Kyle Rittenhouse could sue media outlets that continue to refer to him as a murderer or a white supremacist after his acquittal, according to one of the defamation lawyers that represented student Nick Sandmann against CNN and others.
The 18-year-old Rittenhouse was acquitted on Friday of two counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and two counts of reckless endangerment stemming from an Aug. 25, 2020, Black Lives Matter riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse shot three rioters in self-defense, killing two. News outlets and Democrats — including then-candidate Joe Biden — claimed that Rittenhouse was a “white supremacist,” without evidence. As Breitbart News noted Friday, Rittenhouse can sue Biden because he made the claim after it was clear there was no evidence, and before he enjoyed presidential immunity.
Newsweek reported Saturday that Rittenhouse could also sue media outlets for continuing to make similar claims:
Kyle Rittenhouse could argue President Joe Biden defamed him with a tweet apparently linking him with white supremacists, according to a lawyer who won a defamation case for the student Nicholas Sandmann.
Todd McMurtry helped Sandmann, a former Kentucky high school student, reach a settlement with CNN after he was portrayed as the aggressor in an apparent confrontation in January 2019 with a Native American activist on the National Mall in Washington, DC.
A longer version of the video debunked media reports that Sandmann, a student at Covington Catholic High School, was the aggressor but not before a number of media outlets portrayed the incident as being racially charged.
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He also saw similarities with the Sandmann case and suggested that a number of media outlets could also face defamation claims for how they portrayed Rittenhouse.
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“Lots of media people said he was a murderer, and I think that’s actionable because that suggests that he committed a crime, and we now know that he didn’t,” McMurtry told Fox News.
MSNBC’s conduct during the trial was so egregious that the judge booted the network from the courthouse.
Before the verdict, Sandmann offered support to Rittenhouse in an op-ed in the UK Daily Mail: “I am here for you,” he wrote.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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