Who is Jo Ellis, the transgender pilot wrongly named in DC crash?
She served in the Iraq War and the fight against the Islamic State. Now she is the latest victim of a far-right hoax machine that has repeatedly smeared trans people as killers
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Jo Ellis's record of service in the Virginia National Guard appears to be nothing but honorable.
She served in Iraq as a helicopter door gunner, then in Kuwait as part of the multi-national fight against the Islamic State. And in 2023, with the support of her commanders, she began medically transitioning to female.
Now her face and name are being paraded across the internet by conservative influencers and fringe media outlets who falsely claim that she had been piloting the U.S. Army chopper that collided with a passenger jet on Wednesday night in a crash that killed 67 people.
"I understand some people have associated me with the crash in D.C., and that is false," Ellis said in a video posted on her Facebook profile on Friday, which demonstrated that she is very much not dead.
The hoax claims were part of a longstanding and alarming pattern of right-wing commentators and sometimes even politicians falsely pinning deadly incidents on transgender people, who have now become one of the main targets of Donald Trump's presidency.
So who actually is Jo Ellis, and how did she become embroiled with a deadly air disaster that she had nothing to do with?
From homeschool to the war against ISIL
Ellis describes herself as coming from a family with a long history of military service.
According to a personal essay posted on Tuesday on the website of CNN host Michael Smerconish, Ellis's cousin is a retired admiral who previously ran the United States Strategic Command. That's basically the U.S. military's central headquarters for nuclear strikes, missile defense, and information infrastructure.
Her older brother, she said, was a tank operator in Iraq in 2003. Back in World War II, her great uncle fought the Nazis in the frozen Ardennes forest during the Battle of the Bulge, while her grandfather lied about his age to hunt submarines at sea.
As a child, Ellis's household was highly religious and conservative. "I grew up homeschooled. My parents felt that a Christian education was very important," she told Smerconish on his podcast.
In 2011, two years after joining the Virginia Army National Guard as a helicopter mechanic, she deployed to Iraq, where she earned the Air Medal for serving as a door gunner in combat zones. In 2014 she was sent to assist in humanitarian operations in Guatemala, and in 2016 deployed to Kuwait for Operation Inherent Resolve â that is, the international war against ISIL.
Jo Ellis, as seen in a 'proof of life' video posted to Facebook on Wednesday Jan 29 ( Jo Ellis via Facebook)Until that year Ellis had defined herself as a conservative, much like her father. That changed with the rise of Donald Trump. "I saw the conservative party moving in a direction that didn't align with what I considered to be conservative values," she told Smerconish, adding that she now considers herself an independent.
She said that she is still religious, and is considering converting to Judaism. "Which is not something I would have thought I would move toward, but something just feels like it's calling me in that direction," she said.
In 2020 she began retraining as a pilot for the U.H.-60 Black Hawk, a workhorse helicopter used by U.S. forces for everything from troop transport to medical evacuation to stealthily assassinating Osama Bin Laden on foreign soil.
But as the Covid-19 pandemic raged across the world, Ellis finally confronted feelings about her gender that she had been trying to ignore for years.
âI really tried to be a good manâ
As part of her Black Hawk training, Ellis undertook the U.S. Army's "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape" course â known as SERE.
SERE training is designed to prepare air crew for what might happen if they are forced to ditch their craft in hostile territory. Students must learn how to survive in the wilderness, avoid capture, withstand imprisonment and resist interrogation.
In the most intense versions of this training, students are reportedly put through an intense multiple-day roleplaying exercise in which they must navigate rugged terrain while dodging patrols â before being locked in a simulated POW camp.
"You have a lot of time to think when you're very hungry and very, very tired," Ellis told Smerconish. "So I had many occurrences during that three week school where I realized how much I had been masking and hiding."
Ellis wrote that she had suffered from gender dysphoria since she was 5 years old, but "learned early on to hide these symptoms" because she thought they made her a "bad person.â
"I got married, bought a house, helped raise a stepdaughter, played drums in the church band, and adopted a dog. All the things I believed a good man should do," she wrote. "And I really wanted to do those things, but I also secretly hoped it would fix me. It didnât work.â
After therapy and soul-searching, Ellis started medically transitioning in 2023. As a part-time National Guard member her treatments weren't covered by the military, so she paid for them out of pocket
She says she received "overwhelming support" from her commanders and her unit, with many female soldiers going "out of their way" to make her feel comfortable in their barracks and restrooms.
In her day job she is an IT engineer in the private sector, and Smerconish described her hobbies as "flying airplanes, racing cars, playing musical instruments, and skateboarding.â Her current rank is chief warrant officer, grade 2.
A chilling pattern of demonization
It's not clear how exactly online outrage merchants fixed upon Ellis as a scapegoat for America's deadliest air disaster in nearly a quarter of a century.
The Pentagon did not release the names of the Black Hawk crew until Friday, creating a temporary information vacuum. It has declined to name one of the three pilots "at the request of their family.â
Ellis may simply become a target because of her essays and podcast surfaced so close to the crash.
Donald Trump helped launch a witchhunt with his own contention, based on zero evidence, that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs were responsible for the crash.
Washington DC collision: Trump blames diversity and inclusion for crash that claimed 67 livesItâs hardly the first time trans Americans have been targeted for deaths they had nothing to do with. The far-right rumor mill has falsely blamed trans people for mass shootings in Texas in May 2022, in Philadelphia in July 2023, in Texas again in February 2024, and in Wisconsin in December 2024 â often joined or amplified by Republican politicians.
In Ellisâs case, the Virginia National Guard confirmed to Reuters that none of its personnel was on board the Black Hawk that crashed Wednesday.
On Monday, Trump issued an executive order aimed at barring trans people from serving in the U.S. It also suggested that gender transition is dishonorable and dishonest.
Despite that, Ellis told Smerconish that she still hoped to "keep [her] head down" and serve for "however long [her] body lets [her] fly that helicopter.â
"I don't know what else to say other than I have shown that I am capable of doing my job. I want to continue doing my job," she said.
"In a time when it's hard enough to meet recruiting numbers in the military, why would you want to kick out more soldiers that are willing to sacrifice their lives for this country?" she asked.
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