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ABC Reporter Backtracks After Describing Charlie Kirk Shooter’s Texts to Trans Lover As 'Touching'

Dmitri Bolt
Dmitri Bolt  |  September 17, 2025 2:15 PM

ABC News’ national correspondent Matt Gutman has issued an apology after drawing backlash for describing the assassin of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, in unusually sympathetic terms, highlighting his “touching” and “intimate” messages to a trans lover in the immediate aftermath of the killing.

Gutman said that the messages were "very touching, in a way, that I think many of us didn't expect. A very intimate portrait into this relationship between the suspect's roommate and the suspect himself, with him repeatedly calling his roommate, who is transitioning, calling him 'my love,' and, 'I want to protect you, my love.'"

"The terminology he used, he was trying to protect him," Gutman continued later. "He kept calling him 'my love.' 'My reason for doing this is to protect you.'"

He has since apologized for those remarks. 

"Yesterday I tried to underscore the jarring contrast between this cold blooded assassination of Charlie Kirk—a man who dedicated his life to public dialogue—and the personal, disturbing texts read aloud by the Utah County Attorney at the press conference," Gutman said Wednesday. "I deeply regret that my words did not make that clear."

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Not even a week has passed since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and yet major media figures are already softening the edges of a political killing, casting the gunman’s words in a sympathetic light, purely because of the identity of the person he texted.