Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted last year of charges related to the shooting of three people in Kenosha in August 2020, has launched a new donation fund he says will help take certain media outlets and individuals to court to hold them accountable for their “lies.”
Donations to Rittenhouse’s “Media Accountability Project” will help finance the potential lawsuits, he told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson Monday night. Rittenhouse said that his team is currently looking at “quite a few” politicians, athletes, and celebrities to file lawsuits against, including The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg.
“[Goldberg] called me a ‘murderer’ after I was acquitted by a jury of my peers. She went on to still say that,” Rittenhouse said during his appearance on Carlson’s show.
The acquittal of Rittenhouse, who is now 19 years old, drew both outrage and support across the country. Rittenhouse fatally shot two people, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz after traveling to Kenosha when he was 17 during the civil unrest that broke out after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man.
Rittenhouse was found not guilty in November on all five first-degree felony counts he had been charged with, including intentional and reckless homicide.
A launch video posted on Rittenhouse’s Twitter page Monday night begins with a Malcolm X quote: “The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.”
The video then shows a series of article clips, videos, and other commentaries about Rittenhouse, some of which linked his actions and acquittal to racism and white supremacy. It ends with a short clip of former President Donald Trump seemingly speaking about reporters and calling them the “enemy of the people.”
Rittenhouse told Carlson that the inspiration for launching his fund was to help hold other organizations and people “accountable for what they did to me because I don’t want to see anybody have to go through what I went through.”
The donation fund’s page states that Rittenhouse’s trial “exposed deep corruption in our media for all to see” and that he “won’t let it go unanswered.”
“Help hold the worst offenders in our media accountable in court for their malicious and defamatory lies,” the page reads.
Rittenhouse did not name any specific media organizations on Twitter or while speaking to Carlson, but he did mention Cenk Uygur, commentator and founder of The Young Turks, who “continues to call me a ‘murderer.'”
