A handful of late donations helped Garret “Press with Rancor” Van Nett win Thursday’s GoFundMe title with a $95.00 haul based on donations made during Jose “Chille” DeCastro’s live stream announcing Van Nett’s conviction of felony obstruction and resisting charges in Michigan.
Van Nett’s win was powered by DeCastro fan Gloria AD, who spammed DeCastro’s chat during the live stream with reminders to donate. Her efforts ultimately resulted in three donations, including one by Gloria herself, to bring Rancor to the $95.00 win.
The win demonstrates how reliant Van Nett has been on DeCastro. Not only is DeCastro in the process of paying $48,000.00 in legal bills on Van Nett’s behalf, but he also spearheaded the defense with Attorney Jim Makowski parroting theories that DeCastro has spread over the past year.
Van Nett came off as a pawn in his own trial as DeCastro dominated every aspect of the case without bothering to have Van Nett on to speak for himself, and later, blame Van Nett for the loss in court for standing his ground with the police – something DeCastro advocated to do – as that was what DeCastro claimed lost the case for him.
In funding news, DeCastro claimed that he never withdrew the roughly $4,000.00 in the fund, so he announced the decision that the fund would be used to start Van Nett’s appeal. It is unclear if DeCastro made the decision on his own, or if Van Nett was involved in the decision to move forward with an appeal.
Makowski made it clear on DeCastro’s live stream that he was not an appellate attorney, so he would only be representing Van Nett at his sentencing. DeCastro would need to hire a new attorney on Van Nett’s behalf to handle the appeal, and Van Nett would need to heavily rely on his GoFundMe and more direct donations to DeCastro to handle starting over with a new attorney.
Long Island Audit’s “Support the Fight Against Tyranny & Corruption” campaign came in second for the day, ending a long streak without a donation, and our own on-going expenses fund took third for the day with a $25.00 haul.
On that note, if you’d like to join our hate watcher in making me wonder why Pants is apparently living in my crawl space to spy on me as he/she/they force me to continue to write this column each morning, we do have a GoFundMe of our own (https://gofund.me/b8144e31). All proceeds go to keeping the lights on, eating, and writing new stories to feature here and on reallycoolsite.org.