Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz doubled down Thursday on her shocking comments appearing to celebrate the reportedly targeted murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
A chilling video released Wednesday showed Thompson being shot and killed at close range while outside the Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan, New York. The suspect is still at large.
Hours after news broke of his death, Lorenz wrote on the social media site Bluesky, “And people wonder why we want these executives dead,” alongside a report about Blue Cross Blue Shield no longer covering anesthesia for the full length of some surgeries.
Lorenz went on to share images of Blue Cross Blue Shield CEO Kim Keck and reposted calls for other health insurance executives to be targeted.
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UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday morning. (Photo Credit: Businesswire | NYPD Crimestoppers)
After facing backlash for her post about dead execs, Lorenz defended herself in comments to Fox News Digital, then in a lengthy screed posted to her Substack the next day.
In a post entitled, “Why ‘we’ want insurance executives dead,” Lorenz denied she was calling for the murder of more top executives before seeming to justify her harsh comments from the day before.
“Let me be super clear: my post uses a collective ‘we’ and is explaining the public sentiment. It is not me personally saying ‘I want these executives dead and so we should kill them,'” Lorenz said. “I am explaining that thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people.”
She continued, “If you have watched a loved one die because an insurance conglomerate has denied their life saving treatment as a cost cutting measure, yes, it’s natural to wish that the people who run such conglomerates would suffer the same fate.”
The post also featured the meme of a celebratory image of a smiling star and balloons with the text, “CEO DOWN.”
Taylor Lorenz doubled down on her harsh comments wishing health insurance executives would face retribution for denying medical claims. (Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival)
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“People have very justified hatred toward insurance company CEOs because these executives are responsible for an unfathomable amount of death and suffering. I think it’s good to call out this broken system and the people in power who enable it. Again, not so they can be murdered, but so that we can change the system and start holding people in power accountable for their actions,” her post went on.
Lorenz argued that while some online commentary has gone too far and promoted violence, the media had failed to examine “the systemic cruelty of our health care system” which motivated these sentiments.
She continued to retweet social media posts comparing Thompson to a mass murderer on Thursday.
Taylor Lorenz faced criticism over her social media posts appearing to justify commentary wishing insurance executives would suffer. (Getty Images)
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“Brian Thompson killed more US citizens than every serial killer combined, but because he made money off it the media considered him a successful businessman and morally upstanding citizen,” one post read.
Lorenz left The Washington Post in October and launched her User Magazine Substack. The far-left writer also had a past stint at the New York Times and has been embroiled in several online controversies over the years.
Known for her extreme fears of COVID-19, she went viral earlier this week when she fretted that people not wearing masks in 2024 were “raw-dogging the air.”
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Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick and Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
