Status Updates From Fatal Vision: A True Crime ...

I’ve had this Audible book for quite some years. I remember watching the tv series and having nightmares over it because my brother was stationed at Fort Brag and was in the GB. THEN the main character worked at the hospital across the street from my elementary school! I finally decided to tackle it while I was cleaning/decluttering It’s over 35hours long!! So far, okay.

The New Yorker piece does sound deranged but it is so bizarre to have McGinniss use the 1989 authors note to tear Malcom limb from limb. Thankfully only some of it is blatantly misogynistic. Most of it is “I was literally on trial for libel for reporting facts a defendant didn’t like and you another journalist are cherry picking facts from that case to make me look obsessed with MacDonald” and he’s not wrong

Okay but the prosecution closing argument was crazy good

"But don't ever forget that perhaps the greatest crime of all was committed 2000 years ago and the night before Christ was betrayed, Judas Iscariot would have had twelve of the best character witnesses this world has ever known, to have said he couldn't have done it. But you know that he did".

The whole section where MacDonald writes to McGinniss about hypothetically leaving his lawyers waiting on the operating table while he waits for their insurance to clear as like a refutation of them not providing him bail information in a timely manner. This is deranged why would. He write this also HE WAS THE DIRECTOR OF AN ER how did he not get his license revoked on this anecdote alone

Literally MacDonald had all the money he could want from his wealthly friends to fund a high end defense team that told him all he had to do was not be petulant to the Prosecutor while he was on trial for the murder of his wife + five and two year old children and he couldn’t even do that. Misogyny is a hell of a drug

I get that it was in a section where MacDonald was screaming incoherently at the Grand Jury, but McGinniss lampshades him getting served at work? After he had been made DIRECTOR OF THE EMERGENCY SERVICES DEPARTMENT IN LONG BEACH, CA?!?!? McGinniss needed to be on the scene, I need to know the workplace drama of a Dept Head getting served at court summons for murdering his family five years previously

Did they not document personality disorders in the mid 70’s because the psychologist for the Grand Jury keeps saying MacDonald isn’t pathological but he has a authority complex where he wants to be seen as an authority, he’s a simp to people he sees in authority to him, is derisive to people he sees as lower to him to the point of narcissism. This just sounds like the opposite of Oppositional Defiant Disorder

I don’t always love the rush to Armchair Psychoanalyze perpetrators, but this whole Paranoid Type Psychosis is fascinating. Not just because we’re living in a country where stroking one man’s ego is made sacred but also having someone that basically can’t process negative feedback to the point of barely contained rage or shutting down their emotional response profoundly is so interesting and scary