Down to Clown: When Juggalos Were Declared a Criminal Gang by the Department of Justice

“Will Eat Bugs for $”

At any other gathering, a written proclamation that one is willing to ingest insects for cash might seem bizarre. At the 2010 Gathering of the Juggalos at Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, it went largely unnoticed. The four-day outdoor party, which was heavy on sex, drugs, and nudity, was held in honor of the Juggalos, the proper noun affixed to fans of the horrorcore music duo Insane Clown Posse. Often maligned and vocal about being misunderstood, ICP fans tend to embrace extremes, including a hedonistic demonstration of debauchery at their annual assembly.

While some have derisively written off these events as Woodstock in clown make-up, not everyone has taken it in stride. Juggalos once provoked the Department of Justice and the FBI into declaring them a certified criminal gang; extreme behavior, including a severed finger, has led to mountains of bad press. Are they misunderstood or malevolent? Or, as some Juggalos insist, are they simply part of a unique intersection between music, mythology, and performance art?

1. ICP and the Detroit Scene
2. The Gathering
3. ICP vs. DOJ

ICP and the Detroit Scene

The origins for Insane Clown Posse go back to Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, in the late 1980s. Two high schoolers—Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler—met and bonded over a mutual love of rap and professional wrestling. With Bruce’s brother, John, the men formed a group dubbed the Inner City Posse in 1991. By 1992, John Bruce was out; Joseph Bruce (adopting the stage name Violent J) and Utsler (Shaggy 2 Dope) kept the initials and renamed themselves Insane Clown Posse, embracing the momentum building around the extreme acid-rap genre in Detroit’s music scene at the time.

Like KISS and GWAR before them, ICP adopted a grandiose stage presence, marrying clown face paint with hip-hop. (Bruce took inspiration for their aesthetic from childhood nightmares about scary clowns.) They also recognized that strong followings are built on community and a feeling of being part of something even if it may seem puzzling to outsiders. Rather than release standalone records, ICP created a musical narrative known as the Dark Carnival. Albums were part of a Joker’s Card compendium that unspooled the story, with songs touching on everything from murder to cannibalism to evangelical Christianity.

While provocative, ICP wasn’t glorifying violence so much as channeling the grand guignol horror theater of early 1900s Paris, where audiences experienced a kinetic thrill at gory and outlandish scenarios. While those performances were often caked in stage blood, ICP stuck to lyrical scenes of mayhem.

In “My Axe,” for example, the two ponder the thrills of edged weapons:

“Everybody everybody everybody run
Murdering murdering murdering fun, everybody dies
Swing swing swing, chop chop chop, everybody dies”

This was hardly fodder for Total Request Live. Throughout the 1990s, ICP amassed a fanbase outside of regular channels. They rarely received attention from MTV or radio stations. When they flirted with mainstream success, it never quite materialized. A 1997 record deal with Hollywood Records, then owned by Disney, fell apart after complaints about their provocative lyrics.

Mainstream rejection turned out to be a plus. In 1994, fans decided they would call themselves “Juggalos,” after an ICP song titled “The Juggla.”(A synonym for fans, ninja, seemingly failed to catch on.) Juggalos buy every album—released through the group’s own Psychopathic Records label—hit as many lives shows as possible, pick up merchandise, and embrace the counterculture nature of the group. The more incendiary the general public considers ICP, the more Juggalos seem to thrive.

“People come into our world that don’t belong here, and they review us, and they say, ‘What they do is stupid,’ but it only makes sense to the Juggalos,” Bruce said in 1997. “I know there’s a message to my music. So do the Juggalos. To the rest of the world, all they hear me say is ‘slash’ and ‘cut.’ ... They just want to write bad things. That’s cool. I say, ‘Go ahead, write it.’ I’ll take the blame because I know the Juggalos hear what I’m saying, and that’s all that matters.”

Aside from being a devotee of ICP, there are a few parameters for being a Juggalo. Face paint, while common, is optional. So is getting a tattoo of “Hatchetman,” the group’s record label mascot. More importantly, there’s a familial element that coalesced after ICP spent nearly a decade as an underground success story. Juggalos seeing one another—identifiable by ICP merchandise adorning their person—might strike up a friendly conversation as though they belonged to the same fraternity.

“All my life, I never fit into any social groups,” Jack Tipper, a Juggalo, told the News and Record of Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2004. “I found the Carnival, and everything has been diamond rain! Juggalos show me mad love because it isn’t about the clothes or how filthy rich you are. People got their discriminating so-called social groups. We have the Juggalos.”

In 1998, Bruce’s brother, Rob, attended a Gen Con convention. This gathering, which celebrates tabletop and board games, gave him an idea. If people could convene to share a mutual love of games, comics, or Star Trek, then it made sense that ICP could do the same. The group booked the Novi Expo Center just outside of Detroit for the first-ever Gathering of the Juggalos, which ran from July 21 to July 22, 2000. It would be the last time that the Juggalo fandom would remain under the radar.

The Gathering

The inaugural gathering was something no band had ever done. While there had been fan conventions for the Beatles and Elvis Presley, the performers themselves didn’t act as an event’s promoters. ICP personally sank money into hosting their assembled fans without having any real idea of what would happen or how many devotees would pay $60 for the two-day event.

The answer turned out to be about 7000 Juggalos, all of whom descended on the Novi Expo Center with mayhem in mind. Liters of Faygo—an economy Midwestern soda brand that became the group’s unofficial soft drink—were sprayed everywhere; Juggalos jumped from rooftops into dumpsters; some looting was reported, though other fans stepped in to stop vendors from being targeted. While the facility didn’t ban ICP or its fans outright, it never hosted another Gathering of the Juggalos again.

