'Swatted': Transgender activist decries arrest, seizure of devices

Clara Sorrenti woke up with an assault rifle pointed in her face and London police officers crowding inside her home.

They told the influential online advocate for transgender activism that they were looking for a handgun, ammunition, cartridges, cleaning tools, cell phones and computers. They placed her under arrest.

For 11 hours on Friday, while officers seized her and her fiance’s computers and phones, Sorrenti, 28, was in police custody, held on possible gun and death threat charges, unable to contact loved ones and interrogated over frightening emails purportedly, they said, written by her.

“I never sent any emails. I have no reason to threaten London – anyone who knows me knows that it’s completely out of character for me,” said the London transgender woman, known as “Keffals” in the online gaming world.

Sorrenti said she is a victim of a “swatting” attack where anonymous online trolls, often linked to the online gaming community, send false, malicious hoax messages or make 911 calls that suggest a wide range of possible acts of violence such as bomb threats, hostage situations or potential shootings.

The calls tie up police resources responding to a potential crisis and open up a target to unnecessary and sometimes extreme investigations.

The emails the police linked to Sorrenti were full of grammatical errors and sent to every London city councillor. They included Sorrenti’s name and address and warned that “I killed my mother, I have an illegal firearm and I plan to go to city hall to shoot every cisgender person I see,” she said. (Cisgender refers to a person whose gender corresponds with their birth sex.)

Also in the emails was her “dead name,” the male name she was assigned at birth and that she changed more than a decade ago.

In what she described “really, really insulting to me,” London police ignored her real name and used the dead name to book her into custody and scrawled it across the property bags returned to her when she was released at midnight with no charges.

“Not only did I get swatted, I get humiliated,” she said, her voice wavering, adding that her treatment surmounted to human rights violations for discrimination of her gender identity.

Sorrenti said guns and ammunition weren’t found in the search but London police still have her electronics, which has effectively stopped her from working as an online influencer. Her fiance’s devices were seized that contained their doctoral thesis.

“I’ve had to spend thousands of dollars replacing my work computer because I would be functionally unemployed without it,” Sorrenti said.

Sorrenti is no stranger to political activism, having stood as a candidate in London for the Communist Party in the 2018 provincial election and the 2019 federal election.

She’s become a swatting target because of her popular Twitch and Twitter accounts, where in recent months, she weaves together her gaming skills with commentary on emerging transgender issues, and has been particularly vocal about recent transphobic laws enacted in many American states.

Her voice has struck a chord. Her Twitch account has 43,000 followers while her Twitter account is followed by more than 100,000 users. Her influence has become so far-reaching that she was the subject of a lengthy Washington Post feature at the end of June.

But her views have charged up the transphobic haters.

She’s critical that the London police weren’t aware that she had an online target on her back. “I honestly believe that it is a case of police negligence because this is not the first time this has happened to me,” she said.

On July 31, just five days before her London home was searched, Toronto police contacted Sorrenti to advise her that “someone was impersonating me in an email and making threats to Toronto politicians.”

Police had been sent to an address where the email, sent from Switzerland, said she lived. Sorrenti  said the officer told her “that it was a swatting attempt and I was not a suspect or charged with any crime.”

The Toronto officer, she said, told her this week that he’s had no contact about the Toronto incident from London police.

Toronto police confirmed that there is a report filed on July 31 identifying Sorrenti and involving threats. They “advised it is an ongoing investigation and it that no other information can be provided at this time,” they wrote in an email.

Late Tuesday afternoon, London police confirmed in an email that they had been contacted by London city hall on Friday about letters “threatening potential violence against individuals within city hall later the same day.”

They confirmed they were granted a search warrant and arrested Sorrenti at her residence. She was released without charges “pending analysis of electronic devices seized.”

“This investigation is ongoing, and at this point in time we cannot provide a firm date as to when it will conclude,” the police said in an email, and added that “a London police liaison has been in contact with Ms. Sorrenti to discuss the items seized, and will work with her as we continue our investigation.”

Sorrenti  said she’s been left shaken and angry and plans to move. She said she remains a suspect and it could be weeks before she gets her property returned.

On Tuesday, she posted a six-minute video on YouTube and set up a Go Fund Me page that had raised more than $31,000 by mid-afternoon. She hopes to recoup her financial losses “so I can move immediately because there is no policy against swatting in the city.”

Sorrenti  said she’s also weighing her legal options. “It’s a very terrifying thought that someone can just use your name in a burner email, attach any photo of a gun and then say they are going to shoot up city hall,” she said.

“And you get woken up to having an assault rifle pointed at you and spend 11 hours in custody without having done anything wrong and having no way of contacting your family or loved ones,” she said.

The incident has left her needing to take a break. “I know I want to continue doing what I’m doing but I have to take a lot of time off, time to myself and off work because this has been a very hard situation for me.

“I’m going to lose a lot of money from taking time off,” she said before taking a deep breath.

“I don’t want to see this happen to anyone else in London or in Canada …This was terrifying. I thought I was going to die.”

jsims@postmedia.com

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