Conservatives claim a trans wrestler assaulted her opponent. The video tells a different story.

The Alliance Defending Freedom's latest lawsuit relies on claims that even many anti-trans critics aren't buying

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In a bizarre lawsuit recently filed by the right-wing Alliance Defending Freedom, the group claims that high school student Kallie Keeler was sexually assaulted during a competitive wrestling match.

You probably already know where this is going: Keeler’s opponent was a trans girl, so they’re arguing that allowing transgender athletes to compete is literally harmful for everyone else.

But a sexual assault allegation should certainly be taken seriously regardless of the circumstances.

What makes this lawsuit ridiculous, though, is that ADF includes video of the match taken by Keeler’s mother (who was unaware of the opponent or any alleged assault until later)… and it doesn’t show any sort of misconduct.

Kallie Keeler (in blue) during her wrestling match in December, 2025

You might think the assault would be glaringly visible in the recording. Yet according to multiple wrestling experts I spoke to, there’s nothing abnormal taking place during the match. It’s a clean fight with a clear victor. There may be a little clumsiness with the moves—these are high schoolers, after all—but nothing you wouldn’t see in a a fight between two cisgender individuals.

The 74-page lawsuit—filed against the Washington Interscholastic Athletic Association, state officials, the school district, Keeler’s coach, and everyone else in the orbit of high school athletics in Washington—says a number of things occurred during that match… most of which you can’t see in that video.

Here’s how it opens:

Lies hurt people—in this case, girls. Enforcing the lie that boys can be girls, Washington lets boys take girls’ sports and privacy, and, in this case, sexually assault a girl during her own wrestling match—as her mother watched in disbelief.

In the video, her mother is… just reacting like most parents would. She’s laughing. She’s urging her daughter to make certain moves and expressing frustration when her daughter appears to be losing. If you’ve ever been around youth sports, this is what you would call “normal behavior.” What the mother doesn’t do is hint that anything is out of the ordinary.

The lawsuit goes on to describe the assault (misgendering the other athlete all the way through):

… during the match, the male athlete sexually assaulted K.M.K., shoving his fingers through her spandex clothing, digitally penetrating her vagina, and holding the position for several seconds. Visibly distressed, K.M.K. shouted to her mother, who was videorecording the match, that the opponent’s fingers are “in my c***hie!”

To stop this, K.M.K. allowed the male wrestler to pin her. Shortly afterward, she found out the athlete was male—and felt violated all over again.

Having watched the video in question, I’m not seeing any of that. But maybe it’s because I’m not well-versed in wrestling. So yesterday, I spoke to a number of wrestlers, wrestling coaches, and parents with kids who wrestle to see if they saw anything unusual happening in that video.

Did they see what the lawsuit describes as “not a legal move”?

The responses were unanimous: Nope!

One former wrestler and coach told me the move near the end was a typical Ball and Chain Tilt, adding that moves like it were “perfectly legal” in these kinds of matches.

Another wrestler with years of experience said “I do not see any sexual assault whatsoever. Every move being executed I was taught as well.”

Another: “There's a leg lift on a turn that was high on the thigh, but it was pretty clearly just an exhausted wrestler using poor technique.”

Another person—a female wrestling coach and former competitor herself—put it this way:

"Oil checking" is the joke term when a finger ends up between the cheeks… and it does happen on accident, especially when you're attempting to lift the opponents leg from around the thigh to step through and turn them (which is a very common technique). But when I watched the match nothing seemed malicious or intentional. I'll also point out that no one said anything to the ref, or went to the officials table after the match to make a complaint, which is typically what you do if you have a problem as serious as they're claiming.

But the facts have never gotten in the way of a good culture war narrative, so let’s talk about the rest of the lawsuit. The gist of it is that Keeler was a high school sophomore when this match took place in December of 2025. The way the tournament worked, whoever won this particular match would take 3rd place and the loser would take 4th. The lawsuit says Keeler felt “physical discomfort” in the match to the point that she allowed herself to lose so it would end. Which is basically how wrestling works.

And then, in true Riley Gaines fashion, the lawsuit explained how taking 4th place instead of 3rd was devastating for Keeler:

If K.M.K. had placed third in the tournament, she would have been honored at any awards ceremonies at the end of the tournament, where, if held, she would have stood on a podium and she would have received a medal on a ribbon for her neck.

Instead, the male athlete was entitled to be honored at any awards ceremonies, the male athlete was entitled to take K.M.K.’s podium spot, and the male athlete was entitled to receive K.M.K.’s medal on a ribbon for his neck.

Nothing sounds as desperate as a lawsuit insisting someone else took the Not Even Second Place Medal that you were owed. (Apparently, no one’s even considering the possibility that a cisgender wrestler could also have beaten Keeler.)

Keeler said nothing about the incident to her mother afterwards, something the lawsuit attributes to “the feeling of shock and violation.”

