**Harvard Medical’s Instagram pAGE HERE**

‘Free Luigi’: Professor calls for accused murderer’s release at Harvard fat liberation panel

‘Health insurance industry is equal opportunity evil,’ Roxane Gay says

Rutgers University professor Roxane Gay called for the liberation of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of murdering the United Healthcare CEO, at a fat liberation panel hosted at Harvard Medical School.

….

Gay also told the audience, “The health insurance industry is equal opportunity evil.” She serves as an artist-in-residence for the Master of Science in Media, Medicine and Health and the Media and Medicine Certificate Program at Harvard Medical School.

“They are terrible for thin people, for fat people, for white people, for black people … They just want to prioritize profit over bodies and health,” she said.

…. Gay serves as the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. She is the cousin of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who resigned from her position following criticism for numerous plagiarism allegations.

Panelists at the event, titled “Against the Pathology of Unruly Bodies,” discussed “the intersection of fatness and healthcare,” according to a description of the panel on Instagram.

They also discussed “the way fat bodies are pathologized by medical professionals with grave consequences, and how medical professionals can more ethically treat fat patients as people rather than as problems to be solved,” the post states.

Independent journalist Benjamin Ryan called the event a “Masterclass of Medical Misinformation and Denialism About Obesity’s Health Risks,” in a post on X.

He noted that another panelist, author Da’Shaun Harrison, said “Fascism, is the very foundation of the Western society, the very foundation of the U.S., through the transatlantic slave trade and through colonialism.”

Harrison said “body fascism” is society’s rigid set of rules for how bodies should look and function, used as a way to punish fat people.

MORE: Nearly half of young adults call Luigi Mangione’s actions ‘acceptable’ in new poll

🚨 At tonight’s Harvard Medical School event, artist-in-residence Roxane Gay responded to a question about the health insurance industry with “Free Luigi.” Minutes earlier, Gay admitted she uses concierge medicine after deciding to “throw money at this problem” and “buy my way out” of ordinary healthcare. Gay, incidentally, is former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s first cousin. We all know Harvard is morally bankrupt at this point, but this was a great reminder.
— Stu Smith (@thestustustudio) October 1, 2026