The Otto Case: How a Man’s Crimes Were Blamed on a Woman
Letters from Ireland
By Paddy O'Gorman
Genspect is delighted to welcome back journalist Paddy O’Gorman to Inspecting Gender with his Letter from Ireland. A celebrated radio and television broadcaster in Ireland, Paddy has earned multiple awards for his work and now brings his distinctive voice to paddyspodcast.ie.
Five years ago in Dublin, a man was up in court for pouring boiling water over another man’s face in an unprovoked assault. He got a suspended sentence. Our media lied to us at the time that the assailant was a woman. This week, that same man was sent to prison for having committed a sexual assault. That’s not so easy for the media to lie about. The man is 63-year-old Rolando Otto, aka Samantha Otto. He is a trans-identified, Filipino man who has been living in Ireland since 2011.
From Boiling Water to Sexual Assault
We’ll start with the boiling water attack of 2019. Reporting then, Ireland’s leading broadsheet, the Irish Times, and Ireland’s leading tabloid, the Sunday World, both told us of the “woman who poured boiling water over a man’s face”. These newspapers reported how, in the months before the attack, this woman had stalked her victim, sending him sexually explicit messages, thus causing him to block his phone against her in response. On one occasion, she followed him home. The woman wouldn’t take no for an answer. Frustrated by his rejection of her overtures, she shouted crude abuse at him in public. Then, one evening, upon seeing the man sitting at a slot machine in a casino, she went to the customer kitchen area, where she got a cup of boiling water, came behind her victim, jerked his head back, and poured the boiling water over his face. It was shocking behaviour, especially coming from a woman. Readers may have thought this sounded more like the sort of behaviour you might expect from a predatory man.
Not For the First Time
The media lies like this all the time, passing off men’s crimes as the crimes of women. There was the case of the man, three years back, who, on being released from Limerick women’s prison, was placed in a women’s domestic violence refuge in Dublin, where he went on to beat a woman up; when he was convicted for this, our media told us that it had been a woman-on-woman assault. Another amazingly muscular woman was the one last year in England who overpowered her 30-year-old male neighbour with a garrotte and threw him into a river to die, having previously live-streamed herself killing her cat and putting it through a blender; the Irish Independent shamelessly followed the British media in pretending that this sadistic man was a woman. This week, the British media is telling us about the woman in Brighton who killed her husband, stabbing and slicing him more than fifty times with a samurai sword.
The Trouble with Otto
But the media here can no longer pretend that Otto is a woman. The evidence given in court has made that impossible. Otto was sent to prison this week for a sexual assault on an eighteen-year-old male in a Dublin laneway. The victim told the court that Otto spoke to him and then “cupped his (own) penis” through his trousers. The youth asked Otto to back off, but he refused and offered to perform oral sex upon him. The teenager took out his phone to film Otto and to call for help. Otto was later arrested. In reporting that Otto “cupped his penis,” the journalists could hardly have told us that Otto “cupped her penis”. That would have been a step too far for our media, which has in the past consistently used misleading female pronouns when reporting on this man.
Otto received a sentence of three years for the sexual assault and a further, consecutive, six months, which remained of the suspended sentence he received in 2020 for the boiling water attack. He has now been sent to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, which is a men’s prison. That’s a relief to those of us who have been campaigning to keep men out of women’s prisons, but what the judge had to say in passing sentence on Otto should cause us concern. Judge Pauline Codd said, “It created a difficulty in terms of sentencing as Otto has not yet received a gender recognition certificate”. The implication here seems to be that if Otto had a GRC, then he would have been sent to a women’s prison.
I don’t know why Otto doesn’t have a GRC. It’s easy to get one in Ireland. At least three of the trans-identified men who have been put into the women’s prison in Limerick got their GRCs between the time they were first arrested and the time that they were sent to prison. In all three cases, they were men when they committed their crimes who “turned into women” by the time they were up before the judge for sentencing. Accordingly, all three of these men were sent to a women’s prison. That’s how gender self-ID works in Ireland.
So why doesn’t Otto have a GRC? It turns out, there could be advantages for him in having to go to a male prison. Judge Codd explained when she was passing sentence: “I take into account he’s biologically a male person, who identifies as female and has undergone certain steps towards transition, and that being in a male prison is difficult for someone in the accused’s position”. (The steps he has taken, the court heard, are breast implants and the use of hormone patches.) So this difficulty that Otto will have in a men’s prison has been taken into account in sentencing, which suggests he got a lesser sentence than he otherwise might have done had he not been trans-identifying. If you are a man who is a sex offender facing justice, it’s worth your while to say you are a woman.
Sex Offenders in Prison
The judge is no doubt right that the men’s prison in Mountjoy will be especially difficult for Otto, but that’s not because he is trans but because he is a sex offender. Sex offenders are never popular, which is why they are generally kept away from other prisoners.
Trans-identified men in prison are especially likely to be sex offenders. Four of the five trans-ID men we know of who have been in Irish prisons in recent years have been sex offenders. Transgender lobbyists are always saying that trans-ID men have to be put in women’s prisons because they would not be safe with men, but sex offenders are not safe in women’s prisons either. One of the sex offenders who was in Limerick women’s prison was a man who had abused his partner’s child for years, telling the little boy that he would pull his arms off if he told anyone about what was being done to him. As some of the women ex-prisoners of Limerick have told me on my podcast, many women prisoners are mothers, and mothers don’t take kindly to men who abuse children. That’s why the child-abuser always had prison officers with him if he was out of his cell at the same time that the women were out of their cells.
Sex offender men in Ireland are usually sent to either Arbour Hill Prison in Dublin or to a wing of the Midlands Prison, which is reserved for men of their sort. They are kept apart from other prisoners for their safety. Arbour Hill or Midlands would be safe places for Otto.
No More Gaslighting
To return to the press coverage of Otto’s case, just because journalists are being less dishonest than they were last time Otto was up in court, none of them are admitting they misled the public in the past. The Sunday World is calling Otto a “transgender woman” this time, which is an improvement on five years ago when they simply called him a woman, but it’s still less clear than it could be; the term “transgender woman” gives the false impression that we are talking about a woman so I hope not too many people are misled by this. But the Irish Times has done nothing to correct its misreporting of five years ago. It seems to have chosen not to report the recent Otto case at all. Likewise, for most of the rest of the media, including my old broadcasting company, RTE, which has all ignored this case of sexual assault by a trans-ID man. The mainstream media, it seems, will only ever cheer on the trans lobby and will rarely report anything that might provoke critical discussion of the transgender agenda and the wisdom of allowing gender self-ID.
Meanwhile, those of us in what is called the gender critical camp will continue to keep a watch on any further attempts to put men into women’s prisons, and we will continue to call out journalists who mislead the public by attributing men’s crimes to women.
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