Disney's Villain

minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Schuer's life. Losing his job was not only financially devastating, it was the death of his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation. And losing a job is never easy. It's a crushing blow. You have to figure out how you're going to pay the rent, how you're going to get healthcare, how you're going to find new job. I can't speak for everybody, but I think I'm not alone in saying that it's

also embarrassing. It hurts your feelings, your ego takes a real hit, and for some people that just isn't something they can move on from I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys, This is kind of a silly one. Nobody gets hurt, nobody dies, nothing really bad actually happened. I know. I said last week that I ended up with the episode that came out because I was reaching around for something quick, because the story I was trying trying to write just felt unwieldy and I was having

trouble forcing it into the right shape. Well that's where we still are this week. I'm still really fighting with something I think is going to take a few more weeks to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative. So here we are again at the eleventh hour, and I have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds and ends about a story that spans fifty years, and so I'm scrounging around for something else. I'm not asking

for your sympathy for anything. You probably have a real job where you make something or help people, and my job is just telling you a horrible little story. But all I can tell you is the truth, and the truth is sometimes I have no idea how I'm going to force any more words out of my brain and into this microphone. So all I've got this week is Michael Schueer, And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody. He wasn't a member of any hate groups. As far as I can tell, until last summer, he had no

history of any criminal conduct. I couldn't find so much as a speeding ticket. He was squeaky clean. He was a family man, married for nearly ten years, and the father of three young children. But the course of action he decided on after he got fired last summer is what makes him a weird little guy. And I think he's actually a tiny example of one of the emerging weird little guy archetypes. I don't have a name for

it yet. I don't really have the weird little guy taxonomy mapped out, but patterns are starting to appear in these stories. There are distinct types of weird little guy, and one of them is a kind of guy who can't accept when he's wrong. More importantly, he can't accept being wronged. And God help you if you have even

a passing encounter with this kind of guy. For some of them, the perceived slight is so minor that it's not something I think I would ever think about again, let alone devote the rest of my life to getting revenge over it. If you've listened to the whole catalog of this show, you've heard about some of these guys I'm thinking about, people like Frank Sweeney from the pair of episodes back in September. Frank was a lifelong neo Nazi, sure,

but mostly he was a con man. He ended up in prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons, things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns that he didn't actually own, and then accepting numerous buyers money for these imaginary collector's items. Later in his life, he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy,

purebread hale as cats. He conned the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that he was helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy that he'd befriended in prison. He once tricked a mob lawyer into flying him across the country and putting him up in a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about a Chicago mob boss he'd once shared a cell with. He loved to lie, but more than that, I think the defining characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is

his sense of self righteous indignation. When he felt like someone had wronged him, he made it his life's work to get back at them, to hurt them back the way they'd hurt him, and he did it in some really bizarre ways. In the early nineties, when he was living in an apartment in New Jersey, a family with children moved into a neighboring apartment, and once he decided that the neighbors were intentionally disregarding his request to keep their children quiet, he made it his life's mission to

destroy the entire family. He spread rumors that the father had HIV and that he'd given it to his children. He shut off their power at random. He filled the lock on their front door with staples so they couldn't get into their home. He had their mail routed to a random address in Iowa. And he subscribed to their nine year old son to pornographic magazines. And that's unhinged behavior. That is an unnecessary escalation to the problem of a

noisy fourth grader. And it was all because he felt entitled to complete silence in his apartment and total obedience from his neighbors, and two decades after that, when he was already a very old man, the stranger made a passing comment about how he'd parked his car at the post parking lot, and instead of just letting it go, like almost anyone else on earth would, he spent three years stalking that woman and her entire family, sending them

threatening postcards, spreading rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior, that they were drug addicts and criminals, and they were doing tax fraud. Three years because she commented on how he had parked his car. And then there was Walter Fitzpatrick from those episodes back in November. He was the sovereign citizen who tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse in rural Tennessee because they wouldn't help him indict President

Barack Obama for treason. And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long history of this kind of grievance motivated behavior. He'd been banned from his congressman's office after the receptionist had to get a restraining order against him because he refused to accept that they just couldn't help him get a new trial. In his Navy court martial. And then there are the weird little guys who try to use the courts to get their revenge, becoming vexatious litigants, filing lawsuit after lawsuit

against anyone who says no to them. Guys like Robert Moller from a few weeks ago, the one time arms dealer who shipped hundreds of guns to Neo Nazis in South Africa. In his quieter older years, he seems to work out his anger by filing a constant stream of nuisance lawsuits. He filed a lawsuit against the hospital that didn't perform his elective surgery at the exact time they'd scheduled it. For lawsuits against the guys from the table tennis club who asked him to stop coming around because

his behavior was frightening. A lawsuit against the state because he didn't think it was fair that he got a traffic ticket. A lawsuit against a restaurant for asking him not to let his dog touch the food on the buffet. Like I said, I'm still working on the taxonomy here, but I think these are all, to some degree, the same kind of guy. The common denominator is that they can't handle discomfort. They can't handle someone telling them no. They can't handle being wrong, they can't handle not being

the protagonist of reality. This is their story and we're just the characters in it. We're supposed to behave the way he wants us to, and if we don't, his reaction is not going to be normal. And that's the mold that I think Michael Schuer fits into. He isn't, all things considered, really the kind of guy I'm interested in.

This isn't the kind of story I would normally choose for an episode of this show, because, like I said, he wasn't in any kind of hate group and he didn't hurt any But I am interested in this kind of guy, the kind of guy whose reaction to a pretty normal life event is decidedly not normal at all. The kind of guy who showed no other outward signs of being violent or hateful, but when confronted with an obstacle, suddenly reveals a previously hidden and very peculiar interest in

mass shootings and swastikas. But I guess we should start at the beginning. Michael Scheuer loved Disney. It had always been his dream to work for the company after graduating from Kent State in Ohio. He moved to Orlando to try to get us foot in the door. He started as a janitor and worked his way up, and on this front, I guess you do have to hand it to him, it looks like he did the work. He had a dream and he did the work to try

to make it come true. He had a college degree, but he was willing to take an entry level job making up trash at a theme park if that's what it took to be close to Mickey Mouse. He continued working at Disney while he earned his business degree, and slowly but surely, he worked his way up from groundskeeper to cast member and eventually got an office job at Disney. By twenty eighteen, he was working as a financial systems

analyst when COVID hit. His job was one of many that were cut by the company, and he spent the year that he was laid off trying anything he could to get back in and he was eventually rehired as part of the team doing technical support for computers installed on Disney cruise ships, and in twenty twenty four he was working on the team tasked with designing and updating the menus and menu signs used at Disney theme parks and resorts. In twenty twenty four, Michael Schuer's wife gave

birth to their third child. I don't know if Michael Scheuer took advantage of the full eight weeks of paternity leave that Disney claims to offer, but I do know that he took paternity leave because it was just a few days after returning from that leave in June of twenty twenty four that the incident took place. What exactly happened is in dispute. According to his defense attorney, his

version of events is this quote. Shortly after returning to work, mister Schuyer voiced a difference of opinion to his supervisor about a new process of menu creation. He believed his team agreed with him, but his supervisor did not. He met with his supervisor and a disagreement occurred. Mister Schuyer had a panic attack during the meeting. The next supervisor up the chain of command stated to mister Schuyer that he did not threaten his supervisor, but that mister Scheuer

was going to be suspended. A sworn statement from the supervisor in question, though, reads in June twenty twenty four, Michael Scheuer was terminated from employment due to misconduct against me in which he threatened me at work, and the government was prepared to present to witness who would testify that his behavior had been aggressive and threatening in the meeting that led to his termination. And maybe that comes down to semantics. Maybe she perceived his conduct as threatening

without him actually making a direct threat. That is technically different in the eyes of the law. But I think any reasonable person can understand that if you make your supervisor feel like she is in danger, you might get fired. He was initially just sent home and suspended, but after he sent an email to human resources described only as quote twenty four questions pertaining to the suspension, which I'm sure had a very normal tone, the decision was made

to terminate his employment with Disney. And this is the point at which he crossed the weird little guy rubicon. He was upset. It wasn't fair. This was his dream. He loved Disney, he loved working for Disney, and he needed that job. He needed the health insurance, he had a family to take care of. For God's sake, they just didn't understand. If they would have heard him out, they would understand that they were wrong to fire him,

