There are more than 38,000 members in the r/FreeLuigi community on Reddit — celebrating the 26-year-old accused murderer they affectionately call “Lulu” — but most are not exactly out and proud about their fandom.
Perhaps because they are cheering on the cold-blooded murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, these fans — mostly girls and young women — routinely instruct each other not to engage with the press. They hide behind avatars online and N-95 masks at rallies outside Mangione’s court hearings.
I wanted to learn more about who these women really are, so I spent days scouring their Reddit threads, Instagram pages and smut websites.
“I’m embarrassed to say that I think Luigi has probably changed my life,” reads one Reddit post that’s garnered hundreds of likes. “This is what it took for me to recognize I have to be better as a person.”
“It’s like you worded my thoughts for me,” another fan responded.
They’re discussing whether or not donations to Mangione’s defense fund are tax-deductible —nope — and how to maximize the chances of jury selection if you live in New York City. (The next hearing in the federal case against Mangione is April 18 in Manhattan.)
They share photos of the Luigi-themed T-shirts (some portraying him as a saint), sketches, cakes, embroidery and paintings they’ve created.
Having conducted forensic deep-dives into the alleged killer’s past, they excitedly circulate photos from all the way back to his childhood.
“I’m a married woman, have mercy,” one Redditor commented about a photo of Mangione cheering shirtless at a University of Pennsylvania sporting event.
In another post, a keen observer noticed that a picture from a 2020 commencement party at the University of Pennsylvania appears to show Mangione’s ear.
Luigi supporters’ obsessive, detail-oriented qualities follow a pattern that stretches across a history of girlish fandoms, from the Beatles to K-Pop boy bands to Chappell Roan. Except, of course, they’re fixated on an alleged murderer.
For many of these girls and women, he is a part of their daily life.
One on Reddit posted a letter she wrote to him, lamenting she’s “not doing so well” because “some letters I wrote to you were returned to me… but I console myself with the thought that other letters of mine were more fortunate.
“I’m going to try to write you a little more often,” she signed off. “Take good care of yourself, dear Luigi. I think of you every day.”
One 21-year-old student from New York City who runs a Mangione fan account on Instagram agreed to talk to me anonymously, claiming that “the people that run fan pages for Luigi can’t say something publicly so we don’t make the case harder for him.”
“He doesn’t deserve the death penalty,” she told me, following news that Attorney General Pam Bondi is seeking capital punishment for Mangione. “They’re trying to end a young man’s life because of one murder… Everything is really crazy.”
Whether spoken out loud or not, the collective sense that Thompson’s death was justified is chilling.
The @luigi_mangione_fanpage on Instagram has posted images of Hello Kitty holding a chainsaw with the caption “where is the CEO.”
And there’s no shortage of fan fiction. One website has 143 stories about Mangione.
“You were assigned a group project with well-known frat boy and alpha, Luigi Mangione,” a summary of one reads. “But unbeknownst to you, he has the hots for you and he’s willing to do whatever it takes for you to understand just how much he wants you.”
They also fulfill each other’s requests: “I would love a fan fiction where Lulu is dating a girl with bad anxiety and he comforts her through an anxiety attack. He does deep breathing with her, rubs her back, hugs her, lots of cuddles etc.”
While many accounts interacting with Luigi content belong to girls under 18, I noticed considerable engagement from middle-aged women in the comments. One described a photo of Mangione as “giving François Arnaud as Cesare in ‘The Borgias,’” followed by a heart eye emoji.
There’s also a very active international fan base, spanning from South Korea to Brazil to Germany.
Neena, a 21-year-old supporter from South Africa who studies biomedicine in the UK, told me her support of Mangione has less to do with his charismatic eyebrows. She supports him “because health insurance has become a state-sanctioned scam masquerading as a safety net.
“They’re institutionalizing fraud and operating a scam,” she said of insurers, noting that her anger is fueled by her grandmother’s negative experience with insurance while suffering from Stage IV cancer.
“People like Brian [Thompson] have killed many by denying them healthcare,” she said. “He was no innocent man who fell victim to random violence; he lost his life on a battlefield he chose to fight on.”
“I hope this doesn’t come across as too evil,” Neena said, but she believes Mangione’s message about the insurance industry could only be expressed via violence. “[I don’t] see any other way it could have been conveyed.”
It’s scary. Mangione did more than just allegedly commit murder. He also awoke a dark vengeance that lurks in the hearts of thousands of anonymous girls across the world.
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