A man who left his family to live as a woman and threatened to “Go BERSERK” in defense of transgender ideology shot and killed his son and the boy’s mother at a Rhode Island hockey game on Monday, but the corporate media really don’t want you to know he was a fanatical adherent of one of their pet ideologies.
Robert Dorgan underwent surgery to mimic female body parts in 2020 and went by the name “Roberta Esposito,” according to the New York Post. Hours before the shooting, he posted “Keep bashing us. But do not wonder why we Go BERSERK,” in response to a post that accurately described a cross-dressing congressman as male. According to local outlet WPRI, Dorgan’s “gender identity played a role in multiple family disputes over recent years,” including his divorce, but that fact has been deemed unpublishable by corporate media outlets, which gloss over the killings as a “family dispute.”
Equally incurious is Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves, who told reporters that Dorgan’s “status” as a trans-identifying man “really doesn’t have anything to do with the investigation.” Goncalves paid respect to Dorgan’s transgender identity by referring to him by a plural pronoun in the press conference.
Major legacy news outlets have taken Goncalves at her word. In a New York Times report updated Tuesday morning, Neil Vigdor and Thomas Gibbons-Neff took time to include minor details about the neighborhood surrounding the hockey rink and the “quote above the rink’s high school hockey player entrance.” But the only indication of the shooter’s trans identity was the mention that Dorgan “also went by the name Roberta Esposito.” Vigdor and Gibbons-Neff shrugged that the chief “did not provide further explanation.”
Believe it or not, that line was an improvement from a previous version of the piece. According to a screenshot posted by Fox Business anchor Dagen McDowell, the Times previously euphemized Dorgan’s trans identity by noting that he “went by two different names.”
Kimberlee Kruesi of the Associated Press merely referred to Dorgan as the “shooter” in her headline and first several paragraphs, before simply noting that he “also went by the name Roberta Esposito.” No other details about Dorgan’s history of trans radicalism were included, and she obliged his gender dysphoria by refusing to refer to him by male pronouns. A pop-up banner on the AP website promises to deliver “news without an agenda.” Kruesi’s piece also appeared in The Washington Post.
Over at NBC News, Doha Madani and Phil Helsel did not identify Dorgan until paragraph seven. The only indication of his trans identity is a line noting he “also went by the first name Roberta and by the last name Esposito.” The article was filed under the tag “Guns in America.”
Madani writes frequently about transgender affairs, such as how “racist and transphobic” it is to exclude men from girls’ sports or how “heinous” J.K. Rowling is for defending biological reality. When the transgender subject isn’t the one shooting people, Madani writes about transgenderism and violence this way:
Helsel, too, has deemed a person’s transgender identity newsworthy when it’s politically useful, even falsely describing a man as a woman in a news report to do so. See if you can spot the difference between how Helsel writes about a transgender man who shot people versus one who claimed to be the victim of a “transphobic” attack:
In a quadruple-bylined report — by Elise Hammond, Mark Morales, Danya Gainor, and Amanda Musa — a CNN headline removed not only Dorgan’s identity but also his agency. “Shooting at youth hockey game in Rhode Island leaves 2 dead, 3 injured,” it says passively, with Dorgan left unidentified until the third paragraph. We’re only told that the police chief said he “went by the name of Roberta Esposito.” Like other outlets, CNN conspicuously refused to refer to Dorgan with male pronouns, instead repeatedly calling him the “shooter.”
Under the headline “Shooting in stands at R.I. rink leaves 3 dead, others injured,” an ESPN report similarly avoided using male pronouns and refused to provide information about Dorgan’s trans identity besides the fact that he “also went by the name Roberta Esposito.”
At Bari Weiss’s CBS News, News Editor Kiki Intarasuwan refused to identify Dorgan as male, even using the grammatically incorrect plural pronoun “their” when describing him. Last year, a CBS News correspondent reportedly faced backlash from coworkers when she suggested the network “should refrain from adopting terminology” pushed by transgender groups. Weiss said at the time that it was “perfectly normal for a newsroom to discuss, debate and, yes, even disagree about language.”
An article by The Guardian declined even to mention Dorgan’s “Roberta” alias, giving no indication of his transgender ideology, except for the publication’s refusal to use any gendered pronouns to refer to him. The shooting received one write-up from Politico before Dorgan was identified, but the outlet does not appear to have updated its coverage or published further reports on the shooting since Dorgan’s allegiance to transgender ideology was revealed.
Dorgan’s rampage occurred less than a week after Jesse Van Rootselaar, another trans-identifying man, shot up a school in Canada, in what has been described as the country’s “deadliest school shooting” since 1989. After that attack, Canadian police risibly referred to Van Rootselaar as a “gunperson” to show deference to his ideology. In an emergency alert, he was described as a “female in a dress.” Media such as Reuters adopted the inaccurate terminology, referring to the male shooter as an “18-year-old woman.” Not until the 11th paragraph of its report did Reuters mention that Van Rootselaar “began identifying as a female six years ago.”
