Kyle Rittenhouse provided an update to his ongoing plans to sue the entities who defamed him as a racist mass shooter when he actually defended himself during the 2020 BLM riots in Kensoha, Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse and attorney Todd McMurtry told Fox News host Tucker Carlson they are looking at Facebook in particular because of how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described Rittenhouse's act of self-defense.
"We're going to make the media pay for what they did to me. They made it hard for me to live a normal life. I cannot go out in public. I can't go to the store. It’s hard for me to go anywhere without security. Doing basic things like taking my dog to the dog park is difficult. They made it really difficult to be normal. They affected future job opportunities to me," Rittenhouse explained.
"The first one I am taking looking at is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg announced in a videotape that what Kyle was involved in was a mass murder and that is clearly defamatory as well. That is not protected by Section 230, the Communications Decency Act. In my opinion, Section 230 allows you to take down violent things or things that people don’t want to hear by telling the truth about Kyle, is not something that Section 230 enabled Facebook to take down. So that’s an example of what we plan to do with tech and also plan to do in the defamation arena," McMurtry said.
McMurtry pointed out that while news outlets can report on alleged crimes perpetrated by individuals, "but calling somebody a murderer in certain circumstances can be actionable. Other things that media personalities and people on social media said were clearly defamatory."
"I think that we have some strong grounds to proceed. We're...starting to look at those and evaluate them and look at opportunities to hold the media and tech accountable as Kyle promised," McMurtry added.
Rittenhouse said there have been a few instances of being harassed in public because of being defamed but his security team has been able to handle those situations.