This is your warning that unless you are already intimately familiar with Hanns Heinz Ewers’ novel Alraune and the underground rapper Drrty Pharms you should probably read the first part of this if you want anything to make sense. The first part is almost entirely background and now, using it as a ladder, I can reach for the light bulb and start the shadow puppet play.
The first order of business is to explain what made me compare Wolfe Margolies and Alraune at all. Wolfe was born in 1992 and his mother, the psychotherapist Liz Margolies, had been identifying as a lesbian and active in the world of academic feminism for decades. I only learned this from one of my sources after I began researching this piece but Wolfe’s father is an anonymous sperm donor he most likely has not even attempted to learn the identity of.
It’s important to note that while Alraune’s adoptive father engineered her birth as an experiment in the novel, Liz Margolies’ impulse to pursue motherhood almost certainly stemmed from more traditional motivations. Without knowing her personally the most I can do is place things in a historical context: the movie Look Who’s Talking premiered in 1989 and Whoopi Goldberg’s Made In America followed in 1993 – a year after Wolfe was born.
Both films are centered on the concept of career women raising children as a personal decision enabled by the same methodology. What I’m implying is not causation but a larger social moment where stigma against single motherhood was shifting. Sex and the ownership of offspring are deep questions in any human culture – while fatherhood was once seen as the default in a proprietary sense this has largely been pivoted away from.
Another important marker is a rising tendency for married couples to combine last names rather than have either partner give theirs up. While we put the two names in sequence in my own marriage I also have friends who have used elements of both surnames to create something entirely new. All of this is a shift away from viewing heredity in a purely patrilineal sense.
Before proceeding I want to make something unequivocally clear. I myself identify as a feminist and have done so throughout my adult life. The first magazine I subscribed to was Sassy follow-up Jane in the early 2000s. There is a recent tendency in online discourse to place blame for rising misogyny and misogynist violence from men with feminism itself. Whatever ideas I explore that is very much not what I’m doing – feminism has been an overwhelmingly positive force for both men and women and every person is accountable for their own actions.
To return to Wolfe and his birth it seems highly unlikely that Liz had any control over the sex of her child but after Wolfe was born I feel like she must have thought about the dark side of masculinity and whether or not a supportive feminist environment could make a positive difference in this regard. I did hear from one of my sources that later, after Wolfe’s problematic behavior patterns emerged, she often thought about his nature and whether or not the hand of destiny had irrevocably shaped the person he would become.
In Alraune the father of the child is a rapist and murderer who donates his genetic material on the eve of his execution. Sperm banks market themselves very differently with rhetoric about doctors and lawyers but pragmatically speaking their donor pool is limited to men either in need of quick money or emotionally invested in the concept of anonymous children. When I tried to donate in my own college days the only concern seemed to be sperm count and mine was too low – if there was an additional screening process I never saw it.
There are several prominent lawsuits from donees who discovered that a clinic failed to disclose a donor’s psychological or criminal history after issues arose in their children. We start drifting into unsavory Eugenics territory when placing too much importance on factors like criminal history but at the very least things like schizophrenia should be disclosed. The reality is that egg donors go through a far more rigorous screening than their male counterparts but this stems naturally from one gamete being far more expensive to extract and store than the other.
As Wolfe was born in the early nineties it follows that whatever protections are currently in place would have been appreciably more rudimentary then.
I should probably get more into the reasons I want to look at Alraune and Wolfe’s story side by side. Alraune is at heart a monster story with the station of monster being filled by the girl herself. No matter how repugnant his behavior may have become it is not productive to categorize Wolfe in this kind of morally binary context. Ultimately he is a human being and deserves both our empathy and our criticism – insofar as this recognizes both his personal agency and his potential for positive growth and meaningful change.
In the novel, Alraune’s destructive potential lies not in her own actions but her powers of influence over others. In her boarding school she triggers an epidemic of sadistic animal abuse without lifting a finger and eventually steers one of her classmates into a messy suicide attempt. The body count does not begin in earnest until she returns home, blossoms into a young woman and turns her invisible powers toward her many male suitors.
