A fan-created website for Luigi Mangione, who is facing murder charges, has raked in over $1.5 million in donations for his legal fund.
Mangione is accused of killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in midtown Manhattan in December 2024, while Thompson was en route to an annual business meeting.
Mangione’s attorneys will go to state court in Manhattan for a pretrial hearing this week, ahead of the expected September trial start date. The suspect’s federal murder trial has been pushed back to October of this year.
The donation website, called “Stats4Lulu,” puts the donation tally at $1,530,753 from over 40,000 donors as of June 15. The median donation is $15. The website lists the top five words from donor comments: “free, people, love, support,” and “hope.”
The website also said that more than 6,000 letters have been sent to Mangione from 66 countries. Website visitors are provided with links where they can donate money and write letters to Mangione.
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“The Stats4Lulu team has created and maintains an online, interactive dashboard on Luigi Mangione that shares information about not only the letters he has received but donations made to his GiveSendGo campaign to fund his legal cases, and top news articles relating to Luigi,” the website says. “The team currently stands at over 30 volunteers working across data, wordsmiths, translation, events, and collaborations. The members are custodians of statistics related to Luigi. They nurture and grow it, but in the end, it all belongs to Luigi and is shared as an act of service for him.”
The case has received extensive media coverage because of Mangione’s divisive effect with some on the Left celebrating his alleged actions. Forty-one percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 believe Thompson’s killing was “completely” or “somewhat” acceptable, according to an Emerson College poll conducted the week after the shooting.
Mangione’s supporters argue his actions are morally justifiable because of the alleged predatory behavior of health insurance companies, with some supporters framing him as a modern-day Robin Hood. The suspect’s conventional attractiveness also helped bolster his popularity, according to NPR.