Mental Health

Attracted to Luigi Mangione? Here's What That Means About You

"Mama, I'm in love with a criminal..."

I started to hum the famous Britney Spears song as soon as they arrested Luigi Mangione, “Mama I’m in love with a criminal.”

Then I started to hum another song that often pops into my head whenever a man in an orange jumpsuit strikes my fancy: “Daddy’s home, home for you, and I know you’ve been waiting for this loving all day.”

It was the same song I hummed for days after I met the man who’d drug me and sexually assault me for several weeks.

Subconsciously, my body knew what my mind didn’t: this man is going to trigger ALL YOUR DADDY ISSUES.

I know what you’re thinking: Luigi’s DIFFERENT. He’s a HERO.

However, I knew the minute I laid eyes on Luigi Mangione that he had Antisocial Personality Disorder — colliquially referred to as a sociopath or a covert malignant narcissist. My lust is the first red flag.

I’m the scapegoat daughter of two sociopaths: I’ve trauma bonded to dangerous men all my life. It took a severe near death experience, a lot of therapy, and a psychology degree to understand why the men I bonded to — who very often had the squeaky clean looks, leadership careers, and charismatic appeal of Luigi Mangione — turned out to unmask themselves to be pathological liars, cold-hearted abusers, and criminals.

Men with criminal histories are a major part of my life.

Since my teen years, I ran with the bad boys with my untreated trauma.

As a scapegoat child, my trauma response was to develop an overactive empathy that doesn’t shut off even for predators. As such, I was the girl that the bad boys wrote to from prison; I was the girl putting money on their J-Pay; I was the girl teaching them about technology and social media when they returned to the real-world with the shell-shock of being submersed into rapid cultural changes; I was the girl who paid down payments on cars, who sent packages of clothes when they had no idea what the current trends were or how they wanted to dress.

None of these men were my lovers, though I did have lovers with criminal records or who’d end up imprisoned.

One of these men was my friend from childhood — his brother was my first love who committed suicide at 15. He went to prison as a teenager for nearly killing a man on the anniversary of that suicide two years later.

The others were men I reached out to as a prison abolitionist. Having witnessed the belly-churning traumas of my childhood friend in prison — which included months of solitary confinement that seemed to damage his brain beyond repair as well as rape from other inmates as a child — I became an advocate for prison reform.

I believe in a combination of rehabilitative prisons and restorative justice. I don’t believe in vengeance or cruel and unusual punishment. This has remained true even after being the victim of some very brutal crimes.

As such, offering emotional support to people imprisoned for life became an important part of my activism against what I consider a grave and culturally destructive injustice.

I was penpals with several high profile inmates: all of them were murderers and one rapist. All of them went to prison when they were teenagers and were serving either life sentences or were on death row.

Photo by Karollyne Videira Hubert on Unsplash

The majority of the people I was penpals with had obvious and severe mental deficiencies. Their letters were no different than writing a very young child. They were often very simple and short: they talked about the stray prison cat they were feeding; they talked about their Christian groups of Bible study; they talked about training police dogs; they wished me happy holidays and drew me pictures; they talked about their dreams of freedom. It was clear in the most excruciating way how much our prisons exploit and punish those with mental disabilities.

They sometimes talked about their childhood traumas, and I’ll spare you those details, because if you have compassion, you won’t be able to sleep after you hear them.

But, in addition to my friend in prison, I had a couple penpals who were, like Luigi, extraordinarily smart. One was high profile: I’m protecting his identity, but he had both a television episode and a documentary filmed on him. He’d killed the pedophile who raped him at 14.

He was the most interesting correspondence, and I still have a stack of his letters. He wrote a lot about philosophy and the books that he was reading, and he had many profound insights as someone on death row. Our correspondence ended in 2020: he was upset about the BLM protests and I was engaging in those protests. Unfortunately, racism is a common trait of sociopaths, especially those in prison who are often surviving in racially segregated gangs.

These prison-bound men — in addition to my family, my traumas, and my relentless consuming of case studies to understand the people I’d loved who’d traumatized me so badly — taught me a lot about narcissism and Antisocial Personality Disorder.

I have a dull fear response that is one part trauma and one part naivety, but I’m grateful for it, because if you want God to show you true wisdom, you need to be willing to look directly at the DARKEST PAIN.

Luigi Mangione, for as objectively attractive as he is, represents a man harboring the DARKEST PAIN.

How do I know Luigi Mangione isn’t simply a masked vigilante as admirable as Batman?

First, because Batman is a fantasy that doesn’t exist. (And it’s a fantasy sociopaths LOVE). Secondly, Mangione fits a pattern I know all too well.

Sociopathy runs in my family; it’s only chance that I’m not one myself. It’s kind of like winning a game of Russian Roulette to be a scapegoat or invisible child in these toxic family systems. But it leaves you MAIMED and you become groomed to be perfect PREY.

In families with ASPD, typically both parents have NPD and/or ASPD.

When this happens, the next generation sociopath will usually be golden to one parent and scapegoat to the other. (I was scapegoat to one parent and invisible to the other). The cognitive dissonance of that gives the child whiplash and severe damage, and by early childhood, the parent who golden childed them splits them and begins to introduce shame to the child.

By adulthood, even if they’re still attached to their parents and still treated with favoritism, the sociopath parent who golden childed them has fully emotionally abandoned the child, and the sociopathy is firmly rooted in their behavior because SHAME and undiagnosed cPTSD sit at their core.

ASPD can’t be diagnosed until 18; before then, it’s diagnosed as Oppositional Defiance Disorder. The reason why is because the brain isn’t fully developed until adulthood. But the truth is that even the most covert of malignant narcissists show all their signs of sociopathy in childhood — from stalking, to bullying, to pathological lying, to dead animals and morbid obsessions.

The first sign to detect who is a sociopath in a toxic family can be found in the names: due to the parent having split thinking and being narcissistic, their golden child is always given a version of their own name. They do this through the first name or middle names.

They are Jrs., they have the same middle name, they have the parent’s first name as a middle name, they have rhyming or mirrored names, or their names have the same meaning.

Examples:

Theodore Bundy — Eleanor Bundy

John Wayne Gacy — John Stanely Gacy

Casey Marie Anthony — Cindy Marie Anthony

Adolf Hitler — Alois Hitler

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer — Lionel Dahmer

Occasionally, parents get a bit more creative with this. For example, Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooter, had a father was named Thomas Klebold. His father’s favorite poem was, ironically, an anti-suicide poem: “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” The author: Dylan Thomas.

One should also always look up the meanings of names: for example, Sean “P Diddy” Combs doesn’t share a name with either parent. But Sean means “God is gracious.” His mother’s name is Janice, which also means “God is gracious.” They can golden child through shared middle names and their meanings too.

Luigi Mangione is named after his father Louis Mangione. In addition to having a mirrored name, both names mean “famous warrior.”

Additionally, there are a variety of other details about Mangione’s crime that point to an affliction with ASPD. Aside from the obvious arrogance and lack of remorse exhibited in his perp walk struts, Mangione’s attack on a wealthy CEO seems contradictory when you understand that Mangione was set to inherit about ten times that of the CEO’s yearly salary, and his family — despite having health issues and gripes with insurance companies — donated millions to local hospitals and were able to pay their medical bills with ease.

This happened for the same reason that Trump’s shooter was a registered Republican.

It happened for the same reason that the Cuban government was overthrown by a wealthy lawyer who benefitted from the dictatorship.

It happened for the same reason that nearly all violent slave revolts in America were orchestrated by FAVORED house slaves who had privileges and didn’t receive nearly as bad as treatment as the field slaves.

It was orchestrated by people who were GOLDEN CHILDREN.

And a narcissist hates nothing more than THEMSELVES.

So, of course Mangione would be targeting someone with the same sort of privilege as he had.

He’s PROJECTING.

Mangione’s projections also reveal his own insecurities: he calls wealthy CEOs “parasites” who “had it coming.” Narcissism is a disease of codependency (parasitic): narcissists can’t live without supply sources to siphon an identity and self esteem from, and narcissists usually believe in vengeance, despite being the type of people constantly dodging any accountability or consequences (had it coming).

One sociopath I knew told me that, “For some people, violence is the only language they understand.” That was his projection (everything they accuse is confession). However, it seems to be the truth with sociopaths throughout history. You can’t appeal to their conscience or empathy because they don’t have those things. The only thing that makes any change happen is if they have to face violence, because they’re terrified people and they were usually traumatized violently in childhood. As such, most sociopaths I knew felt a need to be HEAVILY armed and had severe paranoia.

Even Mangione’s actions showcase this truth: after the murder of the United Health Care CEO, several other health insurance companies reversed some of their most deadly and unjust decisions to deny coverage.

Furthermore, Mangione called CEOs “cowardly.” While the actions of sociopaths often seem brave, that’s only because they’re comfortable with violence. Violence isn’t courage: violence is always fear. It’s a sign a sociopath has lost control in some way.

And Mangione wore his fear very prominently after his arrest: he’d clearly wet himself.

Furthermore, while I have very little sympathy for a man like the United Health Care CEO who was likely a greedy sociopath himself, it can’t be ignored that the act of killing someone shows a lack of empathy. I agree that he is guilty of the terrorism and deaths of many innocent Americans in need of health care; HOWEVER, he also had kids and other loved ones.

A person with emotional empathy isn’t able to forget the impact of grief and orphaning on children and loved ones.

Finally, the act of carrying out the murder took the kind of plotting and stalking that only a sociopathic mind is capable of.

Thankfully, many sociopaths don’t ever progress to murdering others, though all sociopaths fantasize about murder as a trauma response to the justice they didn’t receive in childhood and their desires for power. A lot of sociopaths quell their compulsions through chronic stalking, theft, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, and animal abuse.

Some find other ways of satiating their trauma responses, such as joining the military or police, where they can kill with impunity.

But what makes a person with ASPD SNAP to murder?

People with ASPD murder after they experience a narcissistic collapse.

A narcissistic collapse comes from rejection of some sort. It’s unclear if Mangione had recently experienced a break up, which is a common trigger, but it has been verified that he had a secret Grindr account, which means he was bisexual, as all sociopaths are (the reason why this is true is a whole other essay).

What is clear is that he had a collapse: he disappeared for several months and his family and loved ones were searching for him. When he resurfaced, he was a murderer.

When a sociopath collapses, they face their true self and the full weight of their guilt and shame. They become SUICIDAL in these collapses. They sometimes attempt it and often succeed. The reason why men who have never sought any mental health care make up 75% of suicides is because they’re men with ASPD: it’s the disorder with the most successful suicide rate. Even Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ended in suicide.

But what happens when they survive their collapse?

Then they have to PROJECT their suicidal feelings to rid themselves of it, because the nature of their developmental disorder means they can't process shame. They can only project it.

This is when their supply is most in danger. This is when people kill their partners, kill their family members, commit a mass shooting, or go on other crime sprees.

I’ve sat in the storm of this myself, when my stalker’s suicidal collapse led to weeks of me being drugged and sexually assaulted. I should be dead, but I survived by a miracle.

Sometimes, if supply is lucky, the sociopath will REDIRECT their rage onto others, and that seems to be what Mangione did.

Gary Gilmore, after suffering a collapse when his teenage girlfriend broke up with him, went on a random shooting spree. He’d confessed that he WANTED to kill his ex-girlfriend. To protect her, he killed random strangers, and said, “This is for Nicole,” as he shot them. He asked for the death penalty and received it.

In my experience, it’s very rare that sociopaths can redirect their rage like this, but I’ve seen it happen: I even believe it’s why I’m still alive today. However, when they do this, it’s usually a random target or a mass shooting or an animal who takes the fall. (My mom, for example, killed our pets).

Mangione is unusual in the sense that he redirected it in a way that framed himself as a hero, a sort of Robin Hood for the common people.

This was incredibly smart: it’s no wonder he was valedictorian. This will set him up well in prison (he’ll be feared and respected), and it feeds his grandiosity as the high profile murder and trial will garner him many supporters, feeding him supply so he can hold his head high.

Those who love Mangione for political reasons understand that the people who made Bernie Sanders impossible made Luigi Mangione inevitable.

And given that we have an unacknowledged public mental health crisis of ASPD as well as the patterns of history which show us clearly how this kind of greed and oppression ends, we’ll see more cases like this if nothing changes.

When scrolling through the endless TikToks thirsting after Luigi Mangione, I notice a pattern when perusing the comments: many people remark that he’s made them become OBSESSED.

This isn’t uncommon. Nearly every person I conversed with who had a high profile case--even the ones who were mentally childlike and not that attractive--had potential love interests writing them letters. Some men even expressed that it was refreshing that I was approaching them with friendship rather than lust. Ted Bundy got fan mail from people who believed themselves in love, and Bundy got married in prison.

IMMEDIATE OBSESSION is a common response to sociopaths, and it’s one that I experienced myself with those I was romantically tied to. The limerance was so obnoxiously persistent that I felt like I was in quicksand.

Why does it happen? What does it say about you if you’re in love at first sight with a criminal?

1. You come from an abusive childhood

Generally, the sexual desire towards criminals means that at least one of your parents had NPD/ASPD.

All children of narcissists practice trauma bonding unless they’re able to awaken to their patterns, acknowledge their pathologies, and work on significant healing.

The experience of having sociopathic parents is NO EASY ROAD to healing. It’s a long, arduous journey full of grief and shame.

Because it’s so painful, many simply can’t travel the road to healing. It’s much easier to mask grief than to heal it, so they’ll rely on their addictions and their codependencies in toxic relationships.

It’s impossible to be the child of a narcissist and not have trauma responses to that. (Anyone who says they survived that childhood with NO effects and NO personality disorder is an unhealed narcissist — run). Children need love and emotional connection to survive, and not having that is traumatic.

It instills GRIEF in the child at a time when the brain is TOO UNDERDEVELOPED to process shame and grieve.

You’ll often find that children of narcissists are truly terrified of self examination of mental health issues. We all have issues with shame, and we were indoctrinated to thinking that perfection was the only acceptable personality that we could aspire to or inhabit, but perfection is a fantasy that doesn’t exist.

So, rather than unearth their childhood griefs and finish the grieving process by re-examining their childhood and what happened with their parents, they simply…find surrogate parents to replay the tragedy.

They trauma bond to other narcissists. Even narcissists attract other narcissists at the highest rates. We’re all seeking the love our parents didn’t give us, and we all get heavily triggered as our romantic and friend relationships reveal betrayals, lies, and abuses that mirror our childhood pain. This is why we all teeter on the brink of suicide and often suffer from other types of addictions.

I’m nine years celibate, but the last time I even found a sociopath attractive was three years ago. I can identify them and test for them easily now, and my trauma makes them pretty revolting to me.

And then Luigi Mangione existed and all my Daddy issues flared up like a rash.

“I’m just staying celibate forever,” I joked to my friend.

2. You want to be saved and protected

Sociopaths usually have NO PROBLEM with people sexually desiring them. Though they’re incredibly insecure people who rarely genuinely believe themselves to be attractive (despite their peacocking ego), people of both sexes FLOCK to sociopaths like humans lust for vampires.

Sociopaths usually have a hero complex — this is part of their delusion thinking. They believe all their victims deserve it (even when their victims are helpless kids). They usually frame themselves to potential romantic partners as PROTECTORS.

Energetically, it does feel like a sociopath would protect you. They’re people who have a low impulse control, and they’ll resort to violence QUICKLY in fear.

They have no empathy, so they have no limits.

