Investigation of attack on federal judge's house 2:04
(CNN) - On his website, Roy Den Hollander described himself as an "anti-feminist" lawyer defending "men's rights." His personal writings and his life's work reveal a toxic mix of sexist and racist bigotry.
She had unsuccessfully filed lawsuits against bars and nightclubs that offered “women's nights,” alleging they violated the Fourteenth Amendment, and filed lawsuits against the federal government, challenging the constitutionality of its Violence Against Women Act, the “Law on Female Fraud ”, as she referred to it, and against Columbia University, for its Women's Studies program.
Roy Den Hollander
Federal authorities said Monday that Den Hollander is suspected of shooting the husband and son of US District Judge Esther Salas in her North Brunswick, New Jersey.
The FBI called Den Hollander the "prime suspect" and said he is dead. Two police sources told CNN that the suspect died of what is believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The lawyer wrote long documents full of bigoted and sexist content on his website. One document, which he called a "Cyclopedia," has 152 pages of anti-feminist reflections.
In the so-called "Evolutionarily Correct Encyclopedia", Den Hollander made chilling comments about the "solutions" to what he called "political committees" and feminists.
"Things begin to change when men begin to eliminate those specific people responsible for destroying their lives before committing suicide," he wrote.
The suspect argued a case before the judge
Den Hollander argued a case before Salas, according to federal court records: a lawsuit in which he represented a woman and her daughter while trying to register for the selective service of the military. In the case, Den Hollander's clients claimed that the draft was unconstitutional because it prohibited women from registering.
The case, like at least one other in the federal court system, raised complex legal questions about the treatment of women in the Army.
Salas objected to part of Den Hollander's arguments last spring, but also agreed to some of his claims and allowed the lawsuit to continue.
The lawyer abandoned the case in June 2019 and handed it over to a team of attorneys at the large New York-based law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.
Den Hollander said he "couldn't see the end of the case" because he was terminally ill, Nick Gravante, managing partner at Boies Schiller, told CNN on Monday.
Den Hollander had called Gravante out of nowhere last year, asking the largest company to take over the case before Salas.
The firm knew of Hollander's story that hedged views against women, but saw the case as an opportunity to fight for equal rights for women.
"We were not going to let Mr. Hollander's private views, as expressed anywhere, interfere with our taking the case and moving forward with him," Gravante said Monday.
Gravante said he did not know of Hollander's anger at the judge or why he had worked on the case in the first place.
In one of his writings, Den Hollander claimed that he had been diagnosed with melanoma cancer in October 2018.
Appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker
On his website, Den Hollander wrote an autobiographical document in which he personally disparaged Salas in racist and sexist terms.
While speaking of Salas, she stated that she often had problems with judges of Latin American descent, claiming that they were "driven by an inferiority complex."
He attacked Salas' professional history and associations, and at one point seemed to fuel a white nationalist belief that organizations are "trying to convince the United States that whites, especially white men, were barbarians, and all of darker complexions were victims. "
Amid the women's night lawsuit filed in 2007, Den Hollander reportedly appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker and made a special appearance in Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
"Feminists have taken control of all institutions in this country, they want to take control of men," she told the Times in 2011 after the Supreme Court refused to take up the nightly lawsuit of women in bars. "I'm going to fight them down to my last dollar, the last breath."
The profile of the New Yorker, in particular, focused on one night in a club with him in which he criticized the "feminazis", spoke of his attraction to "black and Latin girls, and Asian girls" and clung to his tactics to conquer women.
In 2017, he unsuccessfully sued various media outlets, including CNN, accusing them of broadcasting "false and misleading news reports" about Donald Trump's candidacy for president. The case was dismissed.
Den Hollander graduated from George Washington University School of Law in 1985 and then worked as a lawyer in the Office of the Senior Advisor to the Internal Revenue Service, according to his online resume.
From 1986 to 1989, he worked as an associate at the prestigious law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and since then he had worked primarily as a private attorney in New York, based on his resume and court filings.