As you know, a woman died this February in a multi-car accident in which Caitlyn Jenner was involved. The extent of Caitlyn’s role in the accident is somewhat unknown as reports vary. she has not been charged criminally yet, and it’s not expected she will be, but she has been named in two different civil suits. Caitlyn nee Bruce Jenner has been sued twice for the crash, by the family of the deceased and a person in a second car who was injured. Both lawsuits are now pending.

Caitlyn’s historical transition has been dominating the news lately, but The Daily Beast wants us to remember the victim of the car crash for which Caitlyn may or may not have been responsible. (I tend to think people are jumping to conclusions in blaming Caitlyn. A car stopped short, a second car stopped to avoid rear-ending the first car, and then Caitlyn rear ended the second car, causing it careen into traffic and get hit by an SUV, killing the driver. Caitlyn was towing an ATV, limiting her ability to stop. She may or may not have been following too close. She was smoking at the time. More on the accident here.)

The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly lets us know that the victim of that accident, Kim Howe, 69, was a charitable, well-liked lady who lost her husband to a heart attack 12 years prior to her death. In doing so, Daly throws a lot of shade on Caitlyn’s character despite the fact that she hasn’t been found responsible for the accident. I’ll excerpt some relevant parts but please read the full article to get a better idea:

The official findings will be based on the facts as presented by reports from everybody who was involved in the investigation, from the sheriff’s office to the California Highway Patrol, as well as the medical people.

The conclusions will be the same regardless of whether it is Bruce or Caitlyn on the paperwork. The determining factors will be whether Jenner was driving too fast (perhaps) or following too close (some reports suggest yes) or texting (reportedly no) or intoxicated (also reportedly no)…

By outward appearances, Caitlyn seems to have already found herself not guilty. She pronounced the collision a great tragedy immediately after the incident but seemed to portray herself as blameless.

What was most remarkable about that Vanity Fair cover was not what you saw, but what you did not see.

Jenner certainly did not seem haunted by the demise of a fellow woman four years older than herself, who lived not far from the Kardashian girls in a gorgeous residence that already had been shadowed by a terrible loss a dozen years ago…

Just two days after the Howes closed on the place, and just as they were to embark on a European holiday, Robert suffered a fatal heart attack.

Kim moved in nonetheless along with her rescue pooch, Daisy.

“She lived there all those years by herself with the dog,” Pascucci says…

As has been reported by the New York Daily News, Howe had been active long before her widowhood in supporting the efforts of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to find alternatives to experimentation on animals…

“She had strong feelings, strong beliefs, but a very quiet, soft-spoken person,” Barnard says.

“She wouldn’t in a million years have caused an accident,” he says.

He is horrified by the thought of her stopping for a car ahead of her and then suddenly being struck from behind and sent into oncoming traffic.

“Can you imagine how terrifying that would be?” he asks.

Maybe such imagining does torment the world-famous personage who was driving the car that triggered the horror.

Or maybe Jenner has been too busy of late imagining herself as the woman she knew herself to be.

But what kind of woman is she?

What kind of person?

The person we should all wish ourselves to be is a kindred spirit to the person who perished in that accident.

[From The Daily Beast]

No one said that Caitlyn is perfect, in fact she was an absentee father to her oldest children and definitely seems somewhat narcissistic. (That’s pretty much a side effect of having any kind of long term relationship with PMK.) As Daly mentions, no one found Caitlyn responsible for this accident, either. All we have are conflicting reports and there is no official conclusion yet. It’s also unlikely, according to TMZ, that she will be criminally prosecuted for this accident. So I do think it’s premature to blame her. (Although to be fair Daly did not do this, he just threw a lot of shade – masterfully I might add.) We can talk about Kim Howe’s charity work and her commitment to animal rights without denigrating Caitlyn Jenner. There is a lawsuit pending. While it would have been nice to hear remorse from Caitlyn about this accident, (whether or not she could have prevented it) she’s been advised by lawyers not to talk about it at all.

I do think that Caitlyn should have objected to the photos taken of her posing in her car, though. It probably never occurred to her, but it should have.

Here is Kim Howe: