On April 30, 2014 a staff member at a crisis line called the police, looking for a welfare check. The staff member had received a call from Rodger’s mother who was worried about the content of a video Elliot Rodger had published on YouTube.
The police interviewed Elliot Rodger at his home, but they found him to be shy, timid and polite.
On May 6, 2014, he was involved in an incident where he blocked another car with his BMW and entered into a verbal altercation with the driver and later the driver’s girlfriend, when she confronted Elliot Rodger.
On May 23, 2014, Rodger stabbed three men at his apartment in Isla Vista. Two of those men were his roommates. At 7 38 p.m. Elliot Rodger bought a triple vanilla latte from a Starbucks, not far from his home. At 9 17 p.m. Rodger uploaded a video to YouTube, called “Retribution”. A minute later he emailed a 137-page manifesto, called “My twisted world”, to various people. He then drove to the sorority house where he shot two women and wounded another. He entered his vehicle and started driving around shooting into a Coffee shop, house and a “Deli”, killing a man in the “Deli”. He continued his rampage by shooting at people and hitting people with his vehicle. He exchanged gunfire with the police on two occasions. He was shot in the hip during the second exchange. He crashed his BMW at an intersection. The police found Elliot Rodger dead in that vehicle from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. At 9 35 p.m. in addition to the six homicides, Elliot Roger injured 14 people. Seven from gunfire and seven from blunt trauma. He had hit them with his vehicle.
Elliot Rodger was born on July 24, 1991 in London, England. His father, Peter Rodger, was born into the prestigious Roger family, a family that was once very wealthy. Peter had begun working as a filmmaker and a photographer when he met Elliot’s mother, Ong Li Chin. Chin was a nurse, but she started working on film sets. He had a younger sister. Elliot was placed into an all-boys private school. Later he remembered one incident in which all of the students were forced to sit cross-legged, but he refused so adamantly that the teachers buckled and let him sit differently. When he was five years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California.
When he was 7, his parents divorced. They had joint custody of Elliot and a sister. That same year Elliot Rodger was described as shy and received therapy for lisp which was corrected after several sessions. He would make good eye contact with people when speaking, but he wouldn’t really talk unless somebody asked him a direct question. He preferred to write information down on paper, rather than talking. He would hold his ears when there was a loud noise. He demonstrated repetitive behaviors, like tapping his feet and his leg, and repeating certain words. He couldn’t accept that his father remarried, in his opinion, too fast and he had never accepted his stepmother. He was angry at his father for always siding with his stepmother and even threw him out of the house after a fight. When he was young he did not act out when he was angry, rather he would tense his entire body and clench his teeth. He didn’t get in fights, hurt animals, set fires or otherwise damaged property.
Elliot Rodger didn’t play any individual sport. He felt inferior, because he was short and week in comparison to other children. He was crying and didn’t want to go to school. In 2007, Elliot Rodger was diagnosed with ‘pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified’. In DSM 5, the equivalent disorder would be autism spectrum disorder. It was also believed that Elliot Rodger was depressed and anxious. He took various medications to treat those conditions. According to Elliot’s words, he didn’t take medications. He earned poor grades, but his grades improved significantly during the last three years of high school. He graduated from high school in 2009. He had already developed hatred toward women and men who were with them. He hated sporty men, so called jocks. He thought that women, especially, beautiful, blonde women he liked, were ignoring him. He had wanted to go to all-boys college, shortly after he regretted and changed a college. He was bullied during his schooling.
He took karate lessons and exercised regularly to gain self-confidence. Things didn’t improve. He returned to video games. He was playing “World of Witchcraft” and “Halo”. He liked to go for a long walk and watch sunset, but if he saw a romantic couple, he couldn’t control his frustration and anger. Mostly, he ran away and cried, but on several occasions he spilled drink or coffee on them. He avoided restaurants because he didn’t want to see romantic couples. He drove by young people and insulting them or was taking cell phone videos of them, while commenting how great injustice it was. He was a virgin and he spoke about these topics a lot in his videos. Then, he used money his mother was sending him to buy expensive clothes. Rodger believed that women would pay attention to him then, but they didn’t. At least, he didn’t see it. He then drove BMW. Still, nothing changed. Elliot Rodger concluded that women were wired in the wrong way and that they chose, as he stated ‘big, obnoxious guys and not sophisticated man like me, the supreme gentleman…’ He was very active online. Several times he tried to meet a girl online, but he wrote that he was taller than he was. He asked people online whether women would date a half Asian man. He was deeply insecure and felt less worthy than others.
In 2011 he dropped out of college and moved to Isla Vista. In December 2012 Elliot bought a gun. When he saw that other men, who were not Caucasians or sporty men, also had girlfriends, he was offending them based on their race and ranting online about difference between him and Asian men. He began attending several forums dedicated to INCEL (Involuntary celibacy) and began to identify as one himself, but even on INCEL forums, Elliot Rodger would often get called out on his behavior and subsequently made fun of, to which he would make replies such as: “How dare you speak to me like that, you degenerate subhuman, when I am not deformed? I am perfection incarnate.” At around this time he was in communication with both Christopher Harper-Mercer and Alek Minassian who would later follow his steps. Elliot Rodger wrote: “This site is full of stupid, disgusting mentally ill degenerates, who take pleasure in putting down others. That is all I have to say on here. Goodbye.” Before he committed the crime, he had been hoping to win the lottery and not to have to continue with the plan. He was thinking that he wouldn’t have been a virgin and he would’ve had a happy life. He also believed that entry-level jobs were beneath him. He didn’t want to get involved in any type of manual work. For a time, when he was a teenager, he did work for a friend, doing construction, although much of his money came from an allowance his mother and father gave him and funds from other family members.
