In the aftermath of the fatal shooting of conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, in Utah on Wednesday, the United States again found itself in the familiar, dangerous churn of grief, political recrimination, and online conspiracy theories. This time, the storm swept up a 29-year-old transgender woman nearly 1000 miles away in Washington state, who had nothing to do with the tragedy.
“I was not involved in the murder of Charlie Kirk,” Michaela, a paralegal at a Seattle law firm, said in an interview with The Advocate on Thursday. “I live in Seattle, Washington. I was here all day yesterday. I have absolutely zero to do with Charlie Kirk, absolutely zero to do with any of the people involved.”
Yet for two days, Michaela’s face was plastered across right-wing accounts online, falsely accused of being the shooter. The Advocate is identifying her only by her first name to prevent further harassment.
Digital error with real-world consequences
The misidentification began with a series of ominous social media posts by a user who claimed to be a Utah Valley University student known online as Omar. According to archived records, on Tuesday, the day before Kirk’s appearance, Omar posted:
“Charlie Kirk is coming to my college tomorrow i rlly hope someone evaporates him literally.”
Hours later, he added another message: “Lets just say something big will happen tomorrow,” alongside a GIF of a grinning dog.
When Kirk was shot the next day, those screenshots rocketed across the internet as proof that Omar had warned of the attack. But after the account was deleted, users searching Omar’s handle on Google Images found Michaela’s photo instead. She had no connection to the posts beyond the fact that Omar had previously retweeted a viral joke of hers about Dr. Pepper.
She said people grabbed a screenshot of her profile photo after Omar changed his username and then deleted his account, which led to confusion. Because his original profile disappeared, she said, people wrongly assumed she was his new account, and that’s how the false accusations started.
The chaos intensified on Thursday when the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office released two images of a person of interest: a thin man in a hat and sunglasses. Instead of quelling rumors, the images fueled them. “They added my photo to collages that implied I looked like the suspect,” Michaela said.
George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide who pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI during the Mueller investigation into Russian election interference, amplified the rumor on X.
“BREAKING: shooter identified?” he wrote, posting two images side by side. “First photo is of ‘Omar’, a person asking for someone to ‘evaporate’ Charlie Kirk & saying something BIG will happen the next day. 2nd photo is of the potential shooter on the left & ‘Omar’ on the right.”
Papadopoulos, who has more than 1.2 million followers on X, served 12 days in federal prison before receiving a pardon from Trump in 2020.
“These people really do want to kill me”
The result was a tidal wave of harassment. “It’s been an inundation with abuse with hundreds [of messages], if it’s not death threats,” Michaela said. “As a trans woman, I’m used to hate and vitriol, but it feels different this time. These people really do want to kill me because they think that I killed their idol, Charlie Kirk. I’m glad I live here or I would be scared to show my face outside [in Utah].”
Michaela said she contacted the FBI’s tip line to report the harassment, but doubts law enforcement can protect her from the barrage. “If a trans woman went to the Seattle police every time that she got a death threat, then there’s not enough police in the world to handle that,” she said.
Her employer, however, has been steadfast. When she explained the situation, Michaela said her law firm “was nothing but supportive.” She had been at work the day of the shooting, and her supervisors were “pretty sure they knew that I wasn’t in Utah killing Charlie Kirk,” Michaela said.
A Google spokesperson told The Advocate that Michaela’s explanation is plausible. Search engines like Google aim to display images that are most relevant to a query by pulling from webpages that match the search terms, the spokesperson said. When surfacing social media pages, Google Images may also show pictures an account has shared or reposted, they explained. For some highly specific queries, there may be very little relevant image content available, which can lead to misleading results.
Media responsibility
The Wall Street Journal reported that ammunition recovered near the scene was engraved with “expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology.” The New York Times followed up by noting that law enforcement sources warned against taking the report as accurate.
GLAAD also warned against running with unverified claims.
“There is so much we do not know about this crime, but certain facts are unshakeable,” a GLAAD spokesperson told The Advocate in a statement. “Gun violence is an epidemic affecting every community and people from both parties. LGBTQ people are at far greater risk of being victims of violent crimes than perpetrating them. Media should scrutinize every detail that is leaked, and seek context before reporting, especially if it risks further targeting an already marginalized community.”
GLAAD emphasized that “transgender ideology” is not a neutral descriptor. It’s a term used by opponents of trans people to undermine and demean authentic identity.
Political backlash
Instead, the vague reporting became ammunition for political actors. On The Megyn Kelly Show, President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., claimed that “the radical trans movement” was more dangerous “per capita” than Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “I can’t name, including probably like Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans movement,” he said. He went further, claiming that trans people had committed “practically every mass shooting in America for the last few years.”
These assertions are flatly false. The Gun Violence Archive has tracked mass shootings since 2013 and found in 2023 that just 0.1 percent involved a transgender shooter. By contrast, 96 to 98 percent have been committed by cisgender men.
For Michaela, the rhetoric feels not just misleading but deliberately dehumanizing. “Trans people became a hot-button issue in the 2024 election,” she said. “There’s a lot of money to be made in right-wing spaces by covering this topic. We have become an easy target.”
This scapegoating has precedent. Just weeks ago, a 23-year-old transgender woman opened fire during Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, killing two children and injuring others. The shooter, who left behind a manifesto citing gender identity struggles and personal turmoil, was condemned across the political spectrum. But public officials quickly warned against painting an entire community with the same brush.
“Compassion must prevail,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said after the attack, urging people not to use the tragedy as an excuse “to villainize our transgender community.”
Call for boundaries
Even as she absorbs the harassment, Michaela insists on drawing a bright line. “Even if it’s a commentator I detest, I don’t want any of them to get assassinated,” she said. “If it’s okay for someone to shoot Charlie Kirk, then it becomes okay to shoot anybody on the left wing, and now assassination is just how we treat politics in this country.”
For her, the ordeal is a chilling lesson in how easily one can be drawn into the maw of disinformation, and how difficult it is to escape. “This was a really overwhelming experience,” she said. “With my Twitter suspended, I felt like I was just watching all of this happen to me with no chance to explain why it’s wrong.”
This article originally appeared on Advocate: No, this transgender woman is not the Charlie Kirk assassin