WARNING: This article contains upsetting material relating to the abuse and murder committed by Luka Magnotta. Please proceed with caution.
Don’t Fk With Cats has proven to be one of Netflix’s more controversial true crime documentaries, but there’s more to the Luka Magnotta case than it shows. While Netflix has carved out an interesting niche for itself with acclaimed and popular documentaries, many of those titles have caused their fair share of controversy. The streaming service’s latest controversial documentary series is Don’t Fk With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer, the three-part docuseries that looks into the much-publicized case of murderer and animal torturer Luka Magnotta. Although the series examines the history of the events from multiple angles, there are missing details from the Luka Magnotta case that warrant further discussion.
Don’t Fk With Cats is not the first Netflix original true-crime documentary to cause controversy. Making a Murderer became a hot-button topic, leading audiences and legal experts to argue over how biased the filmmakers’ stances were regarding a difficult case. The 2018 series Evil Genius garnered headlines for deciding to show audiences the moment a man died after a bomb around his throat detonated, as well as its depiction of the accused killer’s mental illness. Don’t Fk With Cats is similarly drawing criticism for its depiction of horrific images, as well as its treatment of mental illness. As with all true crime documentaries, elements are condensed for time or not included in the wider retelling. This always comes with its own set of problems, and that’s evident with the Magnotta case, a strange and deeply disturbing story that must be handled with care.
Magnotta is one of the most infamous criminals in modern Canadian history, an aspiring male model and part-time escort who demanded the world’s attention via films he made of himself torturing and killing kittens. These clips quickly went viral and a group of amateur online sleuths took it upon themselves to track Magnotta down and bring him to justice. Before the authorities would listen to them, however, Magnotta killed and dismembered Chinese student Lin Jun, an act he also filmed himself committing. The documentary at first focuses on the investigative work done to find Magnotta and the wider ramifications of such work before moving its focus more onto Magnotta himself. Given the controversy of the case itself and the need for sensitivity in discussing it, it’s no wonder that Don’t F**k With Cats garnered so much criticism for its depressingly ham-fisted approach to the story and decision to show some of the footage Magnotta recorded of his torturous and murderous misdeeds.
Luka Magnotta’s Background and Mental Health
Magnotta was born Eric Clinton Kirk Newman On July 24, 1982. The documentary does not mention that Luka Magnotta is not his real name (he legally changed it in 2006), although his various aliases are discussed. Not much is revealed about his childhood, even in moments where his mother, Anna Yourkin, discusses and defends him; the filmmakers include a brief clip of Yourkin discussing Magnotta being bullied as a child, as well as his love of movies. Magnotta’s mental health is briefly discussed in the documentary but with a heavily skeptical slant from the narrative. There is a reason for this: How do you fairly and empathetically discuss a convicted killer’s mental health when he has spent most of his life lying about himself and manipulating others with said mistruths? Don’t F**k With Cats seems firmly of the opinion that Magnotta is either making up his mental issues or greatly exaggerating them so as to be able to claim diminished responsibility during his trial. The documentary even implies that Magnotta’s act of murder, and his subsequent questioning, were an elaborate homage to one of his favourite movies, Basic Instinct.
There is more to Luka Magnotta’s history of mental illness than Don’t F**k With Cats shows. As noted by the Montreal Gazette, one month before he killed Lin Jun, Magnotta went to the Jewish General Hospital where he told a psychiatrist he couldn’t sleep, and was feeling impulsive and irritable. He reportedly mentioned his family’s history with paranoid schizophrenia, with his father receiving a diagnosis for the condition in 1994. Magnotta received the same diagnosis five years later, which led him to drop out of high school.
The documentary reveals that Magnotta did seek help and repeatedly claimed that he had been manipulated and abuse for most of his life by a mysterious figure named Manny Lopez, who Magnotta says forced him to commit every crime he was accused of. The jury rejected this defense and there is no evidence that he even exists. The documentary poses the theory that Magnotta made him up, inspired by the film Basic Instinct. No connection is made between this and his diagnosis of schizophrenia, mostly because Don’t F**k With Cats seems to reject the idea that he ever was mentally ill, or at least not to the extent that he claimed.
While Magnotta’s potential schizophrenia diagnosis certainly doesn’t exonerate him of his abhorrent crimes — the Canadian court system found him guilty after all — it does present a problem for the documentary’s credibility. When their overriding narrative is one of Magnotta as a master criminal who is always two steps ahead of everyone else, it leaves little room to consider how mental illness could have played a part in his awful plans. The trial never rejected the notion of Luka Magnotta being mentally ill. The prosecution did accuse him of pretending to be schizophrenic, but all experts who provided trial testimony for both the crown and the defense provided diagnoses of varying degrees of seriousness, from Borderline Personality Disorder to acute narcissism to paranoid schizophrenia. True crime often has a problem navigating mental health – how do you talk about it without demonizing it or using it as a catch-all justification for disgusting acts? It’s one area where Don’t F**k With Cats seriously slips up.
Magnotta’s Hunt for the Spotlight
Don’t F**k With Cats shows footage from Magnotta’s audition tape for the reality series COVERguy, a 2005 show looking for new male models. This was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how Magnotta tried to integrate himself into popular culture and media for attention. He also auditioned for the Slice network television show Plastic Makes Perfect in February 2008, describing himself as a plastic surgery addict. He also appeared as a pin-up model in fab magazine, a Toronto-based publication for the gay community.
