Too Soon?
In 1991, less than a month after police arrested Jeffrey Dahmer for murdering 17 men in Ohio and Wisconsin, PETA paid the Des Moines Register $11,214 to run an ad likening the gruesome crime spree — which involved sodomy, necrophilia and cannibalism — to practices within the meatpacking industry. Explaining its decision to run the spot, which was rejected by Milwaukee's newspapers, the Register's national advertising director said the PETA campaign wasn't unlawful, fraudulent, libelous ... or in bad taste. "We were most concerned about separating it from the obituaries," Nancy Jo Trafton-Dyer told USA Today. Protests against the ad soon followed, which PETA's co-founder and national director, Ingrid Newkirk, dismissed as "mock outrage" from the same people who do "nothing in their communities to make sure no one grew up to be another Jeffrey Dahmer."