Minnesota Politics

Marisa Simonetti: Minnesota’s Senate Candidate Who Threw a Tarantula and Kept Running

Sentenced to 90 days in a Hennepin County workhouse for hurling a live spider at a tenant she wanted gone, Simonetti turned the conviction into campaign merchandise and kept her Senate race alive. The story of an animal, a staircase, and a politician who refuses to exit.

The Thousand-Vote Margin

Before the tarantula, there was the election she almost won. In a 2024 special election for the Hennepin County Commission, Simonetti came within approximately 1,000 votes of her opponent. In local politics, that is not a rounding error — it is a map of how close she came, and of how precisely calibrated her political identity needed to be to close the remaining gap. She was not a fringe candidate who finished fifteenth. She was a near-miss.

The incident happened that same summer. The charges followed. And then — as these things sometimes do in an era when nothing stays quiet and everything is documented — the video surfaced. The Republican Party, which had been a potential home for her ambitions, denied her its endorsement. The political math that had put her 1,000 votes from a county commission seat now had a new variable in it: a criminal case, a viral clip, and a spider.

Most politicians would have reassessed. Simonetti reassessed and concluded she was still running, only now for something larger. She filed as an independent candidate for United States Senate in Minnesota. Whatever the tarantula had cost her in conventional political credibility, she appeared to be calculating that it might buy her something else: attention, which in 2026 remains a non-trivial political currency.

Merchandise, and the Question It Doesn’t Answer

The sentence came down on June 30, 2026, in Hennepin County District Court. Ninety days in the workhouse. Two years of supervised probation. A written apology to the person she had targeted. Domestic abuse counseling. A mental health evaluation. And $1,078 in fines and fees — a number specific enough to mean something: not a round figure, not a fine calibrated for a corporation or a wealthy repeat offender, but the kind of accounting that arrives in an itemized invoice and has to be paid in full before probation ends.

She was required to report to the Hennepin County Workhouse by 9 a.m. on July 31, 2026. Work and school release were permitted, which meant the campaign could technically continue between court-approved hours. She filed the necessary paperwork. She kept her Senate campaign alive.

At some point — with a timing that was either impeccable or unhinged, depending on your reading — Simonetti leaned into the brand. “Tarantula tosser,” the shirts read. The merchandise existed. People bought it, or didn’t, but either way the phrase entered the coverage. Simonetti had taken the most damaging single fact of her political biography and printed it on a garment.

This is the move that is hardest to evaluate from the outside. It could be read as radical self-awareness: I know what you know about me, here it is, I’m not pretending otherwise. It could be read as a cynical calculation that in a media environment where notoriety and fame have merged into something indistinguishable, being the tarantula candidate is better than being no candidate at all. It could be read as neither of these things — as something stranger, a person whose relationship with consequence is genuinely different from most people’s, who processes a criminal conviction the way someone else might process a bad Yelp review: with a product launch.

What the Law Said, and What It Didn’t Settle

The charges against Simonetti were 5th-degree assault, disorderly conduct, harassment, and domestic assault. The disorderly conduct charge was resolved without formal adjudication — a procedural outcome that means less than it sounds, given that the assault and harassment charges proceeded to conviction and sentencing. The domestic assault designation is worth noting: the law applies that label based on the relationship between parties, not the nature of the weapon, and a tarantula thrown at a person with whom you share a residence counts under Minnesota statute as much as anything else might.

The “Home Alone” explanation, which Simonetti offered to investigators, has received more attention than it perhaps deserves. It is a strange thing to tell a law enforcement officer: that you were inspired, in your method of trying to clear a human being from your property, by a 1990 holiday film about a child defending himself from adult burglars. But it is also, in its way, illuminating. The film’s premise is that the house belongs to its occupant, that the occupant has the right to defend it by any means the script allows, and that the methods need not be proportionate or conventional. Simonetti appeared to have internalized this premise and missed, somewhere along the way, the detail that the film is a comedy because the methods are absurd.

A tarantula is not, in itself, a lethal weapon. It is not venomous in any way that kills humans. But it is an animal, and it was thrown, and the person it was thrown at did not consent to be thrown at with it, and the law does not distinguish meaningfully between projectiles on the basis of whether the projectile would have enjoyed the flight.

Simonetti told investigators she had been inspired by watching Home Alone. The film’s child protagonist had used paint cans, a BB gun, and a blowtorch. He had not used a spider. He had also been fictional.

The victim — the housemate, the tenant, the person who had been on the receiving end of the music, the pots and pans, the screaming, and finally the animal — submitted to the court’s process. Simonetti owed him a written apology. Whether he received one that satisfied him is not part of the public record.

Running as If the Trial Never Happened, and as If It Did

What is genuinely unusual about Simonetti’s campaign is not that a person with a criminal record is running for office — that has always happened, in every state, at every level. What is unusual is the simultaneity. The workhouse clock and the campaign clock are running at the same time, and Simonetti has chosen not to treat these as contradictory states but as simultaneous ones. She is, in the literal sense, reporting to a correctional facility and filing campaign disclosures within the same calendar.

Running for Senate as an independent in Minnesota is a project with long odds even without a conviction. Minnesota has two Democratic senators. It has a well-organized DFL. The independent path to the Senate requires ballot access, money, infrastructure, and — absent those — at least enough visibility to make the candidate’s name recognizable in a state with millions of voters. The tarantula has, in its way, helped with the visibility. Whether visibility that arrives via a county court criminal complaint translates into Senate votes is a proposition with very little historical precedent.

Simonetti has not published detailed policy platforms that have circulated widely. What has circulated is the story of what she did, and the story of how she responded to being caught and convicted. Those two things — the act and the response — are her public political biography as it currently stands. She has made no apparent effort to bury either.

There is a version of this story in which Simonetti is a cautionary tale: a candidate whose volatility was always there and whose voters in that Hennepin County race were lucky, in retrospect, that she lost by a thousand votes rather than winning. There is another version in which she is something else: a person who crashed her own political career, found the wreckage surprisingly survivable, and decided to drive the car anyway. Both versions fit the available facts. Neither version requires her to stop running.

She has not stopped running.

The workhouse is in Hennepin County. The Senate seat she is seeking is in Washington. Between those two coordinates — the 9 a.m. report time and the chamber she cannot reach — is a campaign that exists, technically, legally, against all political common sense, because Marisa Simonetti has decided that a tarantula, a conviction, and ninety days in a workhouse are not the end of a political story.

They are, apparently, the beginning of one.