ANDY NGO REPORTS: Rhode Island trans shooter’s posts show years of obsessive humiliation of his ex-wife

As with Jesse van Rootselaar, Robert “Roberta” Kevin Dorgan, 56, left behind an extensive social-media record that allows the public to peek into his mindset. Just one day before the Monday shooting at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena, Dorgan responded to actor Kevin Sorbo, who had referred to Delaware U.S. Rep. Sarah (Tim) McBride, who is transgender, as a man.

“keep bashing us,” Dorgan wrote, “but do not wonder why we Go BERSERK.”

Dorgan did go “berserk.” He shot three of his children, his ex-wife and one of their friends before killing himself. His ex-wife and one of their sons were killed, according to North Providence Mayor Charles Lombardi. The other three were critically injured.

“My father was the shooter,” a distraught young woman told a local television news channel as she left the police station. “He has mental health issues.” Dorgan is believed to have six children.

Dorgan’s posts paint the picture of a deeply unstable and contradictory figure. He went to great lengths to curl his hair, style it with ribbons, wear revealing women’s clothes, and paint his nails pink and duck-egg blue, yet he was also a bodybuilder and a motorcycle enthusiast. He espoused far-right views and even bore a neo-Nazi tattoo, while simultaneously presenting himself as an advocate for transgender causes, frequently clapping back at conservatives on X, including this journalist.

A former Marine, Dorgan was working as a truck driver in the period leading up to the mass shooting.

Dorgan’s transition appears to date back to at least 2016, if not earlier. In a pattern familiar among autogynephilic transgender-identifying men, Dorgan tried to “compete” with his ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan, over femininity, subjecting her to years of torment before she ultimately filed for divorce after he had multiple surgical procedures. It is not confirmed if Rhonda is the same deceased ex-wife described by the mayor. The deceased victims’ names have not been released.

In December 2016, Dorgan shared a link on then-Twitter to an essay titled, “Why Is My Transgender Wife Better at Being a Girl Than Me?” Dorgan responded: “Hehe my cis-wife has flames shooting from her ears when i out do her.” What does it mean for a man to “outdo” being a woman to a woman? He ended the post with emojis of high heels, a dress, and a bikini.

A year later, responding to a caption challenge featuring an image of a man dumpster-diving, Dorgan wrote: “When you tell your wife youre trans and she chucks the wedding bands.”

By 2018, he was openly broadcasting the collapse of his marriage. “My wife says she Hates the person who stole her husband,” Dorgan tweeted. He also claimed he had known he was transgender since the age of seven.

In 2020, Rhonda, who worked at a state mental-health facility, filed for divorce. In the handwritten section listing the reason, she initially wrote: “gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits.” The statement was later crossed out and replaced with: “irreconcilable differences which have caused the immediate breakdown of the marriage.”

Dorgan’s social-media history also contains repeated expressions of violent ideation. “All my Roid-Rages came from Testosterone, not my Estrogen oddly enough,” he wrote. “when Im misgendered, I politely whisper through clenched teeth, ‘Honey don’t make me break a nail knocking your teeth out!’”

In another post from 2018, he declared: “I could build a wall with the skulls of everyone who calls me ‘SIR’!”

He also boasted about alleged extramarital affairs with married men as evidence that he was more desirable than real women. “I’ve had plenty of seemingly totally straight man married to XX females and guess who theyre cheating with,” he wrote. “yeah, you better believe it you guessed it. Theyre cheating with me. nagging wife drives em nuts and suck in bed.”

With Monday’s deadly shooting, Dorgan becomes the latest transgender mass shooter in a growing phenomenon of transgender-identified killers in just the past few years. Many of them — like the Nashville Christian school shooter Audrey Hale and the Minneapolis church shooter Robin Westman — targeted children.