Conservatives falsely accused her of assassinating Charlie Kirk. It started with Dr. Pepper jokes

A Seattle woman is sharing her story — and hoping to clear her name — after being falsely identified as Charlie Kirk’s assassin in some right-wing social media circles last week.

Kirk, a popular conservative influencer and a co-founder of the conservative youth activist organization Turning Point USA, was fatally shot Wednesday while speaking at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University.

The shooting set off a 33-hour manhunt, as authorities struggled to identify the alleged shooter, and thus, a motive. Some, desperate for answers, took to social media with conspiracy theories about who Kirk’s murderer might be.

So, how did a Seattleite get dragged into the assassination of a conservative activist several states away?

For Michaela, a Seattle-based paralegal and a transgender woman, the social media whirlwind started on Sept. 9, the day before the shooting, when a series of her posts on X went viral.

The subject matter: Dr. Pepper.

Michaela, who KUOW has agreed to identify only by first name due to safety concerns, had satirically pretended to be a representative of the soda brand. Its reputation as an outsider among other giants like Coke and Pepsi has earned it a cult following online.

“It had nothing to do with Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It was a bunch of stupid jokes.”

A user with the display name “Omar” retweeted one of Michaela’s posts.

At some point that same day, “Omar” posted to their own account, “Charlie Kirk is coming to my college tomorrow I [really] hope someone evaporates him, literally.” They followed up that post with another reading: “Let's just say something big will happen tomorrow.”

After Kirk was killed the following day, Michaela said “citizen investigators” quickly found those posts, and attempted to identify “Omar,” assuming that person had something to do with the shooting.

And because “Omar” had reposted one of Michaela’s unrelated jokes about Dr. Pepper, she was sucked in.

“If you Google somebody’s Twitter handle, if the last thing that that person posted is not a tweet, but rather it’s a retweet from somebody else, Google Images indexes the profile photo of the person that they retweeted,” Michaela explained. “This resulted in somebody screenshotting what they saw on Google Images, which is my profile photo for my Twitter account and Omar’s username below it.”

“That [started] getting spread like wildfire,” she added.

RELATED: WA officials condemn fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk, political violence

Seemingly panicked about the X posts and the attention they were getting, “Omar” changed their handle to something else at first, Michaela said.

But then people found that account too, and "Omar" deleted their profile entirely — leading people to believe Michaela was them.

It was around 3 p.m. on Sept. 10, nearly three hours after the shooting, when Michaela knew something was wrong. She was suddenly locked out of her X account and couldn’t post, but she started getting “inundated with direct messages.”

“At first it’s people warning me, saying, ‘Hey, I recognized you. I see this picture getting circulated around. People are claiming that you made threatening tweets about Charlie Kirk,’” Michaela said. “Then these people found my account, not just my photo, and now I’m beginning to get tagged in a bunch of conspiracies that I have something to do with Charlie Kirk’s murder.”

The situation quickly escalated to being terrifying, she added.

“People were saying that they were going to find me and they were going to kill me — those were the scariest ones, the death threats,” Michaela said. “And then, just in general, the transphobia. If somebody wasn’t threatening to kill me, then they were just making comments about my appearance.”

By that time, authorities had separately taken two, now-cleared persons of interest into custody, Michaela said, so she tried to brush the whole thing off.

“My first reaction was like ‘This is ridiculous. I can’t believe this is happening. This is all gonna blow over in a couple hours, once they announce that they’ve arrested the person and people realize this isn’t me,’” Michaela said. “Once they released [the second] suspect, then the gravity of the situation started to set in.”

While a couple of people defended Michaela online with screenshots showing she and “Omar” were two different people with different X accounts, others used Photoshop to replace photos of memes Omar shared with Michaela's photo.

“It’s very easy to verify that I didn't make these tweets, and that also my account has been my current username since it was created last year,” Michaela said.

But, those facts didn’t fit the narrative some wanted, she added.

“It was very clear to me from the moment that Charlie got shot that the right wanted this to be a trans woman,” Michaela said. “That’s why my picture spread like wildfire. That’s why everyone was so quick to jump on it, because we’ve been demonized. There is a concerted effort by the right wing in this country to associate trans people with the moral decay of our society, and blame us for the decline of America.”

By that point, Michaela said there were "hundreds of messages of people saying that they want to find me and kill me” — and if you include comments on other social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, “it starts to get into the thousands," she added.

Unable to post on X, Michaela posted a video to Instagram, explaining everything that happened and offering proof that she wasn’t the shooter. In one of the most memorable exchanges for Michaela, someone commented on the video.

“First they tag the FBI, as if they’re about to give the FBI some information they don’t already know,” Michaela said. “And they say that if the FBI doesn’t get me, then we can’t let another one get away and we have to take this into our own hands.”

By the morning of Sept. 11, the messages hadn’t stopped or slowed down — especially after the Wall Street Journal reported that an internal law enforcement bulletin said ammunition recovered from the Kirk shooting was engraved with expressions of “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” However, officials later said the bulletin "may not accurately reflect the messages on the ammunition." To date, officials haven't cited any inscriptions that specifically refer to transgender people.

That afternoon, George Papadopoulos, a former Trump aide who pleaded guilty and served time in federal prison for lying to the FBI about his connections to Russia, joined the social media firestorm, posting a photo of Michaela on X that got thousands of retweets and likes.

Michaela called her parents and asked what she should do. Her mom suggested she call the Seattle FBI field office. So, that’s what Michaela did — to no avail, she said.

“They just transferred me over to the national tip line. I left my information to tell them what was going on, and they said if anyone had questions, they would come and talk to me,” Michaela said. “Nobody has reached back out.”

Michaela also reported the situation to X — also to no avail, she said. The social media platform told her it did not find that the posts targeting her violated its rules.

“I tried to do a follow-up in the reply to say, ‘This is spreading my image, saying that I’m a murder, and very much threatens my actual safety,” Michaela said. “And it’s a proven lie. It’s not that this is some gray area [with] room for debate…This is 100% verifiable through archive links, and it’s still being pushed.”

While Michaela believes the situation “borders on defamation,” that’s not a legal path she wants to go down, she said.

“I don’t want to spend the next five years in defamation lawsuits,” she said. “At that point, this story will come and go and everyone will forget about it, but I’ll still have to deal with it.”

Now that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a resident of Utah, has been arrested and charged in connection with Kirk’s assassination, the social media whirlwind has let up a bit. But Michaela remains anxious — and unsure of what could prevent situations like this from continuing to happen.

“I think that this is almost an inevitability of the way that the internet works and the speed at which information travels now,” Michaela said. “It’s unfortunate that my picture got spread like this, but I really don’t know a way to combat it that doesn’t mean a very overreaching or curtailing freedom of speech on the internet.”

But one thing that could help, Michaela said, is if people stopped trying to be internet sleuths.

“It’s a change that needs to happen at a personal level — it’s people needing to realize they’re not going to figure this [case] out from your computer at home,” she said. “You don’t know more than the FBI does.”

And the bigger issue to Michaela: the rising anti-trans sentiment across the country, and even locally.

“The rhetoric that’s coming out of the right about us right now is just emboldening people to really feel justified in actual violence against us,” Michaela said. “And I think people need to realize that that’s where that rhetoric leads.”

Michaela also wants this to be known: “I unequivocally condemn the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Political assassinations have no place in a functioning society, and that's not because I think Charlie was a good person or I liked him,” she said.

“Once you decide that it's more expedient to kill your political opponents than to work through the ballot box, we no longer have a country,” she added. “If you're allowed to kill Charlie Kirk — and if you think that I killed him, then you're allowed to kill me too — I don't want to live in that world.”