OFFS

[Trigger warning.]

So a dude who spent possibly as much as $100,000 trying to buy a woman's affections, despite the fact that she routinely told him she didn't return his feelings, finally gets fed up, and, instead of walking away from the clearly dysfunctional relationship, decides to hire his roommate (who thankfully reported the scheme to police) to:

kidnap [Elissa Rodriguez], slash her face repeatedly with a utility knife and torch her Toyota.

That way, [Jimmy Santiago Dominguez] reasoned, he could "be there for her," helping his disfigured angel recover from her wounds by giving her tender care and a brand new car.

…"This is a dirty gig," Dominguez told the undercover officer about the plot to hurt the woman he wanted. Rodriguez thinks she is "better than she is," he said, and disfiguring her would change that.

The headline on this story? "Man accused of plotting mayhem to win woman's love."

Uh, nope. Although one of the crimes with which he's charged is indeed "committing mayhem," the others are kidnapping and arson. Kidnapping is certainly the obvious choice for this story, not just because it conveys the human element but also because it has more meaning than "committing mayhem" to the average reader, but I will grant the headline-writers at the Journal Sentinel that "committing mayhem" is funnier—and who can resist going for the yuks in a story about a man wanting to assault a woman?

And, uh, more nope. He wasn't trying to win her love; he was, at best, trying to win her dependency, and, more accurately, trying to disfigure her.

An accurate headline would read: "Man accused of plotting kidnapping to mutilate woman."

Which describes Dominguez as the predator he is, instead of casting him as some hapless lothario who, aw shucks, just doesn't know how to win a lady's affections and keeps getting it wrong, the silly goober!—a perception reinforced within the story by descriptions of him like "a confessed loser in love" who "couldn't win the heart" of the girl he fancied was obsessed with, who "was depressed by how his relationships with women had gone since high school" and "often wondered 'what's wrong with me'."

Aww, poor guy.

Meanwhile, the police let slip that the object of his affection obsession found "their 12-year age gap 'gross'," which the reporter saw fit to include in the story—because, you know, it's important that we all know bitch deserved it.

And why is it that I feel like I just wrote this post…?

Oh. Right.

[H/T to Shaker Roro80.]