Scumbag extraordinaire Martin Shkreli first made headlines in September 2015. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, had raised the cost of a drug that fights life-threatening parasitic infections from $13.50 to $750 a tablet—an increase of over 5,000 percent.
He has given us plenty more reasons to hate him since then. His detestable smirk throughout his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing made his face the most punchable of the decade. Then, he purchased the single copy of Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin for $2 million. Much to the chagrin of music enthusiasts, the ‘Pharmadouche’ then threatened to destroy the album before even listening to it, much less making its songs available to the public.
But now Shkreli has messed with the wrong person. And—finally—it means that he no longer has as loud of a voice.
The Tweets Of Creeps
Twitter suspended Shrkeli’s account after the sleaze ball persistently harassed Teen Vogue reporter Laura Duca. Duca’s article “Trump Is Gaslighting America” recently went viral. She then appeared on Fox News to debate Tucker Carlson about Trump’s family. By most accounts, she won by a landslide.
Shkreli is a Trump supporter—which is quite consistent with his history of being a despicable puddle of sewage. And the very thought of an intelligent woman shutting down Trump supporters must make someone like Shkreli just bristle.
So he decided to troll Duca. Unfortunately for him, he’s also very bad at being a troll. Like most conservative ghouls, he has no talent for humor or wit. So he just came off as a creep.
First, he invited her to Trump’s inauguration via private message. She tweeted a screenshot, along with her reply.
I would rather eat my own organs pic.twitter.com/IgeCRZqk8w
— Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) January 5, 2017
The Verge reports on his increasingly cringe-worthy attempts at trolling:
“Following the message, Shkreli added a line to his Twitter bio saying he had ‘a small crush on @laurenduca.’ He also changed his profile image to a doctored photo of Duca and her husband, swapping his face into the image. He changed his banner to a collage of photos of Duca, overlaid with lyrics from John Michael Montgomery’s 1994 single ‘I Swear.'”
Oh, and it gets worse:
“He also tweeted that he had purchased the domain name ‘marrymelauren.com.’ Shkreli’s followers then joined in, tweeting more Photoshops of Shkreli with Duca.”
Many of Shkreli’s Twitter followers are creeps as well? Color me shocked!
you guys are hella cute together https://t.co/eJbSJBUExY like I dont understand why she keeps pretending she's not interested
— emma (@qtelektra) January 8, 2017
Twitter certainly did the right thing by suspending his account. But they really should do an outright ban. Unfortunately, given the social media platform’s bad history of dealing with harassment, we might be holding our breath waiting for that to happen.
Featured image from YouTube video.
