Barbie Kardashian and the Gaslighting of the Irish Public

Paddy O'Gorman on the trial of Barbie Kardashian and the travesty of violent men in women's prison

The sex offender now known as Barbie Kardashian is a 22-year-old Irishman who has been in the women’s section of Limerick Prison since 2022. Kardashian, born Gabrielle Alejandro Gentile, suffered extreme abuse at the hands of his violent father, who, among other things, forced him to rape his own mother. He spent much of his life in various juvenile detention centres for his threats of violence and actual violence against women. In one case, he ripped the eyelid off a female social worker who was driving the car in which he was travelling. He described that woman’s screams as “music to my ears”.

He is currently serving a six-year sentence for threatening to torture his mother to death. He told his social care managers, “If I got into (my mother’s) house I would run towards her and put the knife into her body and her genitalia; the thing is, I would want to prolong my mum’s suffering for as long as possible. I’d want to put her through lots of torture, fear, and humiliation.” When Barbie Kardashian (henceforth BK in this article) was sent to prison for that offence, his solicitor informed the court that his client had now become a woman and had obtained a gender recognition certificate to prove it. Accordingly, the court decided to send this violent, woman-hating man to a women’s prison.  

Kardashian Was Not Alone

BK joined two other trans-identified men already in the women’s section of Limerick Prison. One of those was a child predator who abused his female partner’s son over an extended period, telling the little boy that he would pull his arms off if he ever told anyone about what was being done to him. The public never learned of him because he was reported in the media as a woman who had abused a child. (He cannot be named to protect his victim’s identity.) The other trans-identified man in the women’s prison was “Shauna” Kavanagh. Kavanagh was serving a two-year sentence for assaults on three men. The public was similarly kept in the dark about his presence because the media never reported the fact that he was a man. Nor did they tell the truth when Kavanagh, having finished his sentence in Limerick, was placed in a women’s hostel in Dublin where he went on to beat up a woman. Kavanagh was convicted for that assault in 2023 and received a suspended sentence, by which time he was already back in the women’s prison in Dublin for a further offence (I have written about Kavanagh here). All three men, Barbie Kardashian, Kavanagh and the child predator, '“became” women once they knew they were facing imprisonment.  

Those of us who attempted to raise concerns when BK was first put into prison with women were dismissed as bigots by commentators, activists, and politicians on both Left and Right. Government Minister Jennifer Carol McNeill stated “…since the gender recognition change in 2015, neither I nor any woman with whom I am personally acquainted has raised the spectre or fact of men coming into women’s places to attack them.” We were assured that BK presented no threat to women in prison. It didn’t work out that way.  

A Danger to All Women

BK was in court recently facing more criminal charges for acts committed while in prison. He faced accusations that on four separate occasions he threatened to rape and cause harm to two women: a prisoner named Tegan McGhee, and a prison officer named Roisin Linnane.   

He was acquitted of all four charges. It was a verdict that surprised me, after sitting in court for five days to hear the evidence. BK did not deny he had threatened the women; he was stunningly candid about this. But the judge explained to the jury that their job was not to decide if those threats had been made, but to decide if those threats could be considered by the victims to have been credible. The jury decided that the prosecution case had not reached the necessary standard of proof to convict.  

It was a lamentable verdict. Regrettably, under our system of justice, a jury is not allowed to know anything about an accused person’s history. The two victims were under no illusions about what BK could do. The jury may not have been so aware.  

In spite of his acquittal, the testimony BK gave in court on the last day of his trial deserves to be widely known, if only to correct the many politicians and commentators who have told us for years that women have nothing to fear from the presence of “trans women” in spaces that were once reserved for women only.  

BK was the last witness to give evidence during the week of his trial. Earlier in the week we heard from his two alleged victims and from other prison staff members who witnessed BK making his appalling threats to the women. On the last day of the trial, Prosecution completed their case and Defence called BK as their only witness. BK took the stand to answer the questions put to him. Speaking in a voice so quiet, shy, and effeminate that he once had to be asked by his solicitor to speak up, BK admitted to the threats but claimed he did not intend carrying them out. There were no surprises in his evidence he gave in his defence, but when he was cross-examined by Prosecution, his testimony became truly shocking. He did not attempt to qualify or minimise any of the threats he admitted to having made. He did the opposite.   

Answering the questions put to him in the witness box by the Prosecution, Barbie Kardashian discarded his effeminate voice and spoke like a man.  

He said he had threatened to rape the prisoner Tegan McGhee with an object and thus injure her to the extent that “she would not be able to have children.” When asked what object he had in mind he explained “I wanted to use an electric rod, but that was not available to me. I remember thinking I wanted to use the handle of a sweeping brush or a mop. I wanted to torture her sexually; I wanted to sexually electrocute her genitalia.”  

He told the trial he wanted to “molest” prison officer Roisin Linnane. He said he would sexually assault her by “putting my hands between her legs and grabbing her vagina.” This would be a more “realistic” threat, he said, because the opportunity to rape her while he was in prison was unlikely to arise.  