but they wouldn't take his calls. He claims that he was unable to find an employment lawyer willing to take his case. He says he quote filed a complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but did not get a quick response. He felt isolated and depressed. He did not understand why nobody would speak with him. And this is the explanation his attorney offered for what happened next quote, he turned to what he thought would get Disney to

respond to him. I'm not an expert in employment law, but I did look up how long it usually takes to get a response from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission if you file a complaint online, The law says they have ten days to send notice of the complaint to your former employer, and then once they do that, the employer has thirty days from that date to respond to it. The average complaint takes about ten months to resolve start to finish. But he didn't even wait thirty days before

he decided to change tactics. He started trying to get Disney's attention his own way less than three weeks after he was fired, and so you might be thinking, oh, he probably sent some weird emails to his former coworkers, right, Maybe he started showing up outside the office or making a lot of phone calls. And those are all reasonable guesses. Those are things you might do if your stated goal

was to get someone's attention. No, what he decided to do is much weirder, and honestly, I don't understand why he thinks we would believe his claim that this was the only thing he could think of that would get them to call him again. From his lawyer quote, he started altering Disney's menus to try to get their attention and respond to him. Now, remember that was his job

before he was fired. He worked on the team responsible for designing, editing, and updating the files used to print the menus at restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels. Once the files were approved by the team at Disney, the physical menus were printed by a Minnesota based print and marketing company called Tailor Corporation. Just a few weeks after being fired, Scheyer logged into the online application used

by the print company to manage the menu files. A lot of the news coverage about this case refers to what he did as hacking, in which I didn't realize is technically the correct word for what happened. Hacking doesn't necessarily require any particular set of skills or you know, it's not like a nineties movie where they're tippy tapping on the keyboard as all the numbers flash on the screen. No, it just means any unauthorized access to a computer device

or network. And he definitely was not authorized to be logging in. But the company had actually just forgotten to change the password to the administrative account, and once he logged into that administrator's account, he created a new employee profile for himself using a fake name, and then using that account with a fake name, he logged in and he went to town. He replaced all of the font files for all of the menus in the system, and this sounds like hell. He didn't just change the fonts

that were used in the text of the menus. He changed the source files for all of the fonts in every menu, so all of the names of the fonts still appeared to be correct, but those names were now connected to a corresponding file for a different font, and he changed most of those fonts to wing dings the

font that's just weird little symbols. And because he'd altered the files themselves, the system then started pushing out this change to every single one of the thousands of files ever uploaded to this system, and this rendered the entire application completely useless for at least a week. And so because this took the entire system offline and rendered every single file useless, obviously they noticed this immediately. Disney pretty quickly tracked down the source of the problem and they

changed all the passwords so this couldn't happen again. But that didn't really stop him. So now that one avenue had been closed off, he just moved to a different strategy. If he couldn't log in, he would make sure no one else could either. He started small targeting those immediate supervisors, the ones who'd fired him, and he used their log in names and entered random, incorrect passwords. These repeated bad attempts to access the system, which would then trigger the

accounts to be locked out. At first, he was just doing this manually, so you have to imagine him sitting alone at his computer while his chronically ill wife is trying to take care of their three young children, one of whom is a newborn baby, and he's just sitting there at his computer again and again and again, typing in a random keyboard smash password and hitting enter over it over and over again so that his old boss

can't access her email. Throughout August and September of twenty twenty four, these attacks escalated, and he eventually wrote a script to automate the process of making these thousands and thousands of login attempts. On one day alone, he made eight thousand login attempts across accounts belonging to the four people that he thought were responsible for firing him, and he eventually branched out to fourteen day for An accounts, all of which belonged to members of the team he'd

worked on before he was fired. Over the course of about a month, he made one hundred thousand log in attempts, locking these employees out of their accounts for days at a time. And around the same time he's ramping up these attacks on his former coworkers accounts, he found a new way to mess with the menus Disney had changed all of the passwords, so he couldn't access the application