I was only able to briefly converse with a source close to Wolfe but he characterized him as having always been malicious. When I asked whether or not he was popular and influential with his classmates my source said the following:
“i mean anybody that was friends with him knew what they were getting into i think
most people knew to stay away”
This echoes a duality in the book where Alraune’s aristocratic peers are powerless under her spell but servants and animals have a natural aversion to her. On the topic of manipulation he offered a single anecdote where the first time he and Wolfe got drunk together Wolfe convinced him he was wearing a diaper for the amusement of watching him piss his pants.
A far cry from animal torture but it is interesting how every feature of the novel character has at least some echo in reality. In a Reddit thread another childhood friend of Wolfe’s characterizes him as “one of those people who could have been a cult leader or something”. An important part of this entire discussion is his relationship with his mother and the influence she held over him – things I will be addressing momentarily.
Alraune’s beauty and sexual appeal are important to the plot of the novel and often described in androgynous terms. The roster of characters succumbing to her fatal attractions includes two women and she frequently dresses in a male bellhop’s uniform to titillate and manipulate her adoptive father. For Wolfe there is no question that his fair hair and delicate features played a role in allowing him to gain access to his female victims and avoid consequences for his behavior as long as he did.
In 2018, the year before his arrest, he appeared on a podcast called Fluid Exchange and spoke candidly on several matters pertinent to this discussion. While he usually spoke boldly about sexually assaulting women in his rap lyrics and social media posts he dances around the subject in this in-person interview – barely acknowledging his history of causing harm in this fashion. What he does seem eager to talk about are his sexual appetites surrounding cuckoldry and feminization.
Early in the interview Wolfe speaks on using estrogen, not for anything related to gender dysphoria, but as part of a larger fetish that can only be described as autogynephilia. He links his fantasies to compulsive overconsumption of pornography – to which he also attributes the heavily racialized aspect of these desires. Sexual submission to Black men is the overarching theme; either through being cuckolded or fulfilling the role of “bottom” in direct sexual contact.
An important aspect of Alraune as a literary figure is amorality and the self-serving pursuit of personal pleasure over empathy. Wolfe seems to be wired in much the same way but frames it in the intellectual trappings of nihilism and an aversion to paternalism in any form. He makes it exceedingly clear that his only reasons for discontinuing a pattern of violent sexual assaults are selfish ones – rather than empathy for his victims or guilt for the pain and harm he had created his sole concern is the displeasure these actions caused him personally.
This is probably as good a time as any to go into Wolfe’s crimes specifically. The majority of this information will be paraphrased from The Daily Beast article by Eamon Levesque – I included a link in the first half of this piece if anybody wants to go straight to the source. Some of these women kept themselves anonymous to avoid harassment from Wolfe’s friends, fans and followers. I won’t be naming anybody but extend an offer to any of these women or other victims to reach out if there is a preferred name, pseudonym or additional information they would like to see added to this essay.
A fourteen year old girl working as a model had been dealing with a chaotic home life and sleeping in a public park as a result. Wolfe offered her shelter, first in his mother’s Chelsea home and later in his own apartment, but used her vulnerability to coerce her into sex. This must have corresponded with Wolfe’s growing interest in being cuckolded because she describes him bringing home strange men to have sex with her – always by force and against her will.
In the Fluid Exchange interview Wolfe describes his cuck fetish as being rooted in his own degradation and the pleasure of his female partners but this young woman’s testimony paints an opposite picture. Ultimately the pathology does not stray very far from the motivations usually ascribed to rape: power, domination and total disregard for a female victim’s boundaries and personhood.
Broadly speaking the entire industry of BDSM dungeons with female dominatrices is rooted in male fantasy rather than female empowerment and only recent technological advancements have allowed some progress toward correcting power imbalances and the democratization of sex work. The final push that allowed this woman to escape from Wolfe, despite his efforts to control every single aspect of her life, was his growing insistence that she bring her eight year old stepsister to his apartment.
Another contradiction in how he presents himself in the Fluid Exchange interview lies in his use of estradiol. On the recording Wolfe is adamant that his use of hormones is a fetish and he would never present himself as trans but the second woman speaks on him doing exactly that as a means of getting her to lower her guard. She had even opened up to him about her own experiences with childhood sexual abuse when he drugged a glass of absinthe he’d offered her to incapacitate and rape her.