BK explained that the reason he threatened to rape and torture these women was that they had angered him by suggesting that he had not thoroughly cleaned the shower after use. He remained calm throughout his testimony, describing his threats of rape and torture as if they were an entirely reasonable and proportionate response to criticism of his shower hygiene. Then Prosecution raised the most obvious reason a rape threat made by BK might be considered credible by his victims: the fact that he is a man.

A Man in All But Name

All week the court had referred to BK as “she,” apart from one occasion when a witness, a prison officer, accidentally referred to him as “he” before immediately correcting himself. Defence even tried unsuccessfully at the outset, to get the judge to rule that the jury could not be told that BK was a “natal” man. How they were supposed to disregard the obvious fact that it was a man in front of them was not explained.

BK wore none of the hideous, garish make-up that he has been photographed wearing in his past court appearance. He wears his hair long (as I did when I was his age), but other than that, there was nothing about his appearance that might suggest he was trying to look like a woman. He is an average-sized man and, as such, has the superior strength that makes it possible for a man to rape a woman. But does Barbie Kardashian have a penis? In answer to the question the jury was likely asking itself all week, Prosecution put it to him: “To Tegan McGhee and Roisin Linnane, you are a male with male genitalia.” BK answered “Yes, but I hate my genitalia.”   

So now the jury knew that BK is a man physically capable of rape. He might call himself a woman, as could the courts and the media, but his victims knew that Barbie Kardashian was a man.  

After his testimony, I fully expected the jury to find BK guilty. I was wrong.  

That the jury found BK innocent and not to have broken the law is, of course, concerning to many of us. I will let the legal experts draw what lessons they will from this verdict, but this is what I learned from the trial.  

For two years now, I have been documenting the experiences of women forced to endure the presence of trans-ID men in prisons and homeless shelters. My critics have denied the truth of what these women have been saying to me. Most have ignorantly asserted that there was never any contact allowed between the trans prisoners and the women. Kardashian’s testimony proves that everything the women prisoners have been saying is true.  

Women in prison have been subjected to sexualised abuse and rape threats. In my podcast, I redacted the mentions of rape as I was unable to prove this serious charge. I will now be able to publish those interviews in full. Not only have rape threats been made, but it also turns out that men making those threats were not even breaking the law.  

Nowhere to Hide

The women prisoners tell me they are visible to the men whenever they leave their cells to go the “rec” (the recreation area) or to the showers. At the BK trial, we saw a diagram of E wing (Echo Wing) of Limerick Prison. This was to establish that there were women prisoners within hearing distance of BK. Tegan McGhee and another female prisoner were in cell E1. BK was next door in E2. And in E3, we were told, there was another female prisoner, but I recognised the name given in court as the feminised name of a male child abuser. The showers are located at the end of the corridor in the E wing. Barbie Kardashian confirmed he could look out through the peephole in his cell door to see women passing by. This means that the women know when they are outside of their cells, they are being observed by male sex offenders .  

Guard, Roisin Linnane outside the Court

Another revelation from the trial was the abuse prison staff must endure from prisoners such as BK. Sex predators will inflict themselves upon those weaker than themselves if they can, and gender self-ID allows them to inflict themselves upon vulnerable women in prison. Even if BK were totally isolated from women prisoners, as we are told he now is, he is still able to demand the attention of female staff on the grounds that he is a woman. When Prosecution put it to Kardashian that it was only females that he had threatened, BK helpfully replied: “I have threatened to sexually assault males since these incidents.” Nevertheless, it is female staff who are particularly at risk. BK told us in his testimony that he did not threaten to rape Roisin Linnane only because he did not see how he could do that so long as he was in prison. BK will likely be released from prison some time in 2026, given his six-year sentence and the usual one third reduction for good behaviour (he beat the most recent charges against him). What will happen then? BK’s mother went into hiding from her son some years back, but hiding will not be an option for prison officer Linnane. She will continue to live in the community. The jury in the BK trial may have decided that the threats against Linnane were not credible but this is not an assumption she will have the luxury of sharing.  

A Pyrrhic Victory

The transgender lobby may celebrate the verdicts in Limerick Circuit Criminal Court, but it is ultimately a Pyrrhic victory. The case poses the questions they most fear. Why did we put a male sex offender in a women’s prison? How did our government and our institutions ever come to think that putting such a man in among women was a good idea?    

In the end, the Barbie Kardashian trial has brought the absurdity and cruelty of gender self-ID for prisoners into the public eye. People are talking about Barbie Kardashian, and it is no longer possible for the media to run away from the debate over transgender demands and their real-world consequences for women and girls. They have finally been forced to report on the jaw-dropping horror of BK’s testimony — even as they continue to call him “she.”   

---

Genspect publishes a variety of authors with different perspectives. Any opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect Genspect’s official position. For more on Genspect, visit our FAQs.

---