More attention is given by the documentary to the online façade Magnotta carved out for himself and how the internet detectives trying to track him down had to navigate it. Magnotta created many profiles on various forums and social media sites, fake accounts called “sock puppets,” with dozens of Facebook groups full of near-identical comments made to “celebrate” him. Police stated that Magnotta set up at least 70 Facebook pages and 20 websites under different names.
This is another tricky area the Netflix docuseries struggles to deal with fully. If Magnotta is a narcissist who craved attention in any form and sought it through various channels, legitimate or otherwise. How do you depict that without feeding into his ego? The chances are you can’t, but you can at least be more cognizant of this fact than the documentary often appears to be. It infamously ends with one of the internet “detectives” turning to the camera and blaming the audience for feeding the monster of Magnotta until he became more dangerous than ever. Little room is given by the documentary to explore the psychological and societal context Magnotta lived within and how the various intersections of media, internet, celebrity, and sociopathy worked hand-in-hand.
The Death and Violation of Lin Jun
One of the biggest problems with Don’t F**k With Cats is how Lin Jun, the man who Magnotta violently murdered, was side-lined in favor of Magnotta and the kittens. Little time is given to detailing Lin’s life, his family, or the circumstances that led him to Canada. At one point in the documentary, one of Lin’s friends even comments that he was almost forgotten in the aftermath of the trial but the series itself doesn’t seem self-aware enough to understand the role it plays in exacerbating that problem.
Controversially, the documentary shows footage from the video Magnotta made of himself killing Lin, which he titled 1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick and uploaded to Bestgore.com. While Don’t F**k With Cats does not show the murder itself, it shows enough footage and plays enough audio from it to lead to questions over the ethical implications of such a decision. In a more empathetic move, the documentary does not reveal the upsetting extent of Magnotta’s abuse of Lin, which included acts of necrophilia and possible cannibalism.
It notes that Magnotta stabbed Lin with a knife and a screwdriver painted to resemble an ice pick, then dismembered his body, sending a foot and a hand to the headquarters of both the Conservative and Liberal Parties of Canada. Notes were attached to the packages, saying that six body parts had been distributed and that the killer would strike again. The content of these notes was kept out of the press by the police for fears of possible copycat crimes. The documentary doesn’t mention that aspects of the crime were kept out of the press, nor does it explore the relationship between Magnotta and Lin, which may have been romantic in nature (via The Globe and Mail).
Lin’s family are almost entirely excluded from the narrative, possibly because they did not want to participate in the documentary. No mention is made of how China reacted to the news of Lin’s murder. Lin’s father, Diran Lin, traveled from China to attend the preliminary hearing.
Magnotta’s Ties to White Supremacy
A year before Magnotta became one of the most wanted men in Canada, he was being hailed as a hero on far-right white supremacist website Stormfront.org (via National Post). A post made by forum member reddragon1 described Magnotta as “an open white supremacist” and claims he was being forced to flee Canada for Russia because of those views. The post claims that Magnotta’s personal website said that “blacks get their own countries, Chinese get their own countries … however if white people want their own countries then we are denied that right.” It is suspected that reddragon1 was Magnotta himself, once again seeking attention. This does not come up in the documentary, and neither do claims made by Chinese officials that Magnotta’s murder of Lin Jun may have been racially motivated.
The Aftermath
Luka Magnotta is serving a life sentence at Port-Cartier prison in Quebec. Since his imprisonment, Magnotta has reportedly married a fellow inmate, Anthony Jolin, who is serving a life sentence for killing an inmate at another prison in 2003.
His mother, Anna Yourkin, published a book called My Son, The Killer: The Untold Story of Luka Magnotta and “1 Lunatic 1 Ice Pick”. In the book, co-written by true-crime author Brian Whitney, Magnotta continues to claim that he did not kill any kittens and disagreed with claims that he sought attention through various online aliases and lies. Whitney describes Magnotta, who he talked to from jail via phone calls and letters, as being “rather haughty and above it all.” He later told the National Post in an email:
The website that hosted the video of Jun Lin’s murder, Bestgore.com, later faced charges for corrupting public morals. The site’s owner Mark Marek was charged by Edmonton police with obscenity for hosting the video. On January 25, 2016, Marek changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to a six-month conditional sentence. The video is no longer hosted on the site. It’s disappointing that this aspect of the story is not covered in Don’t F**k With Cats because it’s the perfect fit for the documentary’s themes of internet fame and the cycle of attention Magnotta created.
“He thinks society is sick — not him. He feels (or at least says) that people are obsessed with him, constantly making things up, gossiping about him, etc. I think there were definitely moments when I felt he was being deceitful, other times it seems like he actually believes what he is saying.”
Lin Jun’s family has chosen to stay out of the spotlight since their son’s murder. In a letter Lin’s father submitted as an impact statement in 2014, he wrote:
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“The night Lin Jun died, parts of many other people died in one way or another. His mother, his sister and me, his friends, Lin Feng. In one night, we lost a lifetime of hope, our futures, parts of our past […] My memories of Lin Jun do not stop at his youth but now I see those memories through his death, how he died, how he must have suffered, how humiliating his death has become with a movie, post office packages, and only the accused’s story that it was no this fault and the fault of government agents […] Lin Jun will never be there for us. We do not want to tell our story because it is too sad to repeat. We cannot talk much about Lin Jun without talking about his murder. The murder that robbed us not only of Lin Jun but our ability to think and talk about him without feeling pain and shame.”
