Seattle trans woman faces hate after being misidentified as Charlie Kirk's killer

SEATTLE — Michaela, a 29-year-old paralegal in Seattle, didn’t like Charlie Kirk’s content. But she didn’t want or expect to see the right-wing influencer killed.

She also didn’t expect to be misidentified as his killer.

Within hours of the fatal Utah Valley University shooting last week, social media users misidentified Michaela, a trans woman, as a suspect in Kirk’s death.

She watched from nearly 900 miles away in disbelief — then terror — as a photo of her went viral on social media platforms like X and TikTok, attached to posts accusing her of shooting the 31-year-old.

People had mistaken Michaela for an X user who had posted threatening messages about Kirk the day before he was killed. Earlier that day, the user had shared a joke about Dr Pepper that Michaela had posted on X, which linked to her account’s profile picture.

The user, who went by “Omar,” deleted their X account after the shooting, as screenshots of their posts about Kirk went viral. But Michaela’s profile picture remained among the top results when people typed the user’s deleted username into search engines, according to Michaela and The Advocate, which first wrote about her on Friday.

Many users, assuming Michaela was “Omar,” rushed to identify her online as a suspect, she said.

For days after the shooting, Michaela locked herself inside her Seattle apartment as her social media inboxes flooded with messages from users threatening to find and kill her, and calling her homophobic and transphobic slurs.

'Real-world consequences'

The online vitriol has slowed since Friday, when an actual suspect in Kirk’s killing, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was taken into police custody in Utah, Michaela said by phone that day. She requested to use only her first name out of safety concerns, and for The Seattle Times to publish her photo so that people who see it will also read that she wasn’t the shooter.

While some on the internet may have moved on, Michaela said she will always fear violence from those who still suspect her, and many of the most viral social media posts showing her photo are still visible.

She said the internet’s rush to dub her a killer reflects a larger “cultural shift” in attitudes toward trans people, including the idea that they’re violent or murderous — a viewpoint Kirk championed before his death.

To Michaela, the terrifying mix-up felt like a warning of what’s ahead for her and other trans people in the U.S.

“This false narrative that’s being pushed — it has real-world consequences for people. It is making us so much more unsafe,” Michaela said, through tears. “It seems like more and more people are starting to believe it every day, and I don’t know what to do to stop that.”

Kirk, an ally of President Donald Trump and the co-founder and CEO of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was speaking Sept. 10 to a crowd of about 3,000 at the Utah university campus for the first leg of his “The American Comeback Tour.”

In video captured just before the shooting that was shared later on social media, Kirk is responding to questions from an audience member about gun violence. Seconds before a gunshot rings out, Kirk said “too many” mass shooters have been transgender Americans in the last decade, according to the footage.

Authorities suspect Robinson fired a single time at Kirk from a nearby rooftop, striking him in the neck.

Meanwhile, Michaela was two states away, in Seattle, working remotely for a Dallas-based law firm that hired her before she moved from Texas in May, she said.

She and her roommate learned of Kirk’s shooting shortly after it happened and turned on their TV to show a livestream of news updates and commentary. They listened in the background as Utah public safety officials announced they had taken into custody, then released, one person, then another.

As a trans woman, Michaela said she didn’t like Kirk.

She worried when Kirk — hours after authorities said a transgender suspect was behind a mass shooting on Aug. 27 at a Minneapolis Catholic school — said on X that people who medically transition have a mental disorder and shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms.

The same day, Kirk posted on X about “the disturbing regularity of trans violence,” despite statistics showing cisgender men are behind 98% of mass shootings, and trans people are responsible for less than 1%, according to the Violence Prevention Project, a Minnesota-based nonprofit research center.

He shouldn’t have been hurt or killed for those views, however, Michaela said.

“Political assassinations are not a good thing,” she said. “Even if I dislike Charlie, I do not like the precedent that this has the potential to set.”

As she sat in her Seattle apartment Sept. 10, listening to “the huge news of the day,” Michaela didn’t know she was becoming a headline herself.

Mistaken identity

Michaela didn’t see the X posts “Omar” wrote about Kirk until it was too late.

She said she doesn’t know who was behind the account. The user wrote a post on Sept. 9 that Kirk was visiting their college the next day, and that they hoped “someone evaporates him literally.” They later wrote “something big will happen tomorrow,” according to screenshots of the posts Michaela provided.

Those posts went viral shortly after Kirk was killed, as social media users rushed to hunt for a suspect.

“Omar” deleted the posts, changed their username and then deleted their account, Michaela said. But because of the way search engines display images, her profile picture on X was among the first images to appear when people looked up “Omar’s” former username, she said.

Mistaking her for “Omar,” users shared screenshots of the posts, along with Michaela’s photo, accusing her of being Kirk’s killer. The digital finger-pointing escalated after FBI officials released images of a thin white man they said was a person of interest, and who some were quick to say resembled the person in Michaela’s photo.

George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, shared Michaela’s photo to his 1.2 million X followers on Sept. 11, including the question, “Shooter identified?”

Another X user posted Michaela’s photo on Sept. 10, saying they would make it their mission to “take down this deranged community” if Kirk’s shooter was trans. The post has been liked 77,000 times.

Notifications streamed across Michaela’s phone the night of Sept. 10 as people found her social media profiles. At first, the mix-up seemed like a joke. But the messages and comments quickly became more threatening, she said.

She “broke down crying” to her roommate after reading a comment about her that said, “We can’t let another one of them get away. We have to handle them ourselves.”

“We get death threats and people being mean to us online. That’s kind of a standard thing trans women deal with on the internet all the time,” she said. “But if people really think I did this, they might do something crazy.”

Michaela, whose X account had been suspended for a week for an unrelated reason, couldn’t defend herself there. She messaged popular users who posted her photo on TikTok and Instagram, requesting they take it down, but said they either ignored or blocked her.

After posting on Instagram that she was not the shooter, Michaela said she received a few messages of support. But the vast majority of messages remained negative, and her explanation of why her photo appeared in search results for “Omar’s” username went “over their heads.”

Michaela called the FBI’s Seattle field office, which transferred her to the agency’s national tip line. They called her back the next day to confirm receiving her message, but didn’t reach out again.

Michaela felt lucky no one was able to find and publish her identity, address or workplace, likely because she hasn’t yet changed her legal name. And before Robinson’s arrest, she felt fairly safe locked inside her apartment with her dog, a 90-pound pit bull.

There also isn’t a safer place for her to live than Seattle, she said. It’s the first place she’s lived where she can walk outside without hearing “slurs hurled” at her, and where no one treats her as “an oddity.”

But Michaela’s experience after Kirk’s death was a painful reminder that she and others in the trans community are becoming increasingly “easy targets” for people to demonize, both on and offline. And the threat of anti-trans violence is only getting worse — even for those in safe havens like Seattle, she said.

“I wish I had a good answer, but I really don’t know how you solve for this,” Michaela said. “Maybe sharing my experience will hopefully help people have more empathy.”