The Importance of Getting the Full Picture
The Importance of Getting the Full Picture
The reaction to Nex Benedict’s tragic suicide ran ahead of the facts.
A child’s death is always tragic—all the more so when, as in the recent case of Oklahoma teen Nex Benedict, it involves the suicide of a troubled 16-year-old. But the Nex Benedict story, which gained national attention last month, also offers some troubling lessons about media bias, uncritical embrace of activist claims, and reliance on “alternative facts”—this time not on the populist far right but in the liberal and progressive mainstream. In this case, the story had to do with a particularly sensitive issue: controversies surrounding transgender youth.
Benedict’s grandmother and legal guardian, Sue Benedict, called an ambulance after Nex collapsed on February 8, and the teen was pronounced dead at the hospital. The first non-local media report on Benedict’s death appeared on February 20 in the left-leaning British paper The Independent. According to the piece, Benedict, who identified as gender fluid, was systematically bullied at school for being transgender:
The bullying had started in earnest at the beginning of the 2023 school year, a few months after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill that required public school students to use bathrooms that matched the sex listed on their birth certificates.
A few weeks ago, on 7 February, the bullying allegedly erupted in violence when Nex suffered severe head injuries during a “physical altercation” at Owasso High School...
The headline on the piece read, “Oklahoma banned trans students from bathrooms. Now Nex Benedict is dead after a fight at school.”
Yet the piece left a lot of questions open—including the link, if any, between the bathroom incident and Benedict’s death the next day. (An update to the article briefly mentioned that according to a police statement, “an autopsy indicated that Nex had not died as a result of trauma.”) It was also unclear whether Benedict’s use of the girls’ bathroom, where the altercation took place, had ever been a problem—or whether Benedict, a natal female adolescent, had ever expressed misgivings about using it. (The Oklahoma law, which requires children to use the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex, also requires schools to provide single-occupancy bathrooms and changing rooms for all students who don’t want to do so.)
Despite these question marks, American progressive publications quickly picked up the narrative. “Oklahoma Republicans Passed a Bathroom Bill. Now a Trans Kid Is Dead,” read a headline on The New Republic website, with the subhead adding, “Nonbinary teen Nex Benedict died after being violently attacked in their school bathroom.” The article asserted that Benedict was “the victim of transphobic torment from school bullies.” The only indication that the death might not have been related to the bathroom incident came in a statement from a local LGBT activist group, Freedom Oklahoma: “We want to be clear, whether Nex died as a direct result of injuries sustained in the brutal hate-motivated attack at school or not, Nex’s death is a result of being the target of physical and emotional harm because of who Nex was.”
At a February 23 meeting of the Oklahoma State Board of Education, local politician and business owner Sean Cummings angrily charged that Benedict’s alleged attackers were “emboldened” by the state’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, a Republican who vociferously supports the bathroom bill, and right-wing activist Chaya Raichik (“Libs of TikTok” online), whom Walters had appointed to a state school library committee. “You literally have blood on your hands,” he said, predicting that the schoolboard would face a lawsuit and suggesting that some of the three girls who had “jumped” Benedict could face prison. Democratic congresswoman and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also weighed in on Twitter, writing that “Nex Benedict’s death from a brutal assault in their high school bathroom is outrageous and heartbreaking” and blaming “anti-trans fervor fueled by extreme Republicans.”
Some media outlets did move to correct the misimpression that Nex Benedict died from an assault: the Associated Press reported that preliminary autopsy results disclosed by the police indicated the teen’s death was not related to trauma from the fight. Then, on February 25, the story took a new turn with the release of materials from the investigation, including a police bodycam video that showed Benedict being interviewed at a hospital after the fight, with Sue Benedict present.
The video upended the earlier narrative in several ways. It showed Nex Benedict with no visible signs of major bruising, injury or impairment, contrary to claims that the beating had left bruises over the teen’s face and eyes. While both Nex and Sue talked about earlier bullying, it seemed that the problem with the three girls had been very recent (Nex had first met them in an in-school suspension class). It also seemed unclear whether the bullying was related to gender identity: the girls had taunted Nex and friends, the teen said, “because of the way we dress.” Yes, dress style can be an aspect of gender nonconformity, but it remains unclear whether the taunting was related to this; in any case, no mention of gender identity was made in the interview. Lastly, Benedict’s account of the confrontation (which lasted less than a minute, according to the subsequent police investigation) showed that the incident was not quite the unprovoked assault initial accounts had described:
I was talking to my friends, they were talking to their friends, and we were laughing and they had said something like, ‘Why do they laugh like that?’ They were talking about us in front of us. So I went up there and poured water on them [from a water bottle]. Then all three of them came at me. … They grabbed on my hair, I grabbed onto them, I threw one of them into a paper towel dispenser and then they got my legs out from under me and got me on the ground, started beating the shit out of me.
On March 13, a summary of the medical examiner’s report was released, indicating that Benedict had committed suicide using a mix of an antihistamine and an antidepressant. A few days later, prosecutors said that they would not seek charges. While the Benedict family claimed that the summary inappropriately downplayed the physical injuries from the fight, the full autopsy report released on March 27 showed that the teen had sustained some minor contusions, abrasions, hemorrhages and lacerations which could not have had a lethal outcome; there was also a contusion on Benedict’s torso, most likely from the resuscitation efforts. Finally, the report disclosed that the 16-year-old had suffered from “bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, self-harm (cutting), chronic tobacco abuse and chronic marijuana abuse.”
If this wasn’t a story of murder or manslaughter, was it a story of a trans child driven to suicide by bigotry? For many, that was a foregone conclusion given the wider context: as the AP story on the Medical Examiner’s findings noted, “Oklahoma’s Republican-led Legislature has passed several new laws targeting transgender and nonbinary people, including bills that prohibit children from receiving gender-affirming medical care.” A statement issued by President Joe Biden on March 14 avoided directly blaming anyone for Benedict’s death, but described Nex as “a kid who just wanted to be accepted” and urged doing more to “end discrimination and address the suicide crisis impacting too many nonbinary and transgender children.”
Obviously, every single suicide, especially of a teenager, is a terrible thing, and a call for compassion is never out of place. But in Nex’s case, there are plenty of other factors that could have contributed to the tragedy. The March 21 press release by Tulsa County District Attorney Stephen Kunzweiler mentioned “the discovery of some brief notes, written by Benedict, which appear to be related to the suicide”—and which “do not make any reference to the earlier fight or difficulties at school.”
In addition to the mental health problems mentioned in the medical examiner’s report, there is an aspect of Benedict’s background that has gone unreported, outside posts online and on social media by independent journalist Jeremy Lee Quinn and a handful of items in the conservative press: what seems to be a history of paternal sexual abuse.
There were only hints at this fact in other outlets, such as a mention in a February 21 Washington Post report on the case that Nex’s father was “in prison for abuse” and not present at the funeral, and mentions in that article and elsewhere of the teen’s relationship with the group Bikers Against Child Abuse, which provided an escort for Benedict’s funeral.
According to documents first reported at the RedState site, Benedict’s father, Arkansas resident James Everette Hughes, pleaded guilty to sexual assault in the second degree in November 2019. (Hughes was recently released but reincarcerated in January of this year for allegedly failing to register as a sex offender.) The victim, identified as D.H. in court records, was his 11-year-old daughter, then known as Dagny Hughes. Hughes had called a sexual abuse hotline to report a sexual assault by the father two years earlier; during an interview at the local child advocacy center, the child disclosed that the molestation had continued for years. After James Hughes went to prison, the child was adopted by Sue and moved to Oklahoma.
Usually, opting to protect a bereaved family’s privacy in such cases is understandable and laudable (especially since the Benedicts’ public statements carefully elided all information about sexual abuse by the father). But when a suicide becomes a national story and major public figures pronounce that it was caused by discrimination, the full picture is surely important.
Eventually, more facts about this tragic story may come to light. The Benedict family may sue the school district, and there is also a pending Department of Education investigation. In the meantime, it is still unknown whether Nex Benedict was a victim of persistent bullying at school, let alone whether the alleged bullying was based on gender identity.
For that matter, Benedict’s actual gender identification is another subject where media narratives have flattened complicated facts. The initial reports said that Benedict used “they/them” pronouns. But several days later, when some of Nex’s school friends asserted that Nex had identified as male and used “he/him” pronouns, many media outlets quickly changed gears. An NBC News report stated that “Nex primarily went by he/him pronouns at school but also used they/them pronouns, which Nex’s family also used.” This is misleading: in fact, Sue Benedict referred to Nex exclusively by birth name and female pronouns in the police interview after the fight. (While Nex did not visibly seem uncomfortable with this language, we don’t know whether there was any friction behind the scenes. Sue Benedict later posted an apology for “not using [Nex’s] name correctly” on the family’s GoFundMe page.)
One could say that all these details should be irrelevant when a child is dead. But if the facts and details were distorted to present a false narrative of that child’s death, the truth matters. One depressing lesson of this incident is that liberals and progressives who rightly decry the proliferation of ideologically driven “fake news” on the populist right are hardly immune from distorted, politically driven narratives themselves. In this case, conservative media consumers got, in some ways, a more accurate account of the story.
In early March, the progressive blog Popular Information criticized supposedly premature reports that Benedict’s death was not caused by the fight at school, in a post titled “How the media failed Nex Benedict.” Those reports were, of course, soon vindicated by the medical examiner’s conclusions. But the media did fail Nex Benedict, as did the activists who drove the media narrative and the politicians who repeated it. First, they egregiously misrepresented the teen’s death and the events around it. Then they sidelined important facts, turning a troubled child into a political icon and a martyr at the center of a national story. Many of the people who promoted these misrepresentations undoubtedly believed that they were helping the noble cause of protecting transgender teens and countering bullies. But no one is helped by a catastrophizing narrative in which gender-dysphoric or gender-nonconforming teens are depicted as being in constant danger from violent bigots, forever one indignity away from being driven to suicide—least of all the teens themselves.
Cathy Young is a writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason.
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Thank you for attempting to get at the truth of this tragic story which has been so misrepresented in the media.
Thanks. I knew there was way more to the story and have just been waiting for more information.