Two days after a helicopter collided with a Washington passenger jet in January, 67 people were killed, and Joe Ellis was woken up by a surge in text messages.
Ellis, a 35-year-old helicopter pilot for the Virginia Army National Guard, learned from a friend that her name and photos are available throughout social media. Users misnamed her as the pilot who crashed into a passenger jet on January 29th. This is how, in the eyes of online mobs, the diversity initiative played a role in the crash because Ellis is transgender.
She posted a “Proof of Life” video on Facebook. She is very alive and stresses to try to slow the spread, but the claims appeared to be multiplying.
“At that point, my life was upside down,” Ellis said in an interview, adding that the employer had sent armed bodyguards to protect his family and began carrying loaded weapons as a precaution. “Forever, I'm known as 'that transterrorist'. ”
Ellis filed a honour-loss lawsuit against Matt Wallace, an X influencer with over 2 million followers on Wednesday. Wallace was one of the most prominent people who spread falsehood in a series of posts that included photos of Ellis and details about her life.
Wallace deleted posts about Ellis after the Facebook video began to go viral online. He posted a “important update” on the afternoon of January 31, writing that Ellis “has not piloted a helicopter that is still alive after hitting a plane.”
The submission claims that Wallace “created a disruptive and irresponsible campaign of honor.” Ellis' attorneys have been filed in the U.S. District Court in Colorado, a state that said Wallace is resident and said he is seeking financial damages in court.
Wallace did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It is difficult for people who target digital misinformation to turn to after the lies have spread online. Social media companies have eased their stance on content moderation in recent years.
At the same time, the idea that social media influencers can be personally and financially liable through the Honor and Loss Act to spread open false statements online has grown as a potential tool to combat misinformation.
“The lawsuit falls within a clear growth trend,” said Ronell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah, focusing on honorific losses. “This is all a relatively new and complicated use of the Honor-Acceptable Law. People who have been victimized by the conspiracy theory of the virus are trying to use the Honor-Acceptable Law to not only improve their reputation, but also correct the broader social lies.”
This approach has been strengthened in recent years by the success of honor loss cases against a much larger group. In 2023, the Dominion Voting System won a $787.5 million settlement against Fox News to lie to the voting machine after the 2020 election. The family, tied up by the Sandy Fook School massacre, sued Fabrist Alex Jones for fabulousness, and won over $1 billion in damages in 2022.
There are few examples of such lawsuits against independent creators and social media influencers.
Ellis's lawsuit was filed by the Equality Legal Action Fund, a group of primarily volunteer lawyers that protect LGBTQ people from defamation and harassment.
Such cases face many constitutional and legal hurdles. Free speech laws are broad and make it difficult to prove a loss of honor and amid even if falsehood is shared. In most cases, it is up to the slander to prove that the speaker acted intentionally and maliciously, rather than making a mistake.
Ellis said any financial compensation she may receive will go to the families of the victims who fell crash.
“I believe in freedom of speech, but I also believe in the consequences of freedom of speech,” Ellis said. “If you can stir up a mob because you say something that's not true, that's your right. But if a mob comes after someone, you have to have some consequences.”
Speculation that the transgender pilot may have caused the collision on January 29th emerged as a conspiracy theory shortly after the training exercise Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger jet across the Potomac River. Just a few days ago, President Trump signed an executive order to ban transgender people from the military, prompting some users to speculate that crashing was a violent transgender pilot terrorist act. For the next few days, Trump continued to tie the crash to policies relating to diversity, equity, inclusion, or DEI.
According to a review of a New York Times post, Wallace was not the first to target Ellis on X. The conversation about Ellis began on January 30th and exploded until January 31st, and by the second day it had become a trending topic for X with over 90,000 posts, according to Trands24, a social media monitoring website.
“I was a door gunner on an Iraqi helicopter during the battle zone and was shot in the same battle zone,” Ellis said. “But even for me, the rumors sparked the magnifying glass on my life and it had a real impact.”
