized climate in the United States all contributed to the public reaction. Similar acts of violence in different cultural contexts might not produce the same shifts in public opinion.

The researchers also note that they could not directly track which survey participants actually saw the viral internet narratives framing the shooter as a hero. They can only observe that the timing of the arrest aligned with the shift in attitudes. Future research should aim to test the exact psychological mechanisms at play. Scientists need to explore how people process moral framing in the media and how these narratives directly interact with personal grievances.

The study, “Partisan Differences in Support for Political Violence: Results from a Natural Experiment in the United States,” was authored by Chiara Vargiu and Alessandro Nai.