As you’re probably aware, 2016 wasn’t a great year for Baby Boomer celebrities or human beings who are plagued by one of those pesky sense of decency things.
Whether it’s his fault or not is a discussion for another time, but there’s no debating that the election of Donald Trump sent a message to latent bigots and bullies, and the most vile forms of harassment or quickly becoming the norm.
Much of this behavior has taken the form of social media trolling, and naturally, some of the worst of it comes from a man who’s a literal troll IRL:
Yes, noted cancerous mole on the face of humanity Martin Shkreli has officially made the transition from trash-talk to stalking, and Twitter has responded by kicking his weaselly ass to the curb.
You might remember Shkreli as the “pharma douche” who jacked up the cost of a life-saving medication by 5,000 percent during his brief time as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.
Like Arthur Chu before him, Shkreli decided to extend his 15 minutes of fame by saying outrageous sh-t on Twitter.
It’s a surprisingly effective formula – until you go so far that even the surprisingly harassment-tolerant folks @Jack decides you’ve gone too far and boots you from the service.
Over the weekend, Shkreli set his sights on a Teen Vogue reporter named Lauren Duca, who dared to observe that Donald Trump psychologically manipulated voters during his presidential campaign.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Shkreli decided to go off on Duca, rather than the thousands of other reporters who have already made this observation, but eventually his disturbing motives emerged:
It seems he has a creepy, creepy thing for her, and his disturbing tweets are his way of throwing rocks at the girl he likes in the schoolyard.
Duca and her followers appealed to Twitter’s admins and eventually he was account was suspended.
We won’t even bother to reproduce Shkreli’s tweets (and yes, part of the reason for that is that his account is gone, which makes them difficult to find), but suffice it to say, low-lights included multiple confessions that he would like to “date” Duca, and a photoshop of his face on her husband’s body.
Yeah, she wasn’t overreacting by being creeped out.
In fact, she wouldn’t be overreacting if she filed for an order of protection.
Fortunately, Duca may not have to worry about Shkreli showing up outside her apartment with a heart full of longing and a boombox full of unreleased Lil Wayne tracks for much longer.
Back in December of 2015, Shkreli was arrested for securities fraud, and he’s set to stand trial in June.
Something tells us his antics won’t play so cute in Rikers.