Natalie Rupnow Might Have Met Her Boyfriend Online and Reportedly Sent Him Her Manifesto

According to court records obtained by The Washington Post, Natalie Rupnow had a troubled family life. Authorities began looking at her parents after the 15-year-old killed two people and injured six at her school in Madison, Wis. Jeff and Melissa Rupnow were first married in 2011, divorced in 2014, remarried in 2017, and divorced again in 2020. Based on the details of their custody agreement, Rupnow divided her time evenly between their two houses.

While this split living situation was happening for Rupnow, her parents remarried again but petitioned for a divorce in April 2021. A little over a year later in July 2022, it was decided that Rupnow would mostly live with her father. Around this time she was also in therapy in order to help her figure out which parent she wanted to spend weekends with. Somehow during all of this, Rupnow allegedly met a boy online who later identified as her boyfriend. Here's what we know.

Anna Slatz is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Reduxx, a "pro-woman, pro-child safeguarding platform that provides high-quality news and opinion on the stories the mainstream media ignores." She covers crime, child predators, and women's rights and was the first person to reveal that Rupnow might have a boyfriend.

Mere hours after the shooting occurred, Slatz posted a thread to X wherein she claimed to be in contact with Rupnow's boyfriend. Their exchanges were mostly about Rupnow's alleged manifesto which Slatz "verified by having him screen record himself opening it from a direct link the shooter sent to him via WhatsApp."

Rupnow's boyfriend also told Slatz that he thought her name was Samantha which was also the name on her school identification card. Despite the fact that there have been rumors that Rupnow was a trans woman, her boyfriend said she was not. Her boyfriend also provided Slatz with a different selfie of Rupnow because the one "making the rounds on social media" didn't look like her. He believed it might have been edited to make her look worse.

As of December 2024, there have been 320 shootings that have occurred at schools on the school grounds, per the K-12 School Shooting Database. When it comes to these types of crimes, the gunman is more likely to be male than female. From 2000 to 2019, the FBI found that of the "345 total perpetrators, 332 were men and just 13 were women," reported NPR.

Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University, said the reason why more men keep committing these crimes is they tend to "see themselves in the perpetrators." It's an ongoing cycle. She told NPR that, "Many school shooters study Columbine, for example. Other university shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they really are kind of using those previous shootings as a blueprint for their own."