An Illinois teenager who gained national prominence in the US over his trial for his use of a firearm against protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, said he was crowdfunding a legal campaign against people he claims have smeared him. He announced this during his appearance on Fox News on Monday.
Before, during, and in some cases after his trial, Kyle Rittenhouse was depicted by some speakers as a white supremacist murderer protected by an unjust legal system. He was acquitted of all charges and became a poster boy for conservative commentators in the US to showcase the perceived liberal bias dominating the American media landscape.
The Media Accountability Project launched by Rittenhouse will sue “politicians, celebrities, [and] athletes,” for tarnishing his reputation, he told host Tucker Carlson.
The young man, who is now 19, identified two people by name as slated to hear from his lawyers soon. One is Whoopi Goldberg, the co-host of ‘The View’ talk show on ABC. Another one is Cenk Uygur, from the YouTube-based channel The Young Turks. Rittenhouse claimed both called him a murderer, even after his acquittal. Neither would immediately comment on the allegations.
A video clip that Rittenhouse posted on social media to announce the launch of his campaign showed a sample of the negative coverage of his case by US media. Pundits quoted had called him a “white supremacist,” “arguably a domestic terrorist,” a “militia wannabe” and other names. The clip culminated with the infamous assertion by then-President Donald Trump that the media was “the enemy of the people.”
Rittenhouse shot three men, two of them fatally, during a riot in Kenosha in August 2020. The riot occurred amid a bigger Black Lives Matter protest against racial injustice in America, which made the case highly politicized. A jury passed a not-guilty verdict last November, agreeing that the teen had acted in self-defense.
Goldberg reacted to the acquittal on her show, saying that “even all the excuses in the world does [sic!] not change the fact that three people got shot, two people were murdered – to me it’s murder, I’m sorry.”
It was not immediately clear which of Uygur’s remarks about him Rittenhouse had in mind when he made his accusation.
Virtually the entire chain of events that resulted in Rittenhouse shooting three people was filmed, with the footage available to the public long before the trial started. Some foreign media covering the Rittenhouse trial wrongly claimed that the three men he shot were black, which critics see as evidence of how skewed the reporting by American news outlets was. Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, whom Rittenhouse killed, and Gaige Grosskreutz, whom he injured, were all white.
While he was set free by the criminal court, Rittenhouse is facing a civil case from the family of one of the people he killed. Anthony Huber attacked him with a skateboard after a foot chase, and Rittenhouse shot him dead in response. The Huber family filed a $10 million claim notice in December and added their son’s killer to the list of defendants last month.