Often, sociopaths WILL protect their supply sources. When my white supremacist neighbors and I got into a fight and they threatened me, I was shocked to see them rushing to MOVE out only a day later. They said someone had broken into their apartment at night and put a gun to their head.

Later, I found out that it was my stalker, the apartment maintenance man, who did that.

However, even as they’ll be quick to defend supply, the empathy they lack for others is also empathy they lack for you. As predatory people who can’t emotionally connect, you’ll eventually be in danger with them, especially if you’re trying to get out of the vice grip of their control, because they split everyone to ALL BAD eventually.

So, while they’ll often protect you, they’ll never be the ones to save you.

This is true historically also: it’s very, very common in history that when one sociopathic leader gets out of control, it’s usually another sociopath who is going to step up and do what it takes to deal with them.

Then, they take over and introduce a new brand of fascism.

There are many examples of this, but one that always strikes me is Haiti, the only country to be formed as a result of a violent slave revolt.

The man who’d been influential in organizing it ordered the genocide of all white people and oversaw it for two years. After that, HE RETURNED PEOPLE TO THE CONDITIONS OF SLAVERY for the country’s “economic benefit.”

And what happened to him?

A couple years later, there was another uprising and they killed him too.

3. You’re prone to fantasy and limerence

People with narcissism are prone to split thinking. With every criminal, they’ll categorize them as all good, all bad, or invisible. Many have already categorized Luigi Mangione as “all good.”

It appears that even his fellow prisoners have assigned him this role: in the prison he’s in, a haircut and eyebrow threading like the one he received is done by inmates doing life. They have to cut everyone’s hair who they’re ordered to, but they don’t have to do a good job, and they usually won’t. To get a good cut, you need to have money or respect. The cut that Luigi sported revealed a man who was respected.

This is exceptionally interesting for those aware of prison politics: the majority of men doing the haircuts would be people of color, and racism in prison is relentless. For a white inmate to receive the cut that Luigi did is a sign that he’s already garnered respect for his crime.

Again, this is part of what makes Mangione’s crime so intelligent. If he’d gone to prison for something else that sociopaths usually end up in prison for — such as child abuse, pedophilia, rape, stalking, or murdering a woman — he’d have been categorized as ALL BAD and received the kind of treatment Jeffrey Dahmer did.

However, not all people who are attracted to narcissists are narcissists. When your pathology is outside of that, the love for a sociopath is just a reflection of fantasy thinking and limerence.

Limerence comes from severe loneliness and unprocessed childhood despair combined. The fantasy thinking is often a consequence to escape conditions in real life which are oppressive in some way.

You may also be prone to split thinking if you were indoctrinated by it, and given that narcissism is so common, it isn’t uncommon to be around people who are always trying to tell you that the world is black and white with no shades of gray.

In that case, it’s much easier to put Mangione in the ALL GOOD category to excuse your lust for him.

4. You believe in vengeance

Nothing on this list applies to everyone, and this one certainly doesn’t apply to me.

Even though violence against sociopaths in power has historically been both inevitable and effective, there are many examples in history in which NONVIOLENCE and LOVE were even more effective. In fact, that’s what MLK’s movement was all about, and it TERRORIZED the U.S. government by outing police as abusers as they sacked violent dogs on unarmed women and children.

When you choose the high road, you force sociopaths to UNMASK themselves, and they can’t compete with that.

But many people believe in vengeance, and the people who do usually do so because they feel they have pains within them that were unjust which they never got closure for. They have griefs within them that they haven’t moved into acceptance yet.

A reason people don’t rectify their internalized anger is because in order to do so they’d have to confront their buried pain.

Mangione’s act represents vengeance towards a very unjust and murderous system that exploits and terrorizes the vast majority of Americans.

It’s so normalized that it’s a grief and fear that follows us everywhere. I think all the time about what would happen if I was in an accident and my body or mind could no longer be useful for labor: in our system, you just fall through the cracks and no one cares.

Mangione represents our internalized rage over that horrific reality that denies us our basic humanity.

