Media narrative surrounding death of nonbinary OK student falls apart following release of police body cam footage: ‘She essentially started it’

New details have emerged in the death of Oklahoma high school student Dagny Benedict, known as Nex, who died the day after a fight with other girls in a school bathroom. Much of the media had asserted that she died after being beaten by bullies who harassed her for being non-binary. Footage from Benedict shows that this was likely not the case.

Benedict was involved in a fight with four other girls on February 7 and initial reports that she had been consistently bullied by the girls has been contradicted by police body cam footage. 

Police interviewed Benedict in a hospital room and asked her about what happened leading up to the fight. Benedict said that she didn't know the girls prior to the altercation in the bathroom. 

"At any point during this whole situation," an officer asked Benedict, "and I use the word loosely, but the bantering, or whatever it is going back between you guys. Obviously you know each other—"

"We don't know each other," Benedict interrupts. 

"Well you know of each other," the officer said, "with the vape situations and all that."

"No," Benedict insists. "Before this, we didn't have no–before this ISB thing, we never saw each other, they're freshmen, we're sophomores, we didn't know." Benedict and the girls with whom she fought had been together in ISB that week. 

Benedict's mother Sue Benedict had told officers that her daughter was complaining about girls in ISB who were "not leaving them alone, throwing things at them and calling them names," KJRH reports.

"Okay," the officer said. 

"I don't know their names, I don't know," Benedict said.

"So they just up and decided to start messing with you?" The officer asked. "There was no—?"

"Yeah," Benedict explained, "because of the way that we dress." 

"So you didn't do anything, at all at any point in time that would have— even a couple days ago, or even a month ago, or anything like that—?"

"I don't know these girls," Benedict said.

"So they just continued to pick on you and pick on you," the officer asked. "Then at some point what happened, they got up and confronted you in class? Or did you say it was the bathroom?"

Benedict said "we went to the bathroom," she was talking to her friends and the other group of girls were talking to each other. "And we were laughing, and they had said something like 'why do they laugh like that?' And they were talking about us in front of us. And so I went up there and I poured water on them and then all three of them came at me."

The water she poured came from her own water bottle. "So you squirted them with water, threw water on them, whatever it was," the officer clarified. "Then at that point what happened?"

"They came at me, they grabbed me, they grabbed onto my hair, I grabbed on to 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 and started beating the sh*t out of me. And then my friends tried to jump in and help. I'm not sure, I blacked out."

Benedict went home from the hospital that day. By the next day she was dead. After her death was reported, trans activists pushed the narrative that Benedict was bullied and beaten for being non-binary and then died from those injuries.

They went as far as to blame those who speak out against gender identity and child sex changes for creating an atmosphere that elicits negative sentiment against trans persons.

It was later revealed that Benedict did not die from injuries after the beating, and an investigation is still underway. Now it has become clear that Benedict was the one who started the altercation that was the basis of the false narrative surrounding her death.