At one point, during the alleged assault, the lawsuit quotes the mother as saying to someone off-camera, “I don’t know what she said or why her face looked like that.” It makes it sound like the mother is concerned about the assault she’s witnessing. In the actual video, though, around the 2:13 mark, the mom is laughing through that comment.

After the match, another team’s coach apparently came up to the family and let them know the opponent was a trans girl. This was news to them. The lawsuit insists they were going to report the assault before that revelation—uh-huh, sure—but they “then resolved to report both the assault and the lack of notice that she was wrestling a male.”

To simplify details that go on for several pages, they said they reported the incident to her coach and the district but nothing was done… probably because there was no evidence of wrong-doing in that video. She just lost a match.

So instead, Keeler told her story to right-wing propagandist (or, as they described her, “local journalist”) Brandi Kruse, who jumped on it and made it go viral in anti-LGBTQ circles and, by extension, the Trump administration.

Even after the unwanted publicity, the WIAA took no action—probably because, again, the moves in the match were legal in the sport. And just last week, Pierce County prosecutors chose not to file criminal charges in the incident because—AGAIN!—”it's clear that any potential charges could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

There’s an open investigation by the school district that has not yet been resolved, which has only led conservatives to complain more, implying that this is all part of some giant conspiracy against Keeler… even though all the facts provided by the lawsuit are consistent with my theory that Keeler lost a wrestling match, blamed everyone except herself for how she did, and received criticism and cold shoulders from damn near everyone in her circles, including some of her teammates.

It’s yet another instance of mediocre athletes using trans people as scapegoats for their own shortcomings. There is a legitimate discussion to be had about what the proper procedures should be when it comes to student athletes with different hormone levels, but just using what the ADF has provided, it seems like this lawsuit would never have been filed if Keeler won the match or lost to a cisgender opponent.

When you look at what they’re demanding, you can tell this is scorched earth all the way with special princess protections demanded for Keeler herself:

The lawsuit seeks to preclude transgender athletes from competing with or against Keeler in sports; declare ineligible any athletes transgender athletes from competing in sports with or against Keeler; require the district to provide notice and opt-out rights to Brown when her daughter is to compete against transgender athletes in girls sports; correct all records where Keeler lost to a transgender athlete.

The lawsuit further asks that Keeler is given the chance to participate in sports without academic penalty or eligibility penalty and restore her lost athletic eligibility. It also seeks to require all defendants named to provide training to all relevant employees to avoid similar situations in the future.

The lawsuit also seeks an award for damages to be determined at trial.

Imagine asking a jury to correct the record so that you can boast about not taking first or even second place at a regular season high school wrestling tournament that (let’s be honest) no one else would ever care about.

There’s nothing wrong with being a mediocre athlete, of course. By definition, most people who compete are! The problem is using your mediocrity as a launching pad to harass trans people out of youth sports entirely, which is what conservatives have been eagerly doing for years now with help from the highest levels of government. (Anti-trans bigot JK Rowling has already spread this particular story.)

Here’s something interesting, though. When ADF’s president Kristen Waggoner tweeted about this lawsuit, she got a lot of responses from people who didn’t want to see trans athletes in sports but were still critical of the lawsuit. Like this person who said “you’re claiming a perfectly normal half-nelson pinning attempt was sexual assault - because her opponent was trans?”

That person wasn’t alone:

When even people who are generally anti-trans are telling ADF there’s nothing to see here, you would think they’d get the hint. But that doesn’t help with fundraising, so we get this lawsuit instead. The same physical contact that would be considered routine, legal, and unremarkable between two cisgender wrestlers is now being described by ADF as criminal sexual assault because conservatives have decided the mere presence of a trans girl changes the rules. It’s a horribly dangerous precedent. If every loss to a transgender opponent can be reframed as oppression—despite, in this case, video evidence that nothing criminal occurred—these people won’t stop until they’ve bullied every trans person out of existence.

The goal is ultimately to manufacture outrage. Because it’s not really about wrestling (which is why the ADF isn’t citing experts in the sport). It’s not even about a fourth-place finish, which Keeler may have earned in other ways. The bigots are always desperate for stories that make trans people appear threatening, predatory, or dangerous. Even if they have to use a relatively meaningless high school wrestling match to gin up material for a massive federal lawsuit and media campaign (complete with glamour shots of the family).

If advocacy groups like ADF can successfully convince the public that ordinary athletic contact automatically constitutes unfair competition—or assault!—whenever a trans athlete is involved, then there’s no need to have a debate about fairness in sports. That’s a debate they would lose because it still allows trans people to compete in certain situations. They don’t want that. This is about dehumanization, pure and simple.

That’s why stories like this deserve scrutiny beyond the headlines. They reveal how far some right-wing zealots will go to erase trans people from public life.

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