This article uses feminine pronouns for Barbie Kardashian due to the fact that the law considers ‘self-identification’ to be enough to change gender and the court documents this article references refer to Barbie using feminine pronouns.
Barbie Kardashian, a biological male who’s had no hormone treatment or surgery, and has sworn to kill and rape women, has been placed in a women’s prison by the Irish authorities.
Barbie was arrested in Limerick on the 24th of September for threatening to kill two people, one of them her mother. The story of her arrest became a matter of national media attention after it was revealed that Barbie is a transgender woman, and that her solicitor had told a court that, following her arrest, Barbie was “very anxious she be detained in a prison facility for females.” Her solicitor did not mention that Barbie also has a well-known, and often stated, desire to rape, torture, abuse, and kill women.
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A High Court order directing media not to mention her status as a transgender woman only ensured that, once Gript broke the story, Barbie’s gender, and the access that might give her to vulnerable women, was going to become the focal point of the story.
Legally, Barbie is a woman, although it is not clear when she formally changed her gender through a gender recognition certificate. It’s not a procedure that takes much time; under Irish law all you need is to make a declaration that you want to live your life as a particular gender, a birth certificate, and proof of address – it requires about the same amount of effort as opening a bank account. The process used to be more involved and require the involvement of doctors and experts, but that was changed in 2015 with the introduction of the Gender Recognition Act which allowed individuals to merely “self-identify” as a particular gender.
Barbie is understood to have undergone no hormonal or surgical intervention to change her body, but merely “self identifies” as a woman. Clinicians have expressed doubt that Barbie suffers from gender dysphoria at all.
In 2019 the Law Society Gazette quoted criminal defence lawyer Robert Purcell as saying that the 2015 Act was “challenging” for the courts and the Irish Prison Service because there were “potentially” safety issues housing female inmates alongside “male-bodied prisoners.” Apparently the 2015 law “did not envisage this situation.”
And yet, we know that Barbie, who is biologically male and who has a lengthy track record of targeting women for violence, has now been placed in the women’s section of Limerick prison. It’s not the first time this has happened since the 2015 Act, the women’s prison in Limerick already has a transgender inmate. That inmate was convicted of 10 counts of sexual assault and one count of cruelty against a child. It is understood that, as with Barbie, they have not undergone any surgical or hormonal transition but they are in possession of a gender recognition certificate saying they are female.
The majority of what we know about Barbie is drawn from newspaper reports of her court appearances, her social media accounts, and a 2019 judgement by Justice Máire Whelan in the Court of Appeal. That judgement details Barbie’s history and quotes from various assessments, psychological and otherwise, that have been undertaken by Barbie.
She was born in Ireland to foreign parents on the 25th of December, 2001. She is an only child. Her original name was Gabriel Alejandro Gentile, but she changed her name to Barbie Kardashian by deed poll on the 24th of August, 2020.
According to court documents relatively little is known about her early childhood other than the fact that Barbie was “born into a household of extreme depravity and domestic violence” with parents engaging in a “sadomasochistic relationship.”
Justice Whelan said that that “the degree of cruelty and dysfunctionality experienced by the girl during childhood was extraordinarily severe… the evidence of the impact on her welfare and development of this is overwhelming.”
According to a risk assessment report from March 2017 the care Barbie received from her parents was “absent, unreliable, perhaps intrusive at times, cruel and probably difficult to predict or understand. The people with the means to care for her – her parents –were the same people who at times harmed her by withholding care or being sadistic in their interactions with her.”
Barbie’s mother was prevented from breastfeeding or tending to her when she was a baby. When Barbie cried Barbie’s father would stop her mother from holding Barbie or attempting to sooth her.
Barbie’s father physically, sexually, and emotionally abused her mother, and is understood to have physically and emotionally abused Barbie. Before Barbie was 8 years old, she had become her father’s “apprentice” and was actively involved in the continued abuse of her mother. The father would later, in an interview with a care worker, “casually” acknowledge carrying out repeated acts of domestic violence, “appearing to lack all insight into the impropriety or deleterious impact of such conduct on herself or others.”
In November 2010, when Barbie was 8 years old, her mother left the family home, taking Barbie with her. They moved to a women’s refuge but staff there had “significant concerns about the level of violence that had been perpetrated by [Barbie] upon her mother.”
In 2012, when Barbie was 10 years old, she violently attacked her mother and became the subject of a care order. Initially she was placed into foster care but had to be removed after 13 weeks “due to an escalation in aggressive behaviour.” Her next placement in foster care lasted nearly a year before being terminated, again due to a continual escalation in Barbie’s aggressive behaviour.