She speaks on confronting him after the assault here:
Wolfe seems to have been entirely devoid of guilt, shame or remorse. If anything the confrontation probably excited him. As many of these assaults took place in the Chelsea apartment he shared with his mother it’s reasonable to ask where Liz Margolies was while all of this was happening. The testimonies of the next pair of victims paint a disturbing picture.
Much like his literary complement Alraune , Wolfe showed considerable academic aptitude and was valedictorian of his eighth grade class before attending Bard High School Early College in Manhattan. Two of his classmates describe relationships with Wolfe and the aftermath. The first talks about his obsession with having sex with virgins brought on by frequent viewing of Larry Clark and Harmony Korine’s Kids movie.
While their sexual encounter was consensual, Wolfe was dissatisfied with the experience and accused her of having been raped as a child and therefore not a “real virgin”. Wolfe had enough popularity and influence in the social ecosystem of their High School to spread degrading stories about this girl and galvanize a coordinated harassment effort against her. Things got bad enough that she attempted suicide before finally being able to transfer schools.
The next young woman to date Wolfe never felt comfortable enough around him to consent to sex but after he started a school rumor that he’d taken her virginity and she set the record straight he retaliated by breaking into her house and raping her. After this assault he used the classic manipulation tactic of threatening suicide to coerce her into seeing him again but she brought a friend for safety.
In the following excerpt, using the pseudonym of Shannon, she and her friend describe the encounter. Wolfe is begging Shannon to get back together with him when her friend firmly reminds him that he raped her. Wolfe responds by grabbing this girl by the hair and violently attempting to drag her out of the room. Sexual violence from Wolfe should be familiar by now but the behavior of his mother, Liz Margolies, is especially telling:
It has been frustratingly difficult to collect information on Liz Margolies beyond her carefully curated public image. There is an audio interview where she discusses motherhood and her early involvement in radical feminism but I lack the academic credentials to access it. For the same reasons I am unable to read a paper she co-authored on domestic violence within lesbian relationships. Nonetheless it is glaringly obvious that her permissive attitudes toward the sexual violence perpetrated by her son and the absence of support for the women directly harmed by him represent a contradiction.
In the Fluid Exchange interview Wolfe speaks on being barred from his mother’s house while he was heavily addicted to heroin but his violent and exploitative behavior within relationships seems not to have engendered the same reaction. In The Daily Beast article the author refers to having received photographs showing the girl who was fourteen at the time sleeping on the couch of Liz’s Chelsea apartment so it seems inconceivable that Liz wouldn’t have had at least an inkling of Wolfe’s exploitation of this young woman.
The Margolies are ethnically Jewish, as I am from my mother’s side of the family, and at many points in this research small things reminded me of my own mother. When my mother was attending Barnard College, the women’s counterpart to Wolfe’s Columbia University in the days before co-Ed campuses, she worked as a personal assistant to a prominent feminist author: Betty Friedan who is best known for The Feminine Mystique. My mother described Friedan as a misogynist and the experience as unpleasant.
More significant is a phenomenon I would call “Jewish cultural misogyny” that I witnessed in that side of the extended family for decades. My grandmother always compared my mother adversely to her brother, who died of cancer at a young age, and all but said she wished things had been the other way around. Growing up my brother and I were treated like princes and put on a pedestal while our mother never missed an opportunity to criticize my two sisters for diet, weight, clothing choices and anything else imaginable.
I’ve been working hard my entire life to unlearn and correct this conditioning and I’m determined to break this cycle if and when my wife and I fulfill our dream of bringing daughters into the world. I wonder if Liz is burdened and affected by the same generational misogyny or if Wolfe’s birth simply triggered protective maternal instincts that overrode and overwhelmed the schools of thought she has devoted her life to.
On that note I need to get into the topic of childhood sexual abuse. My sisters were harassed and I was molested by a man that my mother hired to work in our garden but the greater trauma was that after we worked up the nerve to go to her about it she completely disregarded and refused to believe us:
“You kids just don’t understand, people from other countries are just more affectionate than they are here…”
The gardener was from Mexico. It could have been that my mother was trying too hard to be a “good liberal” but I suspect a deeper pathology. She had a scar on her cheek from where a man had cut her while breaking into her New York apartment and almost certainly raped her. The only thing she ever said on the matter was how frightened this man seemed – as if she held more empathy for him than she had for herself as a victim.
Perhaps a touch of Stockholm Syndrome, regardless we went to our father about the gardener and he believed us instantly and chased the abuser from our home under threat of violence. I only bring all of this up because Wolfe makes references to having been subjected to childhood rape in the lyrics of many of his songs – most notably From Victim To Villain. While it’s possible that this is fabulization intended to present himself as a more sympathetic character nearly everything else he rapped about contained some kernel of truth and I have no reason to assume this is any different.
Whatever he went through it in no way reduces his culpability for the many women he terrorized or the sexual abuse of children he enabled and encouraged by consuming the photos and videos thus created. What I do wonder is whether his own mother failed to believe and protect him as mine did and if so whether the resulting guilt played a role in her later permissiveness.
I used to work as a teacher’s aide at the same High School I had previously attended and one of my students had a home life superficially similar to Wolfe’s. This young man was placed in special education classes for his emotional issues but clearly had the intelligence to perform at an advanced level if he would only apply himself. The source of his rage was that his mother was in a lesbian relationship and he had come dangerously close to landing himself in a foster home through violent outbursts directed at his mother’s partner.
I tried to convince him to redirect his efforts to a GED exam, he’d barely been applying himself to the less rigorous special education curriculum, as a way of moving forward in his life and gaining some degree of independence. His anger towards his mother was a tapestry of several important threads: childhood neglect, what he saw as her role in his abandonment by his father, the perception that his own masculinity had been deemed as “unacceptable” – I tried to explain to him that so long as this anger consumed him his mother would remain in the driver’s seat of his life.
I wasn’t able to help much as a mentor or role model. The poison of his wrath was colored by misogyny and homophobia and he resented my efforts to model a way to purge his legitimate grievances of this irrational hate. He didn’t show up for school the following year and the simplest explanation was that he’d either been incarcerated or gotten himself placed in the foster system. I didn’t have the clearance level to find out that sort of information.
Before I listened to Wolfe’s Fluid Exchange interview I’d guessed that his story would cleave closer to that of my former student but instead of anger all the evidence seems to point to intense codependence with Liz. The one trace I saw of resentment was toward Liz separating from a long term girlfriend when Wolfe was thirteen, a woman that he had also grown up calling “mom”, and any subsequent contact being forbidden.
I don’t have enough information to say whether or not this woman had been a parental figure for the entirety of Wolfe’s childhood but based on what I do know it seems more likely than not.
For any readers interested in picking up Alraune themselves this is your warning that I’m about to give away the ending. If you recall Doctor Jacob ten Brinken is both Alraune’s creator and adoptive father. For most of the novel he delights in the carnage brought about by his protégé as a passive spectator and enriches himself through her earth-connected mystical powers.
After the death of Wölfchen Gontram, Alraune’s childhood playmate and favorite toy, the doctor himself falls under her spell. Disregarding the responsibilities of his financial empire he follows the girl like a pet dog and is treated accordingly. His pederastic tendencies are hinted at toward the opening of the text and to reassure himself of his virility he forces himself on a thirteen year old girl from the lower economic classes.
His crime is discovered and he attempts to convince Alraune to join him in his flight from justice. She flatly refuses and he hangs himself in despair – but not before setting his hand to a final prank. Frank Braun, the nephew who first conceived of the experiment, is named the girl’s guardian and executor of the remaining estate. His intention is to bring his nephew to the same ruin to which he cast himself but fate has somewhat different plans.
Braun does become infatuated with the girl but for the first time in the young woman’s life this obsession is mutual. The wealthy Countess from the beginning of the book loses her fortune through Alraune’s refusal to invest her inherited funds in the Countess’s favor and to take revenge she tells the girl of her unsavory parentage and the experimental nature of her birth. This and Braun’s intention to spurn his lover trigger the conclusion. Alraune goes mad and plunges from the eaves of the mansion while sleepwalking – bringing with her the final Gontram daughter.
With that we leave Alraune behind and turn our remaining attention to Drrty Pharms. Several times in my research I came across references to Wolfe’s total dependence on his mother. A roommate of his at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 speaks of Wolfe being unable to even buy groceries without assistance and Liz abruptly appearing to pick him up after he attracted the attention of local authorities by posting about bringing a gun to school.
While Liz seemed determined to do anything in her power to shield Wolfe from legal consequences for his actions she may not have been the only family member to do so. Mike Margolies, Liz’s father and Wolfe’s grandfather, is obliquely referred to as belonging to a “Jewish Mafia” and Wolfe has rapped multiple times about using large sums of money to make rape charges disappear.
The article in The Daily Beast has a more detailed rundown of the elder Margolies business connections and it is not inconceivable that as the sole male heir to this empire Wolfe would enjoy special protections.
However something shifted in 2019. It could have been the heavy drug charges with two confirmed overdoses, the child sex abuse material on a seized phone, the increased attention his social media posts were getting, the level of violence he was perpetrating in relationships or most likely a combination of everything. While Liz had always worked hard to shield him from legal trouble before it seems like his antics were negatively impacting her professional reputation and career. Something had to give.
My only source on this is anonymous Reddit comments from posters who claim to have been close to him personally but the things they are saying sound reasonable enough. If, as they say, Wolfe followed every piece of advice Liz gave him without question it’s easy to see how she ensured he’d get the maximum prison time. She apparently convinced him to take the first offer without negotiation and tell every single detail of his sexual history to a court psychologist whether it incriminated him or not.
This next image picks up after discussing an attorney who advised Wolfe to hold out for a better plea bargain:
I do believe that Wolfe deserved the fourteen years he got – and honestly more when you take all the victims and violent sexual assaults into accounts. This is pure speculation on my part but I wonder if Liz offered an assurance he’d take the full fourteen years in exchange for limiting charges to the drugs and CSAM on the seized phone. Nobody is responsible for anybody else’s actions but a serial rapist son would have been a worse look for her than a drug and porn addicted one.
Putting things back in terms of Alraune, Liz fits the archetype of Wolfe’s creator about as well as Frank Braun does for the novel’s titular character. She chose to have a child, carried him to term and continues to wield a powerful influence over his decision making process. He absolutely dug his own grave but once she realized there was nowhere else for him to go did she escort him into it?
Assuming nothing else happens in jail and none of the women groomed or assaulted by Wolfe are able to bring additional charges to trial he will be back on the street in fourteen years or less. I am not a big enough fool to look at an American prison and expect rehabilitation. If we believe him when he speaks of being a rape victim himself several times over and likewise believe him when he describes himself as devoid of morality and empathy what hope is there in him not posing a threat to the most vulnerable members of society?
On Fluid Exchange he refers to his own use of estradiol as tantamount to chemical castration but under this regimen he is already known to have engineered the violent assault of a barely adolescent girl. He does not present as particularly unintelligent so might he have achieved moral growth on these matters in the interim? Sex offenders are known for having some of the lowest recidivism rates and optimism in this regard may not be unwarranted.
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Whether the phenomenon is truly growing or the internet has merely given voice to something that has always been here – the violent misogyny of angry young men feels more urgent than it ever has in my life. It’s terrifying to me than any random ten year old watching Minecraft content on YouTube will slowly be steered toward “cringe SJW feminist gets owned” videos and similar red pill content.
Up until a couple weeks ago I was active in political discussion communities on Reddit and saw a distressing rise in young men who believe that feminism is inherently misandrist, rape allegations are overwhelmingly false and straight white men are the most oppressed minority in modern America.
It was a bit like pissing into the wind but I tried to model positive masculinity and share assurance that walking away from hate can and will improve every aspect of your life. Predictably I got my account of ten years banned for my trouble. Apparently explaining that picking a strange bear over a strange man isn’t sexist and correcting distorted readings of statistics concerning domestic violence in lesbian relationships both count as “promoting identity based hate”.
I’ve tried to appeal but if the people you’re pissing off have nothing but time and vitriol, especially if they’re moderators, it’s something of a lost cause.
That’s all probably for the best as it leaves me more time to write here (but less opportunities to share it). For weeks I’ve been working on this monster story and the best place to end it seems to be the tiny image of a post by Liz Margolies I left all the way at the top of this piece:
“You will always be my son…”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 