A Trans Pilot Was Falsely Blamed for a Plane Crash. Now She’s Fighting the Right-Wing Disinfo Machine

On January 29, a Blackhawk helicopter crashed into a commercial airliner in the skies over Washington, DC. The collision killed all 67 people on board both aircraft, including the pilots. But online, a different pilot—one that wasn’t even present—was being blamed for the tragedy.

Within two days, the rumor spread like wildfire. The morning of January 31, Jo Ellis, a part-time pilot with the Virginia Army National Guard, woke up to messages from a friend warning that she was being named online as the pilot who killed innocent passengers in the deadly crash. At first, Ellis thought it was an isolated claim—someone erroneously connected her to the crash, because just days earlier she had written an essay on being a transgender pilot from Virginia. But once she logged in to Facebook, she realized she was wrong.

“I opened my Facebook messages to see hundreds of message requests asking me “Are you alive?” or saying things like ‘I know you’re the tranny who did it?” Ellis told me in April, almost three months after the incident, as she sipped her coffee at a café in Richmond, Virginia. “I was shocked and immediately concerned for the safety of my loved ones.”

The piece of disinformation traveled through different platforms just days after President Donald Trump issued an executive order barring transgender people from serving and enlisting in the military. “A transgender Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the military wrote a long letter about ‘Gender Dysphoria’ and depression 1 day before the fatal crash!” read a since-deleted post on X by right-wing influencer Matt Wallace, who has 2.3 million followers. “What happened may have been another trans terror attack …” This post was viewed at least 4.8 million times. Ann Vandersteel, a Qanon promoter with more than 360,000 X followers, also spread false information about Ellis in since-deleted posts. Vandersteel later published a retraction. (She did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.) In a few cases, people asked X’s AI chatbot Grok, which also named Ellis as the pilot responsible for the crash, making people further believe this rumor. She was the second most trending topic on the platform, with more than 90,000 posts.

Ellis immediately sprang into action to defend herself and released a “proof of life” video. In April, she also filed a defamation suit against Wallace, alleging he concocted a “destructive and irresponsible defamation campaign.” Wallace and his lawyer did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. However, after Ellis released her proof-of-life video, Wallace updated his X posts saying the pilot is alive and was not responsible for the crash. He also shifted the blame to an X account called @FakeGayPolitics, which has since then been suspended, according to the lawsuit.

Ellis’ experience is the latest in a rising trend on the conservative internet: right-wing accounts blaming transgender people for a national tragedy or a violent incident, scouring for pictures and unverified clues to falsely connect them as perpetrators of tragedies without any evidence.

A review of news reports and fact-checking database ClaimReview shows that since 2022 there have been a dozen incidents when a transgender person was wrongly blamed for a tragedy or a violent incident. In December there were false claims that a Madison, Wisconsin, school shooter, who killed two people, was transgender. Six months prior to that, a trans woman was erroneously identified as the person who tried to shoot Trump at an open-air rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. In the aftermath of the Minnesota shootings in June, in which Melissa Hortman, a Democrat in the state’s House of Representatives, and her husband were assassinated and state senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot, Donald Trump Jr. said that the radical transgender movement is “per capita the most violent domestic terror threat if not in America, probably the entire world.” (The alleged shooter in the Minnesota attacks runs an armed security company and has been linked to at least one evangelical group.) On X, Elon Musk has been suggesting that transgender people are vandalizing Teslas around the country.