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GoFundMe Reveals Why It Had Shut Down Fundraisers for Rittenhouse's Defense

When friends of Kyle Rittenhouse, who on Friday was found "not guilty" by a jury, first tried to raise funds for his legal defense last year, they hit quite a few walls. As Ann Coulter referenced in her Wednesday column for Townhall, "Get Rittenhouse!," GoFundMe, which bills itself as the "#1 Fundraising Platform for Crowdfunding" and says it's "The most trusted online fundraising platform for any need or dream," shut the efforts down. 

Over Twitter, however, on Friday evening, the platform addressed the matter. 

The tweet references the platform's terms of service to do with agreeing to "not to use the Services to raise funds or establish or contribute to any Fundraiser with the implicit or explicit purpose of promoting or involving," with one specific bullet point referring to do with "alleged crimes."

9. the legal defense of alleged crimes associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance of any kind relating to race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, serious disabilities or diseases, financial crimes or crimes of deception;

As some accounts tend to do, when they don't want all the attention for a post they share on a public forum, the tweet in question restricted replies. 

That didn't stop people from reacting, with the overwhelming amount of reactions dealing with quoted tweets expressing outage.

Other tweets pointed out other examples of people who had used the platform for legal defense funds as a matter of self-defense.

It wasn't merely the fundraising efforts that suffered. Some people had been fired when word got out they had donated to the legal defense fund. 

Ultimately, money for a legal defense fund was raised through GiveSendGo, a Christian fundraising site, though the Left tried to destroy such efforts as well, as Rachel Alexander wrote in an April column for Townhall.