Episode Details

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