Over a month after Chaya Raichik accused an innocent trans woman of carrying out the tragic school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, the Libs of TikTok creator acknowledged in an interview with The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz that she knew the claim was false – but said she still would not remove the post. Raichik originally used the post — which originated from 4chan trolls — to misleadingly sketch a pattern of mass shootings carried out by transgender people.  

“Twitter is free speech,” said Raichik in response to a question about why she doesn’t delete the post, which she said she is “glad” has a community note correcting it. “People lie about me all the time on there, and they don’t get taken down.”

“The Uvalde shooter wasn’t trans,” agreed Raichik in the interview. “Is there a law against lying? … They’re knowingly lying about me.”

The Libs of TikTok creator appears to hold her critics to a different standard than herself, and she has threatened defamation lawsuits against people who’ve pointed to a troubling link between her posts and the threats of violence that have followed them. 

Raichik also confirmed the end of her business partnership with Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, a change she says happened “recently,” citing “personal reasons.” 

In April 2022 Dillon touted their arrangement as a way to “turn her heroic, high-risk work into a career.” Just over a year later, Dillon took his dissatisfaction with his then-partner’s output public, saying, “I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that we don’t see much” from Raichik “anymore.” Dillon also confirmed the end of the partnership in a post on February 22, saying, “We used to work together. That was announced publicly and widely known. We no longer do, and haven't for some time.”

Dillon has called on Raichik to retract her false claim about the Uvalde shooter.

This is not the only time Libs of TikTok has spread demonstrably false anti-LGBTQ hoaxes. Raichik used the recent Lakewood Church shooting in Houston to spread fears of a so-called “epidemic of trans violence” before police revealed that the perpetrator had “been identified this entire time as female.” 

The account has also shared doctored footage suggesting a drag performer was inappropriately exposed to minors and a debunked hoax about schools providing cat litter for students who identify as animals. Media Matters has documented at least 36 instances where Libs of TikTok posts were followed by threats or harassment against their targets. 

Raichik has recently focused on Oklahoma, where she was appointed to a position on a library advisory committee despite having only visited the state one time. When Lorenz asked why she was appointed to the committee, Raichik said, “They have, unfortunately, a lot of wokeness in their red state and I'm trying to help.” 

Nex Benedict, a nonbinary sophomore at Owasso High School in Oklahoma whose mother is a member of the Choctaw nation, recently died one day after their head was slammed against the floor in an altercation in a girl’s bathroom, drawing attention to discriminatory laws and a hostile climate affecting trans people in the state.  

Just 0.6% of Americans over the age of 13 report that they are transgender, according to the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, and they are over four times more likely than their cisgender peers to be the victims of violent crime.