William Nicholas Love, 33 years old, dressed as Spider-Man, attacked political activist Jake Lang outside Minneapolis City Hall and instantly became the internet's favorite superhero. Donors poured over $120,000 into a GoFundMe for him within days. The organizer urged people to support "SPIDER-MAN the way he stood up for us."
Nobody thought to Google him first.
Love has prior convictions for domestic assault. Not one — multiple domestic violence offenses on his record. He was accused of threatening the mother of his child with a gun. This is the man progressives on social media held up as a courageous defender of justice — a guy whose documented history includes choking a woman and assaulting police officers.
The viral clips showed a man in a Spider-Man suit confronting Lang, and the narrative wrote itself: brave citizen stands up to January 6 defendant. Within hours, the fundraiser was live, the donations were flowing, and Love was being compared to an actual superhero by people who should know better.
The Minneapolis Police Department has charged Love with fifth-degree assault, a misdemeanor, for the attack on Lang. But that's not all. Sgt. Garrett Parten, the department's Public Information Officer, confirmed that a second charge is being considered — assault on a police officer. "We are going to include assault for consideration, yes," Parten said. "There's enough video out there for folks to observe very clearly what took place."
So the timeline is: Love attacked Lang, struck an officer in the process, got filmed doing both, got celebrated as a hero, raised six figures in donations, and only then did anyone bother to look at whether their new mascot had a criminal history. He did. A violent one. Against women.
The $120,000 in donations sits there as a monument to how the outrage cycle actually works. The costume was the story. A grown man in a Spider-Man suit hitting someone the internet already hated — that's content. That's a meme. That's a GoFundMe pitch. Who he actually is, what he's actually done to people who weren't filming — that part comes later, if it comes at all.
