The Gilead Gazette: Men Ejaculating on Women in Dollar Tree, Texas Shut Down a Midwife & More

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, your weekly roundup of everything the men in charge have gotten up to since last Saturday. This week: Dollar Tree’s lawyers argued in court that a man ejaculating on a customer caused her no physical harm. Kansas is forcing pharmacists to post signs telling women abortion pills can be reversed, which is a lie with no science behind it. Live Action got a cease and desist from thirteen grieving women it called murderers. And Ken Paxton shut down a midwife’s three clinics for a year on the strength of one anonymous email. Let’s get into it.Starting with a word I’d rather not have learned this week. Gooner. But thanks to an in depth investigation by the guardian, I now know it.Gooners are men who’ve organized online around compulsive masturbation, which would be nobody’s business except a subset of them decided the hobby needed an audience. So they do it in public, on video, on women who did not agree to any of it, and then post the footage for other men to applaud. They call it sharking. One seller had two hundred of these videos up for twenty-five dollars a pop. There’s a crypto coin. There’s a Pokemon card. It’s an entire economy, and the product is women being humiliated on camera for clout.Their venue of choice is Dollar Tree. Understaffed, badly lit, aisles stacked with unopened boxes, nobody watching. The same conditions that keep getting the company fined by federal regulators are the conditions that make it convenient to assault someone in the soap aisle.In December of 2023 a Houston woman the court records call MR was shopping in one. A man followed her through the store describing what he wanted to do to her sexually. She told him he was disgusting. He watched her from the checkout line. And in the parking lot he ejaculated on her, which she felt before she understood what it was.She went home, got in the shower fully clothed, and washed away the evidence before she’d thought it through. Then she pulled the leggings out of the trash and took them back to the store. The clerk called into the back, “We’ve got another one.”Another one. So this wasn’t the first time. Or the second time. Dollar Tree’s attorney Wesley Welmaker called what happened to her a one-off event. Liar. Her lawyer had already documented ten assaults at Dollar Trees in eighteen months, six involving ejaculation. A year later the count was sixty-three documented sex crimes. My dude, sixty-three is a lot of one-offs.The store had cameras. Dollar Tree never produced the footage, and without it the investigation died.Then MR sued, and the company’s lawyers landed on their defense. She is owed nothing under Texas law, because she suffered no physical harm. That’s the position. A man ejaculated on a woman in their parking lot and a legal department full of grown adults decided the winning move was to argue it didn’t technically hurt. Her lawyers had to go into court and argue, to a judge, in a filing, that being ejaculated on is offensive.Meanwhile in Knoxville, a Dollar Tree employee got caught on his own store’s cameras masturbating in front of customers. He pleaded guilty. He kept his job. Eight months later police found twenty-five thousand photos of women on his phone, including up the skirt of a sixteen-year-old girl in that same store.So where does this stand. MR’s assailant was never identified. Her lawsuit is a year and a half old, still stuck in preliminary motions, no trial date, and Dollar Tree’s strategy is to keep every other case out of the courtroom so this one stays a one-off on paper.As for the government, the only thing that’s ever landed on this company is workplace safety. In 2023 the Biden administration settled with Dollar Tree and Family Dollar over safety violations. They paid one point three five million dollars and admitted nothing. Dollar Tree has nine thousand stores. That was about protecting employees, not customers, and on the women in the parking lot no agency has done anything at all.Which tells you the math. It’s cheaper to pay the fine than to staff the store. And these go into low-income neighborhoods where there’s nothing else within driving distance, so the women shopping there don’t get the option of somewhere better lit.Two and a half years later, MR says she feels like crying, and then she gets so fucking angryOver to Kansas, where the Board of Pharmacy has sent out a cheerful little newsletter reminding everyone who dispenses abortion pills that state law requires them to post a sign telling patients the medication is unsafe and reversible. It is not unsafe. It is not reversible. There is no credible science behind reversal, no reliable study, nothing. Kansas has legally mandated a lie and put pharmacists in charge of printing it.The outfit pushing it is Heartbeat International, which claims reversal attempts jumped from seventeen hundred in 2021 to twenty-four hundred last year. Heartbeat International is also sitting in an Alameda County courtroom right now, because California’s attorney general took them to trial last month for false advertising and wants nineteen point eight million dollars out of them for saying the exact thing Kansas is making pharmacists say for free. One state is prosecuting it as fraud. The other one is printing it on a poster.To Live Action, the anti-abortion media operation behind the Baby Olivia cartoon that Republicans keep shoving into public school curricula. They also run a news site, and that site names real women who ended doomed pregnancies and calls them murderers. Thirteen of those women, across seven states, have now sent them a cease and desist.One of them is Megan Kling. Her fetus was missing vital organs and was never going to survive. She wrote in the Star Tribune that she’d braced herself for the devastation, she just hadn’t braced for a news outlet to call her a killer. She’s in therapy. She’s getting death threats. So a movement that talks about protecting life every waking hour has built a publication whose main product is aiming strangers at a grieving woman.Finishing in Texas with Attorney General Ken Paxton, currently the Republican nominee for Senate, who has spent a year going after a licensed midwife named Maria Rojas. She ran three clinics serving low-income, mostly Spanish-speaking patients, and she’s the first person criminally charged under the state’s abortion ban.Paxton got a civil injunction that shut all three clinics. This week an appeals court threw that injunction out, because the entire evidentiary basis was a single anonymous email. One email. The court said the trial judge abused his discretion.So Rojas can legally reopen, except after a year dark her lawyers say she probably can’t. And the criminal case is a separate case, still live, so she’s still facing felony charges carrying up to life in prison. Paxton is appealing to the Texas Supreme Court. He lost on the evidence and he’d like to run it back.Speed round. Tennessee state representative Monty Fritts is running for governor on executing women who have abortions, and the Tennessean profiled him as a constitutional hardliner and took twenty-three paragraphs to even mention that he wasn’t to kill women. Students for Life’s Kristan Hawkins wants doctors to know they can treat an ectopic pregnancy, they just can’t call it an abortion, which is convenient, because if it was never abortion then the bans never hurt anybody. And a new study found nurse practitioners provide medication abortion as safely as doctors, which anti-abortion groups have spent years denying, and which matters because nurse practitioners are still working the rural counties the OBGYNs already fled.Lizz Winstead, who co-created The Daily Show, wrote in Rolling Stone this week that the abortion pill has never abused women. Men do. The same people who’ll tell you all day that guns don’t kill people have decided this one pill acts alone. Kansas is forcing pharmacists to hang a sign warning women about a pill. Nobody is making Dollar Tree hang one about the parking lot.Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye. Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe