Former New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz said her comments about alleged UnitedHealthcare CEO murderer Luigi Mangione weren’t about her defense of him but about the mentality of his supporters.
Lorenz spoke with Fox News host Sean Hannity Wednesday in an interview where she attempted to clarify remarks she made about Mangione and his appeal to Americans upset with the healthcare system.
“What I’m describing, and if you watch the full segment, not just the clip, you’ll see that I’m just describing the mentality of these fangirls [who] show up outside Luigi’s court and show up outside his jail cell,” said Lorenz. “Those girls are not me, OK? We have very separate belief systems. But I was describing how they believe.”
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The former Washington Post columnist told CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan last week about Mangione’s support among women, arguing he’s a “revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who’s young, who’s smart.”
“He’s a person who seems like he’s this morally good man, which is hard to find,” Lorenz said.
Brian Thompson, the healthcare executive who was gunned down in midtown Manhattan in December, was a 50-year-old father of two.
He’d been on the job for nearly four years before he was assassinated outside the New York Hilton.
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Hannity asked Lorenz if she would agree that anyone who praises Mangione lacks “a soul, a conscience and a heart.”
“Well, what I will say, Sean, once again, is that I believe in free speech. I don’t believe in things like, you know, religious things like souls and all of these things,” she answered.
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“If you can’t have sympathy for a dead father and husband, do you lack a conscience, a soul and a heart? That’s a simple question. You’re a smart woman,” Hannity responded.
Lorenz reiterated the challenges within the U.S. healthcare system, citing nearly 70,000 Americans dying each year due to a lack of health insurance.
“You want to talk about the assassination of innocent people? I believe that the tens of thousands of Americans [who] die each year because of the lack of health insurance. That is, to me, a violence in itself. That is assassination,” the Substack writer explained.
Hannity asked Lorenz one final time if she condemns Mangione’s supporters and the people who praise him for allegedly murdering Thompson.
“The people [who] are showing up outside to support Luigi, they’re exercising their right to speech. They’re talking about the fact that over 320,000 people died from [a] lack of health insurance in the first two years of the pandemic alone,” she said.
“There are major things we need to acknowledge if we ever want to fix our system. We have a violent, violent healthcare system, Sean, and it needs reform. And that’s what we should be focusing on.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced in early April that she was directing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty in Mangione’s case.
He faces charges of using a firearm to commit murder, interstate stalking resulting in death, stalking through use of interstate facilities resulting in death, and one count of discharging a firearm that was equipped with a silencer in furtherance of a crime of violence, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.
