What Happens When Mackenzie Shirilla Becomes an Influencer From Prison?

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This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
Christine Russo lost her brother Dominic when Mackenzie Shirilla drove 100 miles per hour into a brick wall. Two people are dead. One person convicted of murder. And the months since a Netflix documentary put the case back in front of millions of people, Christine has watched Shirilla's Instagram following Explode! Past 40,000 watched a free Mackenzie Shirilla Facebook page grow past 20,000 members and listen to recorded jail calls where Shirilla's mother talks about writing a book. While her daughter talks about modeling after she gets out and laughs about how famous she's become, Christine launched a petition. She calls it Dom's Law. Victims Before Influencers. She wants Ohio to modernize its Son of Sam statutes to cover the creator economy, monetize social media, influencer platforms, crowdfunding, sponsorships, merchandise, paid content and proxy accounts. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed it. Her cause is righteous and her grief is real. The law she's asking for will almost certainly be struck down. Not because she's wrong, but because every version of this law for almost 50 years has met the same fate. Son of Sam Law, that's what we're getting into today. And as we do your thoughts, your opinions, I'd love to hear them. There's no right or wrong on this. In the comment section on Substack and YouTube, those links are in the description. To give you some context here and where this might be going, let's talk about it. The original Son of Sam Law was passed to New York in 1977, named after serial killer David Berkowitz. Publishers were circling after his arrest, ready to pay him for his story. And the legislature did what legislators do when the public is outraged. They wrote a bill. Executive Law, Section 632A, so that if you commit a crime, you don't get to sell the story of that crime. Any money you make goes to a victim's compensation fund. The concept was morally clean and legally intuitive, and nobody with a conscience really could argue against it. And in 1991, the United States Supreme Court struck it down unanimously, not because the government lacked compelling interest in compensating victims. The court acknowledged that it did, but the law imposed a financial penalty on speech based on its content, and the First Amendment doesn't allow that. It doesn't matter how repugnant the speaker is, you cannot single out a category of expression and say this speech costs you money. But that speech doesn't.
The statute was so broadly drafted, it could have been used to seize profits from the autobiography of Malcolm X. That's what overboard means in constitutional law. And the court wasn't subtle about saying so. More than 40 states had already passed their own versions by then. The dominoes fell one after another. Arizona's Son of Sam Law was struck down in 2000 California's fell in 2002 Challenged by a man named Barry Keenan, convicted decades earlier for kidnapping Frank Sinatra Jr. Massachusetts lost that same year. Nevada's was struck down in 2004 over a prison memoir written by a man convicted of voluntary manslaughter who had already served his three years. He wrote a book about the experience. The victim's family sued for royalties. The court said, nope, 40 plus states passed these laws. Courts kept tearing them apart. The pattern has never really broken. Legislatures write them on a wave of public anger and courts strike them down on constitutional speech protections. The emotional math works. The legal math, not so much. Ohio already has Son of Sam laws written in the 1970s and the law they have covers what those laws were designed to cover. Book deals, movie rights, direct compensation for selling the story of a crime. Ohio House Bill 505, introduced in 2025, would extend that to crowdfunding platforms. And it was inspired by a separate case where more than $55,000 were raised on GoFundMe for a man accused of killing a Hamilton County Sheriff's Deputy. Dom and Davion's Law goes considerably further. That petition calls for restrictions on monetized social media accounts, influencer platforms, crowdfunding sponsorships, merchandise, paid content and proxy accounts. It proposes mandatory disclosure of all monetized social media and business arrangements connected to crime-related notoriety. It asks for courts and parole boards to have authority to impose case-specific restrictions during supervised release. That is an enormous amount of ground to cover. In the modern economy, monetized social media, sponsorships, merchandise and paid content are not niche activities. That is a description of how a significant portion of the American workforce earns a living. More than 200 million people globally identify as content creators. For millions of Americans, their social media presence is their livelihood, their resume, their storefront. The original Son of Sam laws tried to do one narrow thing, stop criminals from selling their story of their crime. The court said even that was too broad. These new proposals are trying to cover every revenue stream that could possibly be connected to notoriety, casting a wider net with weaker constitutional rope. Now, Gypsy Rose Blanchard weighed in on the Shirilla case of all people. She said she believes Shirilla specifically should not benefit from social media. And she drew a distinction. In her view, people who survived terrible circumstances and committed crimes in response should be able to sell their stories. But Shirilla's case is different because there is no sympathetic story behind it.