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George Zimmerman can’t get a date. Like a lot of murderous losers, he can’t get a job, either. Because he is America’s patron saint of losers, he’s suing the parents of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old he shot and killed seven years ago, for $100 million.

The way Mr. Zimmerman sees it, it’s their fault he’s a loser. It’s their fault that people still consider him a murderer despite his acquittal in a case in which he shot an unarmed boy in the chest. Having fallen on to hard times is everyone else’s fault but Mr. Zimmerman’s.

Oh, how he has suffered in the last seven years. Because he says he now suffers from PTSD, depression, insomnia and weight gain triggered by the stress of the homicide trial and its aftermath, he has no choice but to sue Benjamin Crump, the lawyer who represented Trayvon Martin’s family. He’s also suing the publisher of Mr. Crump’s book because of unkind things written about him in its pages.

Mr. Zimmerman also accuses the prosecution of malicious prosecution and of entering into a conspiracy with Trayvon Martin’s family to “frame” him during his trial. He also accuses the cops of being part of the conspiracy, which is ironic given how leniently they treated him until national outrage forced a second look at the circumstances surrounding the killing. He’s suing them, too.

It is no exaggeration to say that everyone but George Zimmerman is to blame for his descent into the bowels of notorious obscurity, according to him. Near the end of his 36-page suit, the whining and caterwauling reaches peek self-pity in the following points:

“Because of the arrest, charges, prosecution and federal investigation, Zimmerman lives in constant fear of physical harm due to regular death deaths, which often are expressed in rap music as well as online social media commentary. In 2015, a man named Matthew Apperson attempted to murder Zimmerman by shooting a bullet at him that missed his head by inches. Apperson was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

“Plaintiff Zimmerman was kicked out of college and had to abandon career plans to become a lawyer.

“Plaintiff Zimmerman has suffered nearly a complete loss of income as he cannot find work because of his “infamy” and legitimate fears by employers of violence and boycotts on their company. Because of the arrest, charges, prosecution and federal investigation, Zimmerman is unable to live a normal life. Zimmerman cannot circulate as a normal person in public. Zimmerman is unable to date; he was kicked off of several dating websites.

“Plaintiff Zimmerman has suffered severe loss of reputation, goodwill, and past, present, and future loss of income, earning, and other financial damage.”

Don’t you hate it when a killer can’t profit from his brutal handiwork? Mr. Zimmerman did give it the old college try, though. Remember when he tried to auction the gun he killed Trayvon Martin with to the highest bidder in 2016? Because of all the support he got from racists during his trial, Mr. Zimmerman assumed it was only a matter of time before higher earning bigots would lay claim to his murderous memorabilia and give him a measure of financial independence in the process.

The bids did get as high as $65 million for the Kel-Tec PF-9 Mr. Zimmerman used to kill Trayvon Martin, but the website hosting the auction pulled the plug because of the volume of fake bids that flooded in. It turns out that even in a country with no shortage of racists, no one was really interested in supporting such a ghoulish get-rich-quick scheme with real cash. Mr. Zimmerman was left broke and alone as usual.

And the cons kept coming. And so did unflattering headlines usually involving arrests because of domestic abuse of an ex-wife and a string of girlfriends. After an initial flurry of bad press, the women dropped the charges, leaving Mr. Zimmerman free to abuse again. He had become a perennial returnee to crime blotters all over Florida.

Suddenly, Mr. Zimmerman found himself a long way from the sympathetic coverage he regularly received on Fox News and other conservative media platforms during his 2013 trial. There was a time when Sean Hannity would devote whole episodes of “Hannity” to defending his honor and feature soft-ball interviews with Zimmerman family members testifying to their misunderstood loved one’s character.

As Mr. Zimmerman drifts up, down and across the state’s various highways like a manifestation of the legendary “Florida Man,” one can’t but help wonder where all of his supporters went. Where are those passionate defenders from 2012 and 2013?

Remember the days when seemingly “non-bigoted” people considered it perfectly normal for an armed cop-wannabe to stalk an unarmed black teenager because he “looked suspicious” before killing him in “self-defense?”

Mr. Zimmerman’s subsequent behavior after his acquittal for killing Trayvon Martin did cost him a lot of goodwill with former supporters who for a time pretended they were “colorblind,” or, at least “not avowedly racist” in supporting such an obvious racist.

But to support Mr. Zimmerman now would be to give tacit approval to his conspiracy theory-minded lawyer, Larry Klayman, best known for filing suit against the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency on the grounds that Mr. Obama was allegedly a Kenyan citizen. Even the dumbest person acknowledges that “birther-ism” is racist.

Mr. Klayman and his client believe that new evidence dug up by Joel Gilbert, a conservative filmmaker on “tainted testimony” in the Zimmerman trial will prove a conspiracy at the highest levels to frame the former neighborhood watch activist at his trial. That’s the basis of the lawsuit.

The filmmaker who directed “The Trayvon Hoax” has a penchant for conspiracy theories that stoke the racial anxieties of white conservatives. His most notorious film, “Dreams from My Real Father,” advanced the bogus theory that Mr. Obama was a communist sleeper agent trained by his Marxist father in Kenya to win the presidency and ruin America from within. He also peddled the theory that Bill Clinton had a “black son” with a prostitute.

Mr. Klayman is filing suit against the Martin family, their attorney, a book publisher, a trial witness, the state police and several law enforcement officials based on the filmmaker’s shaky theory of a conspiracy to “defame” Mr.Zimmerman. To call such a suit “crazy” would be to dignify it. It is a frivolous suit that will bring a few minutes of anguish and anger to Trayvon Martin’s family, but it ultimately won’t go anywhere.

We’ve come a long way as a society since 2012 and 2013, when a man could claim self-defense for the cold-blooded killing of an unarmed black teenager and get acquitted. The overwhelming reaction to Mr. Zimmerman’s suit so far has been outrage and exasperation. As of this column’s deadline, I couldn’t find one defense of Mr. Zimmerman or his lawsuit. You have to go to the dark web where racists hold forth to find that, but their noxious words of support mean nothing. Meanwhile, Mr. Zimmerman’s loser streak continues.

Tony Norman: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631.

First Published: December 6, 2019, 9:45 a.m.
Updated: December 6, 2019, 5:48 p.m.