Before she was 13 years old Barbie had been moved from foster care into residential care homes. The first care home placement was again terminated due to escalating aggressive behaviour. The second placement, in June 2015, broke down after Barbie attacked a member of staff, and was noted to have exhibited “extreme and excessively sexualised behaviour towards female staff.” This is the first time in the reports we have available to us that Barbie’s behaviour moves from being described as aggressive or violent to both violent and sexual.
Staff in the care homes said that they felt Barbie’s “physical assaults had a premediated feel”, noting that she only ever attacked female staff members or housemates.
Staff said that Barbie dealt with staff “as though they exist only in relation to her needs, with no expectation of an exchange which could be friendly or reciprocal”, and that she “shows no curiosity towards other people except in regard to how they might be used to meet her needs or are likely to harm her.” They noted that she “has a strong sense of grievance and often feels that things have gone wrong, or have been done wrongly in regard to her care. This leads her to make many official complaints.”
In 2014, when Barbie was 14 years old, she began to refuse to attend school and her formal education ended. Her refusal to attend school was noted to have been “partly a reaction to not achieving ‘perfect’ exam result.”
In 2015 Barbie began sharing a house with a transgendered person. By Christmas of that year Barbie had begun to wear makeup and to say that she identified as a female and wanted to undergo gender reassignment surgery.
She was sent to the Tavistock clinic in England, which specialises in transgender adolescents, for an assessment in March of 2017. That assessment stated that, whilst Barbie presented as ticking all of the correct boxes for gender dysphoria, Barbie had a lack of affect when describing how she had been impacted by gender dysphoria “as though she was reciting from something she had learned.” The reports states that “All the facts were correct but there was no emotional impact.” The assessor said that it was impossible to actually determine if Barbie had gender dysphoria as “In discussion with me it was very noticeable that she has researched the area and was therefore able to provide a tick-box list of symptoms that are required to the formation of this diagnosis.”
The report went on to say that Barbie was: “on the verge of an offensive attack at all times”, that she “presents a high level of risk to those around her”, that she was “controlling, callous and unemotional”, that she attempted to control others in order to feel safe, that “control is achieved through manipulation and at times violence and sexual violence”, and that “hurting others gives her a sense of power and control. The mental stalking and physical pinning down of others in a sexual and/or violent way allows her to project the fear of violation into another.”
It was also noted in the report that Barbie attempted to “manipulate and emotionally blackmail” those around her and would seek to provoke other people, “usually vulnerable” people, into attacking her. She was 15 years old at the time this assessment was conducted.
On the 1st of May 2018 Barbie tried to kill a social worker. By this point Barbie had become a repeat visitor to the courts on charges of assault and criminal damage. Barbie was in a moving car with two social care workers when she decided to attack the female driver of the car.
Barbie repeatedly told the woman “I am going to kill you” whilst trying to gouge out the woman’s eyes. She wrapped herself around the body of the care worker, tore clumps of hair out of the woman’s scale, bit her, and clawed at her face, tearing her eyelids.
The social worker was able to stop the car and Gardai were called. The social worker required hospitalisation and, when interviewed by Gardai, Barbie was found to have put a large lump of hair from the social worker in her pocket.
According to reporting in the Irish Independent Barbie told Gardai that hearing the woman “scream and cry while asking me to stop” was “music to her ears.” She explained to Gardai that she had planned assaults on staff for weeks or sometimes months and had a list of staff she wanted to assault for various reasons. Apart from expressing disappointment at not killing the social care worker she was “gleeful about what happened.” Later that day she told a psychiatrist that she had plans to murder care workers. Gardai expressed concern for the safety of care staff.
Following the assault Barbie was detained in Oberstown Children Detention Campus. Whilst there she made repeated threats of self-harm and suicide, saying that she planned to kill herself to “end the emotional pain” that she said she felt upon “not being recognised as a woman.” She was referred to a Professor Harry Kennedy for a risk assessment. Professor Kennedy stated that Barbie’s “threats of suicide are instrumental, designed to achieve another purpose, to manipulate clinicians towards complying with her wish to be referred for gender reassignment.”
Professor Kennedy went on to say that Barbie’s claims that she was self-harming by cutting herself “are not currently supported by any scarring evidence.” He said that Barbie “exhibits callous and unemotional thoughts, communications and behaviours”, and that she “does not reason about acts of violence according to conventional ‘moral’ foundations.” He went on to say that Barbie engaged in “acts of physical and sexual violence which at times are instrumental –prepared and goal directed – particularly towards women.” He noted that this was “a risk factor for further violence.”