On July 20, 2013 consumed alcohol and went to a party where he climbed a 10-foot ledge and sat down. Other people climbed onto the ledge and started talking with one another but they were ignoring Elliot Rodger. He started insulting the individuals and they reciprocated. The situation escalated to the point where Elliot started pushing them. His main target was the females. Unable to push anyone over the ledge, he ended up being pushed and fell off the ledge, fracturing his left ankle. He still managed to walk away from the party, but he remembered that he left his sunglasses behind. He returned to what he thought was the correct house, but he was intoxicated and had selected a completely different house. The occupants of that house called him names and physically assaulted him. He reported to the police. That was the only time something like that happened. On January 15, 2014, Elliot Rodger called the police because he suspected his roommate had stolen candles from him. The roommate accused Rodger of moving his property around the apartment. But after the candles were found under the roommate’s bed, the roommate was arrested. The case was dismissed due to insufficient evidence.
A major theme of both his “Retribution” video and his manifesto is this idea that he was rejected by women and extremely lonely. He called himself the supreme gentleman. He was a virgin, because he was denied sexual relationships with women. He felt this denial was criminal and society needed to pay for it. He talked about how people made him suffer and how now he was going to make them suffer. He believed that committing homicide would prove that he was an alpha male and it would make him a god. He said that if he had the power, he would annihilate everyone on the planet. The content of his video indicates that he was extremely angry and despondent about rejection. He actually repeated lines from his favorite movies. He was socially awkward, because of autism. He was genuinely confused as to why women were not interested in him. He believed he was doing everything that women wanted. Actually, Elliot was never truly rejected by any woman according not only to his own manifesto in journals, but to his parents and his friends. He failed to ask any of them out, in the first place, or even flirt with them. He merely felt that because they didn’t approach him first they had preemptively rejected him. He only had assumed that he was or would be rejected by them. There was no problem with Elliott’s appearance, his race, his height or any of the superficial problems. In fact, shortly after the story had broken and his face was all over the news, many women took to Twitter to express their disbelief that he was unable to get a girlfriend. A woman wrote that she had seen him, but that he had seemed absent, unapproachable and that he was a nice looking man. Maybe, she would’ve approached him…
Elliot Rodger’s manifesto was “My twisted world”. It seemed that he unconsciously knew that his inner world was his world, in which he locked all other people with his thoughts. His inability to see things from the perspective of others, kept him trapped in a world of loneliness. He simply couldn’t reach a point where he could see how others viewed him. His vulnerable narcissism allowed the anger to stay inside him for a long time, building up. It was probably the decision to end his own life that opened up the possibility of revenge.
Elliot Rodger has become an icon in INCEL community, their hero. They call him the Supreme Gentleman. A violent killing spree is called ER, his initials. Alek Minassian went on a killing spree and posted a message on Facebook: “Hail, the Supreme gentleman, Elliot Rodger!”
INCEL is a portmanteau of “involuntary celibate.” In its most basic form, INCEL describes someone, usually a male, who is frustrated by their lack of sexual experiences. The INCEL worldview is based on the notion that attractiveness is pre-determined by genetic factors, which dictate our physical appearance, and these are the main features that women find attractive in men (Baele et al., 2019; Ging 2019; Hoffman et al., 2020). Those who subscribe to the INCEL ideology believe these physical traits to be substandard in themselves and that they are “doomed to a life of involuntary celibacy”. The subculture’s attitude can be characterized by resentment, hostility, sexual objectification, misogyny, misanthropy, self-pity and self-loathing, racism, sense of entitlement to sex, blaming of women and the sexually successful for their situation, nihilism, rape culture, and the endorsement of sexual and non-sexual violence against women and the sexually active. The empirical evidence indicates that this notion contributes to a sense of being isolated and lonely, which drives individuals to become increasingly frustrated and jealous of those around them who they perceive to be in happy sexual relationships (Van Brunt & Taylor, 2021).
The term INCEL first became well-known following Elliot Rodger’s 2014 spree killing in Isla Vista, California. Before carrying out his attack, Rodger left a video and a manifesto-type autobiographical account detailing his “involuntary celibacy”. Originally coined as INVCEL around 1997 by a queer Canadian female student, known as Alana. The spelling had shifted to INCEL by 1999, and the term later rose to prominence in the 2010s, following the influence of Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian. On 12 August 2021, Jake Davison embarked on a killing spree that resulted in the deaths of five people before taking his own life.
Peter Rodger, Elliot’s father, gave an interview to Barbara Walters and stated that he wished Elliot had never been born.