“It was the first event where Juggalos from all over were coming together,” Rob Bruce told The Detroit News in 2020. “Before, they were just in their town with their friends in that town. Here, you got Juggalos coming from states away to come to this event. That’s what was so dope about it.”

The Gathering of the Juggalos was not a one-off event. It became an annual tradition, with backyard wrestling, boxing, beauty pageants, vendors, and a sense of uninhibited socializing that sometimes clashed with polite society. During the closing night of the Gathering in Toledo, Ohio, in 2001, some errant Juggalos stormed and destroyed the stage, drawing the ire of more courteous fans. Wayward Juggalos, one fan informed a reporter, were called “Juggahos” and were mostly shunned from Juggalo society at large.

During the 2002 Gathering in Peoria, Illinois, police staved off a riot that broke out after some female Juggalos (sometimes called “Juggalettes”) embraced a clothing-optional aesthetic. Come 2003, the event made a permanent move outdoors, where private property made public nudity and drug use more tolerable.

On occasion, Juggalo crowds could be insular and had little patience for invited guests. In 2010, rappers Method Man and Redman performed, only to be pelted with debris. During the same show, internet personality Tila Tequila was also assaulted with projectiles. The wrestling matches, which hosted wrestlers like Colt Cabana, often included a highly participatory crowd that measured their satisfaction by how many rocks they threw into the ring.

The ensuing publicity for the Gatherings was often irreverent, casting Juggalos as a fraternity of nonconformists (most of whom were and remain young white men). The fandom was an easy target for shows like The Daily Show; immersive journalism with reporters filing from Juggalo gatherings became common in the early 2010s, too. But the occasional joke paled in comparison to a 2011 declaration that made Juggalo affiliation less of a quirk and more of a criminal matter.

In the eyes of the United States government, Juggalos weren’t a family. They were a gang.

ICP vs. DOJ

In 2011, the Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center and the FBI announced in their gang threat assessment report intended for Congress that they had classified the Juggalos as a “loosely organized hybrid gang … rapidly expanding into many U.S. communities” and one that had been known to commit crimes including vandalism and felonies. The report went on to say:

“Crimes committed by Juggalos are sporadic, disorganized, individualistic, and often involve simple assault, personal drug use and possession, petty theft, and vandalism. However, open source reporting suggests that a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity, such as felony assaults, thefts, robberies, and drug sales. Social networking websites are a popular conveyance for Juggalo subculture to communicate and expand.”

Concerns over Juggalos being a legitimate gang organization preceded the DOJ’s inclusion by years. In 2003, male students at George Washington Middle School in Illinois were sent home when they braided their hair in a fashion modeled after ICP. Local police believed older Juggalos were getting into criminal trouble and may have been in the crosshairs of local gangs like the Latin Kings.

Those reports had been isolated, though. The 2011 DOJ classification of Juggalos put them in league with street gangs like the Crips or the Mongol motorcycle club, making the fandom’s reputation worse.

Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope were understandably furious. The two vehemently defended their fans and alleged the DOJ had badly miscalculated Juggalos; they offered to pay the legal fees for any fans unduly burdened by the slander.

With the support of ICP, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan sued the Justice Department and the FBI in 2014, charging the federal government was ostracizing Juggalos. Some, the group claimed, had been fired from their jobs, had been stopped and searched by police for wearing ICP clothing, and even denied entry into the United States Army over the fandom’s now-besmirched reputations.

The lawsuit was dismissed but later reinstated in 2015. Come 2017, the band had seemingly exhausted its last legal blow, with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals finding that the FBI’s definition was not legally binding and therefore not able to be legally challenged. (The gang classification technically remains in place.)

In 2018, Consequence of Sound posted the FBI’s documentation on Juggalos, which appeared to mimic some of the earlier government hysteria around horror comics and violent video games. Juggalos, the FBI reported, were at odds with the violent MS-13 gang, an accusation some found unlikely. (In 2006, ICP graffiti had been found near crossed-out MS-13 signs in Pineville, South Carolina.) And despite their supposed gang status, only two violent crimes committed by known Juggalos were cited in the document.

That said, some Juggalos have displayed some highly unique behavior. In 2016, a Juggalette named Shelby Neuens agreed to have a fellow Juggalo slice her right forearm open and drink her blood to honor a dead Juggalo friend. According to Rolling Stone, Neuens also consented to having her pinky finger cut off. The Juggalo who wielded the knife, Jonathan Schrap, was charged with reckless injury in the second degree, mayhem, and false imprisonment. (Schrap received a 3.5-year prison sentence in 2017.)

Another Juggalo sliced off his own nipple during a 2013 Gathering in the hopes of finding a buyer for it; another was arrested in 2017 for showing up to a Boston radio station with an axe to demand the DJ play “My Axe.” Other, more serious crimes have been connected to Juggalos, though their participation in the fandom seems incidental rather than motivational.

Nor have these incidents stemmed enthusiasm for the group and the familial atmosphere it promotes. The Gathering of the Juggalos has been held annually since 2000, skipping only 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, Violent J announced he would be stepping back from touring due to heart issues. But the Juggalos continue to gather, united by their status as a family outside the mainstream. To be a Juggalo is to be fundamentally misunderstood, and that’s how many of them prefer it.

“I’d rather have 10 Juggalos,” Violent J said in 2001, “than 1000 meaningless radio fans.”

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