that was used by the Disney production team anymore. But the company that actually prints the finished menu files had their own system. All finished menu files had to be uploaded to the print company through a secure file transfer protocol. So he made his own menu files and uploaded them directly to the printer. His initial attempt to get Disney's attention had made the menus unusable. They had nonsense fonts, they would load the image files, or they just came

up as blank pages, so everyone noticed this. This was a very obvious attempt, But this time around he was a lot more subtle. If you're just looking quickly at these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong. Honestly, they might have even made it all the way through a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous. Because he's just changing individual words. He's changing the prices by a dollar or two. He removed an asterisk, he changed

the QR codes. They're just little changes, almost like maybe he didn't want them to notice this time, And honestly, some of them are kind of funny. I mean, overall, yes,

this is a bad situation. He should not have done any of this, But if he'd just stuck with immature little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone, because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing cheesy grits to cheesy shits on the menu for a cafe at Disney's old Key West resort, or changing shellfish to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast tea from a psalm tea to just ass tea. Is

a little bit funny. I'm not mad imagining an old couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu. It's whatever. But unfortunately, most of the changes were not funny swear words. Most of the changes were modifications to the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations, removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food allergens like peanuts. On other menus, he altered the region listed for wine selections. That one sounds mostly harmless to me.

Not a wine snob, so I don't really care where the grapes were grown. I'm not going to pretend I can taste the difference. But he swapped out the actual locations for places where well known mass shootings have occurred. In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent. He swapped out Willamette Valley. On one wine for Appalachi High an unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia that it only just happened the week that he did that.

On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika. He would later claim that he never actually intended for any of these altered files to get printed. He said that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer. He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies. He just wanted Disney to call him. He didn't want these menus to end up in anyone's hands. He just

wanted attention. But that claim falls apart. By the time he switched to a new mode of attack, he uploaded altered files directly into the server that functioned as the print queue for the company that printed the menus. So by that point in the process, the printer is receiving what they believe to be a file that has been proofed and approved and is ready to print. And they did, in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs.

Although by the time they did print these the investigation was coming to an end, and the affected items were destroyed before they were shipped out, and he wasn't hard to catch. Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected, Disney launched an internal investigation. Multiple employees interviewed during this process brought up the fact that Michael Scheuer had just

been fired. Further investigation showed the attacks had all been made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address, but when they looked further back into company logs, they found that before he was fired, Michael Scheuer had accessed his work email from home, and when he did that, he had his VPN on, so he managed to mask the true IP address of his home computer, but because he used the same VPN throughout, he was still using

an IP address that was provably connected to him. On September twenty third, twenty twenty four, multiple members of the menu production team were locked out of their accounts again. Someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access their accounts using incorrect passwords. At twelve forty one pm that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Schuer's front door. They had a warrant to search his home and seize his computers. At twelve forty six pm, the wave of

login attempts suddenly stopped and it never started again. Two minutes after that, Michael Schuyer answered his front door. He claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there, but he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening. I have no idea what that means. That never comes

up again. He told the FBI agents that sure, he definitely used his home computer to access systems related to his job when he still worked there, and maybe he logged into some work related stuff after he was fired, just to get his old pays st ubs, things like that, but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be there asking him questions like that, And when they explained to him why they were there and what they were investigating,

the outright denied having done anything of the sort. And then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because they were worried about him. The FBI took his computers with him that day, but they didn't make an arrest. A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and checked himself into an impatient mental health facility. Meanwhile, the FBI was still building their case against him, including getting

a search warrant for his Google account. Then, on October twenty second, twenty twenty four, a month after they searched his house, Michael Schuer received an automated notice from Google that they'd been served with a warrant for his account and they would be complying with the order to turn over him account information. Now, I imagine that's a really scary email to get. I'm not sure what my initial reaction would be in that situation. The right answer if

this happens to you is to call a lawyer. The extremely wrong answer is to then type please explain this to me at the top of the email, and then forward that email to the FBI agent who was just at your house, and then follow that up with another email the next day demanding that the agent loop in the victim of the crime on the conversation so you

can get some answers about what's going on here. Perhaps an even worse course of action in this situation would be to then drive to your former boss's house in the middle of the night and stand on his front porch making a thumbs up at his security camera, and then just walking away. It's hard to say what you would do in a stressful situation that you have never experienced before. I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here. I like to think that I would just call a lawyer.

