Independent Minnesota US Senate candidate Marisa Simonetti, 32, has been sentenced to three months in the Hennepin County workhouse after throwing a live tarantula onto the staircase leading to her tenant’s living space in Edina. She was convicted of gross misdemeanour harassment and misdemeanour domestic assault and will serve her 90-day sentence on school and work release. The court also ordered her to serve two years of probation and submit a written apology to the victim.
Simonetti’s sentence comes as she campaigns for a seat in the US Senate, hoping to replace Tina Smith in the November 2026 Minnesota election. Her candidacy has drawn further attention after a video she posted of herself confronting a Girl Scout and the child’s mother over selling cookies without a permit went viral, putting her own conduct under public scrutiny.
Really not fair to the tarantula, who asked for none of this.
Tarantula are wildly intelligent. Like, smart dog intelligent.
This is a 100% lie and literally anyone here with a single minute to spare could fact check and learn they aren’t very intelligent at all. Nowhere remotely close to a dog or cat, and aren’t even known to be the smartest types of spiders. It’s kind of sad that 28 people straight just blindly up voted this comment without a single one of them knowing it wasn’t true and didn’t bother to check.
They’re super cool, but they’re still dumb.
Not as dumb as some dogs.
Yeah I’m gonna go ahead and call bullshit on that bullshit. There is zero chance of that being true.
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I don’t find tarantulas yucky and have had one as a pet.
They aren’t smart. They aren’t like dogs. You can’t teach them anything. The most you can get out of them is that they will learn you’re not gonna squish or eat them and be cool with you.
You can look this up “on the internet”. They aren’t even as smart as jumping spiders.
So yeah. He right on calling bullshit. Because it is bullshit.
Yeah, jumping spiders is where it’s at when it comes to intelligence in spiders, and even then only in highly specific ways (i.e., hunting, and calculating jumps), and a significant portion of their apparent intelligence is just them having very good eyesight for a spider; dogs, cats, birds, rats, and even probably bees are still much more intelligent than them.
Tarantulas on the other hand aren’t much smarter than your average politician or CEO.
There is zero chance a spider is as smart as even the most mediocre dog. Stop it.
Like, “sit”, “stay”, and “fetch me a cigarette”?! I want video of this
They aren’t. They’re pretty dumb. Way dumber than a dog or cat. Learning you aren’t a threat to them is about as advanced as a tarantula can get. They aren’t even the smartest spiders.
Hey I love tarantulas (we keep over 60 of them currently) and think they deserve our appreciation and respect. However there isn’t any evidence that they are particularly intelligent, and certainly no indication that they are “smart dog intelligent.”
One could make an argument for jumping spiders tho: https://youtu.be/_QF6kaOAuYg
How the heck did you come up with that?
I was wondering where the animal abuse charges were in all this.