5. You’ve been indoctrinated to think bad=good and toxic=healthy

This is pretty normal in America. Everything about becoming a mature and sane adult in American culture is a process of UNLEARNING and SELF TEACHING.

We have to unlearn racism.

We have to unlearn sexism.

We have to unlearn fatphobia.

We have to unlearn homophobia.

We have to unlearn classism.

We have to unlearn people pleasing and overworking.

We have to learn TRUE history on our own.

We have to learn MENTAL HEALTH on our own.

We have to learn SELF LOVE and SELF ESTEEM on our own.

Our capitalist culture profits off of self hatred and our politicians benefit from using narcissistic triangulation on us, otherwise known as DIVIDE AND CONQUER.

So hating ourselves and hating each other is how we’re socialized. We’re also socialized to only believe in a two party system and trust that politicians and wealthy CEOs have our best interests at heart.

It’s a lot like The Wizard of Oz: we skip across the yellow brick road with this sense that we are deficient in some way and believe some magical and all-powerful WIZARD is going to save us, just from the goodness of his wizard heart.

And it turns out that the wizard is only interested in power.

And that his magic isn’t even real.

And his power is only propped up by lying to everyone and convincing them that he’s this godlike figure that he’s not.

He’s not a “wonderful wizard;” he’s a greedy, power hungry, lying fraud.

But if you dare defy him, you’ll need to leave the CULT of Oz, and they’ll ostracize you and frame you as a WICKED WITCH.

So, people shuffle along with their delusions and do their best not to pop its fragile bubble.

In such a sick culture, of course many people are indoctrinated to be sexually attracted to what is TOXIC. They’ll be convinced to go against their best interests and participate in their own oppressions and the oppressions of others, all to protect the fragile ego of a destructive man.

It’s the same reason people don’t leave cults or why you see mass amounts of people crying for Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Un like they are The Beatles.

It’s a manifestation of cultural trauma and brainwashing.

A lot of the hero worship of Luigi Mangione comes from the fact that many people lack the courage, self worth, and conviction to believe they can affect social change.

This is purposeful. If we were taught the full scope of true history, then it’d be very obvious to us all how powerful we are.

I know my power by how often I get shadowbanned and censored. People who know their power experience this on social media platforms as well. We go through all sorts of abuses like smear campaigns, assaults, trolling, and unjust job layoffs just for speaking truth and love.

Power structures are FLIMSY.

You don’t need a hero to save you: you have it all within you without Luigi Mangione.

In fact, Luigi Mangione lacks the one thing that scares the powerful the most.

LOVE.

That’s what scares them most.

Why?

Because they can’t control it.

And love is the only real power there is.

That’s why those who pursue power need to design their masks after loving people. Without that, they have NO POWER at all.

Power isn’t even a real thing, just a fantasy we all buy into, like money. It doesn’t exist and all people are inherently equal, just different. The fantasy of power can be collapsed like the bursting of a bubble, and it has in the past and it will again in the future. Power generally ends badly for those who pursue it, in one way or another.

Without a single weapon, you can be the most powerful threat to narcissists simply by having what they lack: conscience and a heart.

If you lust for Luigi Mangione, you’re simply the natural byproduct of a sick and traumatized world. There’s nothing wrong or even unusual about that.

But hopefully, you’ll learn your own worth and start to love yourself, because THEN you’ll be unstoppable.

Maybe it’s time we try defying gravity.

If you’re flying solo, at least you’re flying free.

My memoir, This is a Story About Ghosts: A Memoir of Borderline Personality Disorder, is now available on Amazon.

For individual coaching to recover from narcissistic abuse, BPD, or sexual assault, visit https://am-champion.com

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Anne M. Champion is the author of Hunted Carrion: Sonnets to a Stalker (KDP, 2024), She Saints & Holy Profanities (Quarterly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Levitations (Trembling Pillow Press, 2019), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her work appears in Verse Daily, diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Salamander, New South, Redivider, PANK Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2009 Academy of American Poets Prize recipient, a 2016 Best of the Net winner, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Grant recipient. She has degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing.