Roth

David Chester Warfield, a man who identifies as a lesbian and renamed himself Dana Rivers, is serving a life sentence in a women's prison for the brutal slaying of a lesbian couple and their son. He was transferred to the Central California Women’s Facility in 2023 to serve the remainder of his life sentence. Rivers’ crimes date back to November 11 of 2016, when police were called in response to the sound of gunshots being fired outside the home of lesbian couple Patricia Wright and Charlotte Reed in Oakland, California. When authorities arrived, they found Rivers covered in blood and gasoline and fleeing from the house, which had been set ablaze. When discovered by police, Rivers had been heading towards his black Harley Davidson motorcycle, which was parked outside of the home with the keys left in the ignition. When police searched the Harley, which Rivers affectionately referred to as “Barbie,” they found blood on the bike and a bloody knife in its saddlebag. Examiners found that Charlotte Reed had been stabbed and bludgeoned dozens of times in addition to having gunshot wounds. Her partner, Patricia Wright, had been shot twice, and her son, Benny Diambu-Wright, who had just graduated from Berkeley High School, had been shot in the heart. The bodies of Wright, Reed, and Diambu-Wright were found inside the burning wreckage. A 2010 social media post made by Rivers claimed that pornography motivated his decision to claim a lesbian identity: “Porn helped me understand my gender deviant mindfreak is healthy, sane, and delightfully irrational.” Prior to the slayings, Rivers was a prominent trans activist known for fighting against “gender discrimination.” Rivers gained notoriety in 1999 after he was fired from Center High School in Sacramento County, California, for openly discussing his “sexuality and the importance of gender self-determination” in class with students. According to a 1999 article in The New York Times, one parent stated that Rivers had told the children he had been “sodomized as a youth and that he always felt he was a woman trapped in a man’s body and that he was going to be changing into a woman in the fall. He should have gotten permission from the parents to say this.” Following the administration’s decision not to renew his employment, Rivers subsequently initiated a widely-publicized discrimination lawsuit that launched his career as a trans activist and resulted in a compensatory award of $150,000. He appeared on the Today Show, Oprah, and Good Morning America, and had even been profiled in the New York Times, quickly elevating his profile as a respected LGBT advocate. Rivers was a key speaker at the Millennium March for Equality, a major LGBT rally, on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on April 30, 2000. Rivers was a keynote speaker for the National Center for Lesbian Rights as well as for The Tiffany Club, an organization founded to promote the political interests of those with “gender confusion.” Rivers also spoke as a guest lecturer at several universities, including Stanford and UC Davis, and served as a Board Member for the International Foundation for Gender Education (IFGE), a transvestite lobby group. But prior to his mainstream trans activism, Rivers participated in guerrilla fear-mongering tactics targeting women-only spaces and events, most notably against the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF), colloquially known as MichFest, a lesbian-oriented event. Rivers began to participate in the aggressive campaign known as Camp Trans during its second iteration, and at one point tried to strong-arm his way into the Music Festival. In an essay he wrote about experience, Rivers stated: “I stood there, ready to declare that I met the womyn-born-womyn criteria. In my heart I know this to be true. My mother and daughter and lesbian lover know that this is who I am... I’ve felt first hand the sting of the patriarchy that the [Michigan Women’s Music Festival] purports to hold at bay for a blessed week. I belong among other womyn as surely as I need to sit down to pee.” Rivers compared himself to lesbian women at the festival, stating that although they had been “born with vaginas … it was obvious to me and to them that I was more female than they were.” Camp Trans continued its campaign against MichFest and its attendees, at one point distributing disturbing flyers which read “real women have cocks” and called the lesbian feminists “cunts.”