“Your favorite punching bag is no more,” someone wrote me earlier today. That’s not quite accurate.
Favorite punching bags come and go, of course. At one point the record for most me-punches absorbed was clearly held by Roy Pearson, Jr. the former administrative-law judge who accused a dry cleaner of losing a pair of pants and sued it for 65 million dollars. See, e.g., “The $65-Million-Pants Case: Year 16 (June 10, 2020) (he lost but kept appealing). But a search also turns up a lot of punches aimed at one federal agency that has been consistently useless since its creation. See, e.g., “TSA: Terrorist Source of Amusement” (Mar. 31, 2013). The top ten punchees probably also include professional sleazebag Joe Francis of “Girls Gone Wild” infamy (“Judge Skeptical of Joe Francis’s Explanation” (July 30, 2014)); the corrupt and thoroughly ridiculous Rod Blagojevich (“An Evening With Blago” (Aug. 17, 2020)); and former star athlete and non-murderer O.J. Simpson (“O.J. Embarks on Long, Slow Bronco Ride Into Eternity” (Apr. 12, 2024)). No doubt artificial intelligence and the lawyers humiliated by having trusted it will eclipse all of these, but only time will tell. So, it might not be technically accurate to say that Nicholas Rossi has been my favorite punching bag.
He is dead, though.
Or is he? As you may recall, Nicholas Rossi has faked death before, one of several strategies he deployed in hopes of dodging multiple rape charges. After fleeing Utah, he eventually settled in Rhode Island under the name “Nicholas Alahverdian,” which he used for years. But in 2019, when police finally started to close in, he suddenly developed late-stage cancer, and shortly thereafter a completely ridiculous obituary said he had died. Two years later, someone who looked an awful lot like him, and even had the same very distinctive tattoos, turned up in a Scottish hospital claiming to be an Irish orphan named “Arthur Knight.” His claim that somebody tattooed him while he slept in order to frame him is what originally put him on the punch list. See “Suspect Claiming Mistaken Identity Says Someone Tattooed Him Without His Knowledge” (Nov. 15, 2022).
The failure of anyone on Earth to believe that story did not deter him. For the next year and a half, Rossi fought extradition while continuing to insist that it was all a case of mistaken identity. Scotland put up with this obvious nonsense until early 2024, when he was finally dragged onto a plane headed for the United States, literally kicking and screaming and somehow briefly losing his pants. See “Former Fugitive Extradited, Briefly De-Trousered” (Jan. 9, 2024). Only in October 2024 did he finally admit his true identity, but then told what was arguably an even dumber story. All to no avail. See “Alleged Irish Orphan Convicted of Being American Rapist” (Aug. 14, 2025). He was later convicted of a second rape, and was sentenced to five years to life on each charge.
But as we learned today, “life” turned out to be less than a year. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Rossi/Alahverdian/Knight died on June 25 in a Utah hospital, having chosen to “discontinue medical treatment” for an “existing condition.” Corrections officials did not disclose what the condition was, so it’s impossible to say whether it was the same late-stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that killed him in 2019, until it didn’t. He consistently showed up in court in a wheelchair and with an oxygen tank, but he was doing that in Scotland when he was claiming to be an Irish orphan, so there are reasons to doubt those things were really necessary. If they were, that makes his story only marginally less ridiculous.
His death itself is not funny, of course, but given his crimes, it is also not sad.
Should he turn up again later under yet another name having faked death a second time, I’ll mention him again. (If he gets caught as a result of having trusted artificial intelligence to do something, I’ll definitely mention him again.) But that seems very unlikely. I think his run has now come to an end.