Conservative commentator Candace Owens is speculating about what she claims are additional manifesto writings by the Nashville school shooter.

Steven Crowder, also a conservative media personality, released three pages of what he said was 28-year-old Covenant School shooter Audrey Hale's manifesto on Monday. Hale fatally gunned down six people in the March 27 private Christian school shooting, including three children, before being killed by police.

The Metro Nashville Police Department announced shortly after the shooting that Hale had written a manifesto, comprised of journal entries and other writings, prior to the shooting. Police also said that Hale was a former Covenant School student and identified as transgender, with at least one online profile for Hale listing he/him pronouns.

The purported manifesto features Hale writing about a desire to "have a high death count" during a "death day" shooting, while referring to the children attending the school as "little crackers" and "f*****s" with "white privilege." The pages shared by Crowder do not refer to transgender issues.

Owens said in a post to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday morning that she had been "contacted by a source with more concrete information" on Hale's writings and the "true motive" for the shooting, promising to present more information during her podcast later in the day.

During the podcast, Owens said that a "very well-placed source" she claimed saw additional writings by Hale had passed along new information to her.

Owens stressed that she did not "physically see these documents" before claiming that Hale recounted a history of child sex abuse in the writings. She baselessly suggested that the purported abuse caused Hale to become transgender.

"What the source conveyed to me is that Audrey Hale claims to have been sexually assaulted in her youth," Owens said. "I think that that is a very important and a very relevant allegation. I obviously spend a lot of time on this show and this podcast talking about transgenderism."

"The hatred that Audrey felt for her youth was really predominantly transferred to the Covenant School," she continued. "Perhaps this is the reason that she targeted this school. Apparently while Audrey was dealing with some identity issues Audrey was at the Covenant School ... we can't confirm that."

Owens went on to speculate that a "plausible motive" for the shooting was Hale feeling that the school did not embrace "her identity issues in the correct manner" as a student.

Newsweek has not verified any of Owens' claims concerning the documents supposedly seen by her anonymous source. No images or other evidence of the purported documents were presented.

Nashville police said in a statement to Newsweek on Monday that they were "unable to confirm the authenticity of what has been released" by Crowder as well, but were "looking into that at this very moment."

However, Nashville Police Chief John Drake seemingly confirmed authenticity of the Crowder pages in a statement released a short time later, saying he was "greatly disturbed by today's unauthorized release of three pages of writings from the Covenant shooter" and police were "extremely serious about the investigation to identify the person responsible."

"This action showed a total disregard for Covenant families, as well as the court system, which has control of the shooter's journals at the present time due to litigation filed earlier this year," Drake said. "It is now pending in Davidson County Chancery Court and the Tennessee Court of Appeals. We are not at liberty to release the journals until the courts rule."

Nashville Mayor Freddie O'Connell has also directed state officials "to initiate an investigation into how these images could have been released," saying that he was "deeply concerned with the safety, security and well-being of the Covenant families and all Nashvillians who are grieving," according to NBC News.

A spokesperson for O'Connell's office told Newsweek on Tuesday that the mayor "cannot independently confirm the authenticity" of the documents released by Crowder.

Owens said in an X post on Monday that she was in favor of releasing the Hale manifesto because she is "a mother" and "an advocate against" what she called "the mental illness of transgenderism."

Like many other conservatives in recent years, Owens is well-known for promoting anti-transgender views. During an interview with right-wing U.K. broadcaster GB News last month, she also claimed that being transgender was a "mental illness" and attempted without evidence to tie acceptance of transgender people to pedophilia.

However, transgender identity is in no way related to pedophilia and is not considered a mental illness by the medical and psychiatric community, although "gender identity disorder" was once a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

The latest version of the DSM explicitly states that "gender non-conformity is not in itself a mental disorder," having replaced the previous diagnosis with "gender dysphoria"—a symptom that many transgender people experience, defined as distress caused by an incongruence of psychological gender and physical sex.

There is also no evidence that being transgender makes a person more prone to violence or likely to become a mass shooter, with the overwhelming majority of shooters in the U.S. instead being cisgender men.

Uncommon Knowledge

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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