Popular Trans Twitch Streamer Keffals Arrested After 'Traumatizing' Swatting Incident [View all]

Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, a trans streamer and political commentator, was arrested by Canadian police last week after a swatting incident. Keffals was left rattled, saying in a YouTube video recounting the event that the police terrorized her and locked her out of her accounts because she’s “still a suspect in an investigation” of a crime she didn’t commit.

Keffals’ Twitch streams and YouTube videos on politics and LGBTQ+ issues specifically have garnered her a hefty following. She’s weighed in on transphobic comments by journalist Helen Joyce and ratioed the hell outta noted TERF J.K. Rowling. Keffals has also used her platform for activism, such as calling awareness to a California bill that would protect trans youth fleeing to the state. If there is news relating to queerness, chances are Keffals has said something about it. And being as outspoken as she is, Keffals is no stranger to courting controversy. For example, she was temporarily banned from Twitch for “openly talking” about the abuse she gets earlier this year and regularly targets right-wing commentators for their bad takes, like Tim Pool.

A search warrant Keffals showed in the video noted that police were “looking for a handgun, ammunition, cartridges, cleaning tools, a gun case, cellphones, and computers.” The cops seized her personal and work devices, including the computer she streams from, as well as her fiancé’s equipment, which holds the only copy of their Ph.D. thesis and other university documents. Keffals explained that the Ontario police should’ve been privy to these awful swatting calls because it happened to her previously. On July 31 in Toronto, a different email by someone impersonating her was sent to Toronto politicians making similar threats. The sergeant of that police department, Nathan Edward Gibson, called it what it was—a misleading swatting incident, particularly because she doesn’t currently live in the metropolitan city of Toronto—and released Keffals without charging her for a crime or making her a suspect.

London Police Services, however, maintains that Keffals is still a suspect in their ongoing investigation. This is despite the cops recovering no weapons in Keffals’ home, finding her mom alive and well, and her own brother calling the department back in March asking for the family to be put on a no-swatting list. (That request, according to Keffals, was “completely dismissed.”)

https://kotaku.com/trans-twitch-youtube-livestream-clara-keffals-sorrenti-1849396487

Such breathtaking incompetence - Did Uvalde cops move up north or something?