NASHVILLE, TN- The Daily Mail reports that at long last, portions of trans Covenant School shooter Audrey Hale’s unhinged manifesto have been obtained by The Tennessee Star. The outlet obtained dozens of pages of Hale’s rant, which has been suppressed by the FBI and Nashville police for over a year.
The writings, amounting to some four dozen pages of the manifesto, sheds some daylight on Hale’s attempt to transition from female to male and why she was led to shoot and kill six people, including three students at the school in March 2023.
In her screed, Hale raged about her parents and slammed her conservative Christian upbringing, while also complaining about suffering because hormone blockers were unavailable when she was a child.
The writings have been kept secret for over a year and some have accused law enforcement officials of hiding her manifesto because it would hurt the trans community, which has seen its share of violent actors.
The manifesto details how Hale, 28, who identified as a male named Aiden, was able to shoot her way into Covenant and kill three adults and three nine-year-old children before responding officers heroically entered the school and killed her.
The Star writes that Hale’s journal began with a page titled “My Imaginary Penis” and included a crude drawing.
“My penis exists in my head. I swear to god I’m a male,” Hale wrote in the papers, which were recovered by police.
She also fantasized about having a penis so she could have sex with a woman in her assumed identity as Aiden. She also complained that when she used the name Aiden on a job application for a delivery position, it raised issues with the company’s background check.
Hale said being raised as a girl was “torture,” and wrote of being concerned that her high school classmates would call her a “dyke or a faggot,” she wrote.
All of that went away when she was informed about transgenderism in her early 20’s.
“I finally found the answer–that changing one’s gender is possible,” Hale wrote.
However her mom wasn’t willing to let her go through that.
“What she believes, how she grew up, conservatively, and that LGBTQ–especially transgender–was an enigma, nearly non-existent,” she wrote.
“I hate parental views; how my mom sees me as a daughter–and she’d not bear to want to lose that daughter because a son would be the death of Audrey,” she wrote.
Hale then engaged in violent language when talking about the emergence of puberty blockers in the 2010s, with those therapies being hailed at the time for helping transgender pre-teens delay the onset of puberty.
“I’d kill to have those resources,” Hale wrote. “2007 was the birth of puberty blockers and a newfound discovery for treatment of non-conforming transgender children,” she continued.
However for Hale, she felt it was “too late,” since she “was in the 6th grade, puberty already hit me.”
She spoke of creating scenes with stuffed animals to simulate having sex as a man.
“I can pretend to be them [and] do the things boys do [and] experience my boy self as Tony,” she wrote. Tony refers to her “stuffed boy doll” which she likened to herself as being “the boy I am in another form.”
Hale wrote that she simulated intercourse between “Tony” and another soft toy over the course of hours, even going so far as to take photos of the scene and losing track of time.
“God, I am such a pervert,” Hale wrote. “I waste too much time in my fantasies.”
That entry was written only 16 days before Hale, dressed in combat gear, entered the Covenant School armed with two assault-style guns and a handgun and began her deadly rampage.
Hale also wrote what the Daily Mail described as “politically charged comments” about gun rights and trans people.
“So now in America, it makes one a criminal to have a gun or be transgender, or non-binary,” Hale wrote.
“God, I hate those shithead politicians,” she continued.
The manifesto was recovered from Hale’s car, which was parked outside of Covenant and was provided to The Tennessee Star by a law enforcement source close to the investigation.
Immediately after the shooting, Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake said the department had recovered Hale’s manifesto, as well as hand-drawn maps, from her car, and promised they would eventually be released to the public.
However both the MNPD and the FBI later stepped back from that promise and said release of the manifesto could hurt the investigations.
The Tennessee Star and others have filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the Metro Nashville PD and the FBI to release Hale’s writings. The FBI allegedly advised the department not to release the manifesto and other “legacy tokens” in the wake of the mass shooting. The families of Hale’s victims eventually stepped in and became part of a public records lawsuit against the city.
In that suit, they claim that Hale’s estate includes the manifesto, and they therefore own the copyright and can determine whether or not it should be released. It has been long expected that Hale’s writings would reveal more about her motivations for the deadly assault.
Last November, three pages of notes written by Hale were leaked, which revealed she planned to target “white privileged ‘critters’ and ‘fascists’ before then planning to commit suicide.
On the day of the attack, Hale wrote, “Today is the day. The day has finally come. I can’t believe it’s here. Don’t know how I was able to get this far but here I am.”
“I’m a little bit nervous but excited too, been excited for the past two weeks,” she wrote. “I’m ready–I hope my victims aren't.”
She continued, “God let my wrath take over my anxiety. It might be 10 minutes tops. It might be 3-7. It’s gonna go quick. I hope I have a high death count. Ready to die.” She then drove over to Covenant.
Fourteen minutes after beginning her rampage, she was shot dead, but not before she claimed the six victims.
According to an autopsy, Hale’s clothing had “handwritten words, drawings, and numbers” on them, although it is unknown what was written on them.
She also had a plastic orange anklet which was inscribed with a number, 508407, although it is unknown what that number referred to.
That leak resulted in seven Nashville police officers being suspended after an investigation over how the notes became public.
Many on the right believe the manifesto has been suppressed to avoid shedding negative light on the "T" component of the LGBTQ movement, which has become a lightning rod over the past few years.
Comments
2024-06-10T03:01-0500 | Comment by: Charli
This says nothing about Hale, now an adult, taking hormones to be a male; did she or didn't she? I can only imagine how much more hyped up Audrey would be testosterone, and, if she was on testosterone, that would explain the violence she exacted on innocent babies.