Less than a year after Rittenhouse was labeled a murderer and white supremacist after being acquitted of all charges in a 2021 homicide trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the teenager said he's now gearing up for potential legal action in order to "make the media pay."
While speaking to Fox News on Monday night, Rittenhouse and his lawyer, Todd McMurtry, claimed that media and Big Tech personalities defamed him during and after the homicide trial in Kenosha.
"Certainly, Kyle was charged with a crime. News organizations are allowed to report on that," McMurtry said. "But calling somebody a murderer in certain circumstances can be actionable."
In the aftermath of the Kenosha trial, Rittenhouse said he has been unable to get a job, or even go out into the public without security.
"We're going to make the media pay for what they did to me," Rittenhouse told Fox host Tucker Carlson. "They made it hard for me to live a normal life ... I don't think I'll ever be able to work or get a job because I'm afraid an employer may not hire me."
Among Rittenhouse's initial lawsuit targets: McMurtry says they're looking at Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
"Mark Zuckerberg announced in a videotape that what Kyle was involved in was a mass murder, and that's clearly defamatory," said McMurtry.
McMurtry was apparently referencing an Aug. 28, 2020, Facebook post in which Zuckerberg addressed the social media platform's handling of a page connected to a group called the Kenosha Guard.
Additionally, McMurtry hinted of plans to pursue legal action against media personalities who called Rittenhouse a white supremacist.
"I don't know how the media can claim that they didn't make a statement made up out of thin air without engaging in actual malice or, most certainly, negligence," McMurtry said. "I think we have some strong grounds to proceed."
There's recent precedent for what Rittenhouse could accomplish when bringing forth legal challenges against media outlets.
Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School student who had a viral-video encounter with a Native American during a visit to Washington, D.C., in 2019, and was falsely characterized as a white supremacist by several mainstream media outlets, sued a number of media giants, and reportedly settled with at least three entities out of court — CNN, the Washington Post, and NBC — for millions of dollars in damages.
The bevy of Rittenhouse-led lawsuits could coincide with him attending college sometime this year — possibly in the state of Texas.
Recently, Rittenhouse announced he would be attending Texas A&M, but that reportedly fell through.
And now there's speculation of Rittenhouse attending Blinn College, a "feeder school for Texas A&M."
However, according to one report, Blinn College says that Rittenhouse has neither applied nor been accepted to the school.
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