Across the street from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where a crowd of protesters stood behind metal barricades, the chanting began just before 9 a.m. Leading the call and response was a Black man wearing jeans, a basketball jersey, and the signature green hat worn by Luigi, the Nintendo character from the Super Mario Bros. video games.

“No more deaths by denial!” he yelled.

“Put the system on trial!” the protesters yelled back.

“Corporate greed we must fight!”

“Health care is a human right!”

The man in the Luigi hat was Jonni Gartrelle, a New Yorker who moved back to the city from Miami last fall. At 36, he’d been involved in numerous activist causes, spending much of 2024 fighting alongside Planned Parenthood on a campaign to end Florida’s six-week abortion ban. But this was his first protest in support of Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The crime had struck a nerve. “He could be any of us,” Gartrelle later told me. “Each of us has a reason why this could be us.”

“Each of us has a reason why this could be us.”

It was Tuesday, September 16, and Mangione was soon due to appear at the courthouse across the street. The 27-year-old faced first-degree murder charges in New York’s state and federal courts. In the former, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had charged Mangione under the state’s terrorism law, which carried a life sentence. In the Southern District of New York, the Trump administration was seeking the death penalty.

Prosecutors cast Mangione as a cold-blooded killer who stalked and murdered Thompson in a brazen act of violence, shooting him outside the Midtown hotel where he was attending a shareholders conference last December. Surveillance footage of the killing circulated online, captivating and horrifying people across the country. But by the time Mangione was apprehended five days later, he had become a folk hero to countless Americans, who viewed the act of vigilante justice as a necessary wake-up call about the greed and cruelty of the U.S. health insurance industry.

He was also something of a heartthrob. On the sidewalk outside the courthouse, where people had been camped out since the night before, one protester wore a T-shirt that said “Cougars for Luigi.” A younger woman, clad in a floral tiara and a pink top reading “I Heart Italian Boys,” eagerly told reporters that she was in an AI relationship with Mangione. She showed me messages exchanged with a chatbot engineered in his likeness. “Just made my case for appeal,” the AI had written to her. “And my case for marrying you.”

Among pundits and commentators, the outpouring of support for Mangione has been with a mix of fascination, bemusement, and disgust. Many argue that Mangione would never have attracted so much attention if not for his good looks. But to protesters like Gartrelle, this is both short-sighted and misogynistic. “Whenever there is a social justice movement, they are overwhelmingly supported by women because it’s women who are being victimized by the system,” he said.

Gartrelle joined the protest “because of my background in human rights advocacy and health care.” But it was also personal: “My brother passed away about five years ago. He had epilepsy.” His chronic illness made it hard to hold a job, which in turn prevented him from securing the health insurance he needed for treatment. “My brother was never able to get the care that would have worked for him,” Gartrelle said. “But the point is that no one — not the healthy, not the unhealthy — should have trouble finding a doctor. It should be the easiest thing in the world.”

Criticisms of the protesters had recently taken a darker turn. The murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah less than a week earlier........

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