California police say they are investigating the death of a prominent men's rights attorney who was fatally shot at his home over the weekend.
County deputies responded to reports of a shooting around 4 p.m. Saturday on Glenwood Drive in Cedarpines Park and found Marc Angelucci "unresponsive and suffering from apparent gunshot wounds," according to a statement from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department. The 52-year-old was pronounced dead at the scene. The investigation is ongoing and the motivation behind the shooting remains unknown, the office said.
Angelucci founded the Los Angeles chapter of the National Coalition for Men, a controversial group that describes itself as "a nonprofit organization that raises awareness about the ways sex discrimination affects men and boys." Founded in 1977, NCFM says it works on issues like male victims of sexual and domestic violence, male reproductive rights, which includes false paternity claims, adoption rights and rights over frozen embryos, and the gender pay gap, which the organization says "only exists" because "men work far more hours at high-stress jobs they hate with longer commutes, less flexibility, more physical risk, etc., just to be breadwinners and feed their families, only to die younger and get bashed for 'earning more.'"
Angelucci, who served as vice president of NCFM, joined the organization while he was a law student at the University of California-LA School of Law after a male friend who had been physically abused by his wife was denied access to aid, according to a statement from the organization.
"Marc was an unbelievably generous man, living on a shoestring despite some personal health challenges so he could donate many millions of dollars of his time to mostly voluntary legal work on behalf of men’s rights and the genuine gender equality that is so badly needed in this country and this world," read the statement, which commended him on winning Woods V. Horton, a 2008 case which held that it is unconstitutional to exclude male victims of domestic violence from state funding for victim services.
The statement also celebrated Angelucci for winning an equal protection case against the Selective Service Administration overturning male-only draft registration last year.
"Women are now allowed in combat, so this decision is long overdue," Angelucci said at the time. He added that women "should face the same repercussions as men for any noncompliance" with registration laws.
NCFM has been criticized as a male supremacist organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which accuses the group of distorting statistics and deploying litigation "to indicate female privilege, blame women or create false equivalences between the oppression of men and of women, rather than simply seek to advance the cause of men and fathers."
Angelucci also appeared in the "The Red Pill," a divisive 2016 documentary about the men's rights movement that inspired protests and was decried by critics as "misogynistic propaganda." The film's director, Cassie Jaye, wrote a tribute to Angelucci in a blog post on Monday, referring to him as "one of my dearest friends and the most brilliant and good-hearted person to dedicate his life to justice for men and boys."
Ronda Kennedy, a Republican candidate running to represent the 26th congressional district in California who had served as co-counsel with Angelucci on previous cases, said she had spoken to detectives and urged anyone with information to reach out to authorities.