Kyle Rittenhouse, who fatally shot two attackers and injured in a third in self-defense during a riot in Wisconsin in August 2020, is launching a new project designed to hold media organizations accountable for their “lies.” The exonerated teen also named multiple celebrities who he and his team may sue.
Dubbed The Media Accountability Project, Rittenhouse told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Monday that the initiative will act “as a tool to help fundraise and hold the media accountable for the lies they said and deal with them in court.”
“I don’t want to see anybody else have to deal with what I went through. So I want to hold them accountable for what they did to me, because I don’t want to see anybody have to go through what I went through,” Rittenhouse told Carlson.
Rittenhouse said his team is also “looking at quite a few politicians, celebrities, [and] athletes” who allegedly defamed the teen during his trial.
“[Whoopi Goldberg] called me a ‘murderer’ after I was acquitted by a jury of my peers. She went on to still say that,” Rittenhouse said.
Rittenhouse also named The Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur as a possible target because the host “continues” to call Rittenhouse a “murderer.”
“We’re going to hold everybody who lied about me accountable, such as everybody who lied called me a White supremacist,” Rittenhouse continued. “They’re all going to be held accountable. And we’re going to handle them in a courtroom.”
The media’s treatment of Rittenhouse echoed the 2019 incident involving then-Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, whose encounter with demonstrator Nathan Phillips went viral. Like Rittenhouse, the media painted Sandmann as a “white supremacist” and “racist.”
“This is the problem with liberal media outlets in the United States. They want to get the story first, get the most views, make the most money, and advance the agenda from liberal patrons,” wrote Sandman in a Daily Mail op-ed last November.
“These outlets cover themselves when they are wrong with small footnotes at the ends of long articles, clarifying that new information has come out and that they have updated their coverage,” he continued. “News shouldn’t be a scoreboard that constantly changes.”
Sandmann asserted that “the first impression of Kyle [Rittenhouse] has been set in stone, probably for the rest of his life,” adding that “every single label on Kyle as a ‘terrorist’, ‘white supremacist’, and ‘school shooter’ in the streets of Kenosha, will only ever be withdrawn after the damage has been done.”
Sandmann has since reached settlements with CNN, The Washington Post and NBC News. In December, Rittenhouse commented on Sandmann’s success against massive news organizations, saying, “Good for him.”
