Ottawa activist misidentified as Renee Good

"Renee Nicole Good wasn't a 'warrior.' She was a domestic terrorist, more concerned with harassing federal law enforcement agents than being a mother to her children," reads the caption of the collage shared to Facebook on January 9, 2026.

The picture contains a grid of six images of a woman holding up a phone and sporting a shirt with the slogan, "Protect Trans Youth." Each frame shows the subject making different expressive faces, sometimes baring her teeth or screwing up her eyes.

Other posts on Facebook, Instagram, Threads and X spread the claim that the pictures showed Good along with the implication the images proved she was "irrational" or an "extremist."

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Screenshot of a Facebook post taken January 16, 2026

Good was shot at point-blank range in Minneapolis on January 7 as she apparently tried to drive away from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers who were crowding her vehicle.

The Trump administration has insisted the agent who shot her acted in self-defense, while visual analyses of bystander footage by Bellingcat, The New York Times and others show Good's car turning away from the officer as he fired the shots.

Polling shows political allegiance is heavily guiding people's perception of the incident. AFP previously debunked posts which aimed to smear Good by falsely claiming to show visuals of her mocking the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The posts supposedly identifying Good as the protester in the "Protect Trans Youth" shirt are similarly misleading.

Reverse image search reveals the photos have circulated online for years, often with negative comments about liberal women because of the subject's unusual expressions and obvious alliance to trans causes (archived here, here and here). Some of the images have captions that mention Deana Sherif, an Ottawa-based activist currently embroiled in legal fights over her conduct at protests (archived here). 

Contacted by AFP, Sherif confirmed she is the one holding the phone in the photos which were taken at a June 9, 2023 counter-protest in Ottawa facing off with a crowd opposing LGBTQ+ materials in schools.

She also posted about her image being misidentified as Good on her X account (archived here).

"Having my face everywhere is not the problem," she said in a January 16, 2026 interview. "The problem is that it is being used as a weapon against anybody."

Sherif said she was making the faces in the video to mock a demonstrator on the other side of the protest. A clip shared to X the same day as the demonstrations in Ottawa shows the stand-off between Sherif and the other protester (archived here). 

A newscast covering the June 2023 demonstrations also shows the inflatable pink unicorn which can be seen in some of the social media posts using Sherif's likeness.

AFP has fact-checked other claims about the shooting in Minnesota here.