Military pilot Jo Ellis said she had to hire private armed security for her family because of the false claims, which went viral on social media.
A transgender military pilot filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday against a conservative influencer who falsely claimed on social media that she was flying the helicopter that collided with a commercial jet near Reagan National Airport in January, killing 67 people.
“I want to hold this person accountable for what they did to me,” Jo Ellis, a pilot who has served more than 15 years in the Virginia Army National Guard, said in a statement to NBC News. “It’s become too common that people can say horrible things about someone, profit at their expense, and get away with it.”
On Jan. 30, less than 24 hours after the crash, conservative influencer Matt Wallace, who has 2.2 million followers on the social media platform X, shared a post from another account he operates stating that the helicopter pilot was transgender, according to the lawsuit. Wallace included a photo of Ellis, and the post went viral, the lawsuit states.
I’m confused as to why you are getting so many upvotes because either though misreading or misplaced focus, you only replied to one half of one sentence of my reply, constructing an alternate reality in which my point was the opposite of what it actually was. And to be blunt, both the reply and the upvotes reflects so much of the knee-jerk hyperemotionalism in online debates.
As for the rest, I think we can all acknowledge that people in general will take more offense to a paper insulting a powerless minority than the powerful majority. But in this case they didn’t, hence my point that violence is counterproductive to a cause, which you seem to think was the opposite point.