I don't think that I would do all that other stuff. But that is what Michael Scheyer did. The day after he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the FBI rode up and filed the criminal complaint. Whatever timeline

they'd had in mind was irrelevant. Now this guy was behaving unpredictably and they needed to go ahead and make the arrest, probably in large part because he made that strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house and then the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors. He was held without bond. After two months in jail,

he entered a plea agreement. He pled guilty to computer hacking and identity theft, and was sentenced to thirty six months in prison during the three year period of supervised release. After he gets out. He's not allowed to have any contact with any of his victims. So that's those fourteen co workers and the Disney Corporation in the grand scheme of weird little guys. This is all pretty minor. Nobody

really got hurt. It cost about one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to reprint the affected materials, and Disney estimates that the ordeal cost them about six hundred thousand dollars in total. I have to admit I don't particularly care if the Walt Disney Corporation lost half a million dollars. If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten seriously hurt. But they didn't, and according to Michael Schouer,

he knew they wouldn't. I don't know that that's true. It's impossible to say at this point. But again, in the end, nothing really happened, did it. I initially came across this case during my regular search for newly filed cases containing certain keywords I like to look for. I think in this case it was the word swastika. But I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi. I don't have any other evidence that points to that

swastika being a larger part of his life. When the FBI came and took his computer away, there was a file on his desktop called swastika dot png. He must have googled the word swastika and then saved the image that he wanted to use on the menu. It kind of reminds me of early four chan culture. I don't mean the four Chan of today. I mean way back in the day before those guys were genuinely sincere neo Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts. A lot of them were

just shit talking. They wanted to be extreme, they wanted to be edgy. They wanted to post the most shocking, fucked up stuff they could think of because that was funny or thrilling or interesting. I guess so, I'm inclined to believe he put the swastika on the menu because it was the worst thing he could think of, not because he actually liked it. I mean, I hope that's the case. I'm a little less generous when it comes to the mass shooting thing, though. That's odd to me.

That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest. I don't know that that's something that would come immediately to mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing preoccupation with mass shootings. You know. But that's just my gut. There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations. This is the only thing he ever did. He crashed out at work, and it sent him into a tailspin

that ended in federal prison. The only glimpse into Michael Schuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit post he made just a few days before the FBI showed up at his house for the first time. On a subreddit for people with social anxiety. He made a post with the title reaching the end question mark. It's long, but it reads in part, the people involved in firing me treated me like a criminal, me who is afraid of everyone and just wants to blend into the background.

I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me. Not one person from work reached out to check on me. I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a man and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone. Maybe the other part is because I'm an awkward asshole. I have no friends, no work connections, nothing I've already determined

I will never work again. Nobody cares about me. He goes on to say that he started therapy earlier that year, but when he got fired, he realized it was too late, too late for what is unclear, too late to change, too late to make anything of his life. It has a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a

desire to harm himself. On the contrary, he seems fixated on harming others, writing quote, every day since I was fired, I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged. But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem. Maybe it's me. I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's everybody that's been afraid of me. And there it is, isn't it. He said it himself because I feel so wronged.

It's remarkably self aware. It reminds me a lot of what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening postcards all those years. He just didmitted it. He said that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed, and it made him feel better to know that he was causing her distress and return. Being a weird little guy is something that exists on a spectrum. I think

some of them are truly monsters. They kill, name, torture, and terrorize. They carry out mass shootings and blow up synagogues and daycares. They're trying to start a race war, they want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot it out with the police, or they just want to gain enough political power to punish their enemies. Those are the guys I was thinking about when I started the show.

But there are weird little guys out there who are much much littler, guys whose behavior fits the archetype but only registers a little blit on the radar. And those are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet one day, God willing, most of us will never meet a mass shooter, but you probably will eventually encounter the kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer, so he puts a swastika on the menu at the Mickey Mouse Cafe. Weird Little Guys is a production of

cools On Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me Molly Conger Our Executive producers are Sophie Linterman and Mabert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Mary Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me a Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the

Weird Little Guy subreddit. Just don't boast anything that's going to make you one of my weird Little Guys.