He’s baack! Roy Den Hollander, “a Manhattan lawyer and a self-described antifeminist,” who in the past year has sued nightclubs for favoring women by offering ladies’ night discounts and has sued the federal government over a law that protects women from violence, is now targeting Columbia University. According to recent reports, Den Hollander filed a federal class-action lawsuit on Monday against the university not only for offering women’s studies courses, which he “sees as discriminatory toward men,” but also for “using government aid to preach a ‘religionist belief system called feminism.’”
The lawsuit is far from new territory for Den Hollander, a former associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, who now devotes much of his private practice to representing men in, as he puts it on his MySpace page, “battl[ing] the infringement of Men’s Rights by the feminists and their allies.” Den Hollander has explained that part what “helped tweak his anger toward feminists and laws he sees as favoring women” was repeatedly being turned away from nightclubs like Lotus and China Club for not having enough cash to pay the higher guys-only cover charge when he started to “get back in the social life” after being dumped within months by a woman he brought over from Russia and married.
Aw, now we feel bad. We were all geared up to call out Den Hollander as nothing more than a self-styled Gloria Steinem for the repressed douchebag meathead set, but we guess if we were an over-the-hill Big Firm reject who couldn’t even afford the cover charge at some bridge-and-tunnel club that hasn’t been popular since 1991—no less convince a Russian mail-order bride to stick around for a couple of months—we’d hold a bit of grudge against the ladies, too. [WSJ Law Blog]