Based upon a documented history of falsely claiming to be ill, including intentionally falsifying a monitoring test for blood pressure, Professor Kennedy stated that “all aspects” of Barbie’s account of “ symptoms, mental states, beliefs and preferences are unreliable for clinicians to assess. Risk assessment is therefore not reliable and risk management is particularly difficult.”
He stated that gender reassignment had “no place to play” in the management of Barbie’s suicide risk. He noted the prominence of “callous unemotional traits” in Barbie’s personality and a “egocentric, egosyntonic attitudes towards violence to others.”
Professor Kennedy said that Barbie was unlikely to change her behaviour over the short to medium term and that it was evident that Barbie would continue to assault others and that Barbie “should continue to be held responsible for any such assaults by being charged and processed through the courts”. He said that “only a secure care placement would be appropriate” to Barbie’s needs. He added “This should not be in a hospital setting.”
Barbie was meant to be released from Oberstown on the 7th of November, 2018 but the Child and Family Agency [CFA] sought a special care order from the High Court to allow them to detain Barbie in Coovagh House Special Care Unit. Special Care Units are secure, residential facilities designed to house adolescents when their behaviour poses a real and substantial risk to their life, health, safety, development, or safety.
Barbie was strongly against the idea of being placed into a Special Care Unit and argued against that placement in the High Court. She stated she would not engage in therapy if placed in a Special Care Unit, that she was not a risk to others or to herself, and that it was unfair to place her into such care.
The High Court, when considering the application, considered material from a number of medical professionals. One of those, Dr. Eamon Raji, told the court that Barbie “does not present with a psychiatric illness but has numerous personality disorder traits in the realms of a Cluster B personality disorders, namely narcissistic, anti-social and emotionally unstable.” He asked Barbie if she posed a risk to society or to others and said that “she was clearly not concerned with this and was surprised that I had felt she is a risk to others based on her history.” However, his report noted that, when they discussed Barbie’s attempted murder of a social worker, she appeared “animated and pleased with herself in recounting the event and circumstances surrounding the assault and reports feeling cheated from (sic not) knowing the bodily harm she had caused.”
Barbie stated that she wished to cut off her penis, stating that “I don’t like having male genitalia and I am quite disgusted by this.” During the proceeding it was also reported that Barbie’s long-term ambition was to move to Los Angeles to work as a sex worker and in the adult film industry in order to fund plastic surgeries.
The court decided that placement in a Special Care Unit was in the best interests of Barbie and the order was granted in December of 2018. Barbie later appealed this decision, leading to a Court of Appeal judgement from Justice Whelan. In her judgement Justice Whelan found that “in the circumstances, the Special Care Order was both necessary and proportionate and was validly made.”
Since then Barbie has been the subject of a number of these orders. But as she approached her 18th birthday, the age at which she would legally be an adult and therefore able to decide to leave state care, Tusla engaged in what the Irish Independent called “a race against time to prevent a homicidal teen’s release into the community.”
Coming up to her 18th birthday on the 25th of December, 2019, Barbie told a social worker she had “a continuing wish to murder and to rape” and that these wishes were “a source of pleasure” to her. The Gardai Public Protection Unit was briefed on Barbie, such was the fear of what would happen if she was able to simply leave state care.
At a hearing held eight weeks before Barbie’s 18th birthday the court was told that there had been “no progress really on any front…there is a real risk that somebody will end up dead.” Tulsa tried to find suitable accommodation for Barbie but she refused to live in a facility with male staff, “notwithstanding her wish in relation to female staff to murder and to rape them.”
Barbie’s mother submitted an affidavit to the court recording her “very, very great concern for her own safety” something which, given Barbie was just arrested for threatening to kill her mother, would appear to have been prescient.
On the 24th of September of this year a nationwide bulletin was issued to garda stations regarding a “homicidal teenager” who was due to be realised into the community after the High Court had ruled there was no legal basis to continue her detention. The bulletin noted that the teenager had repeatedly expressed a wish to rape and murder women, and that the teenager’s own mother had fled her home for her own safety following advice from the gardai.
We now know that that bulletin was referring to Barbie Kardashian. According to reporting in the Herald Barbie was at that time on bail, facing charges of sexually assaulting two women and of threatening to kill or seriously harm a third.
Barbie has now been remanded in custody in the women’s section of Limerick prison and charged with threatening to kill two people, one of them her mother. A file is currently being prepared by the Director of Public Prosecutions.