Kyle Rittenhouse has declared plans to take legal action against talk show host Whoopi Goldberg for calling him a 'murderer'.
After Black man Jacob Blake was shot by police, protests were held in Kenosha on August 25, 2020. Rittenhouse travelled 20 miles to the protests, where he shot and injured one man, and fatally shot two others using an AR-15-style automatic rifle.
The then-17-year-old claimed he had made the trip to provide medical aid and defend a local business from protesters. He pleaded not guilty and claimed that he had acted in self-defence. Facing five felonies, on November 19, 2021, a panel of 12 jurors found the teenager not guilty.
Rittenhouse has since announced plans to sue multiple media outlets for their reporting of the case through the launch of a new project.
On Monday, February 21, on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight, the now-18-year-old detailed his plans to launch an initiative called 'The Media Accountability Project'.
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He said, 'Me and my team have decided to launch The Media Accountability Project 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 explained that the reason Whoopi Goldberg had gained a spot on his list is because she called him a 'murderer'.
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'She called me a 'murderer' after I was acquitted by a jury of my peers. She went on to still say that,' he stated.
Alongside the Sister Act star, Rittenhouse is also planning to sue Cenk Uygur, who is the founder of The Young Turks, for similarly calling him a 'murderer' and allegedly continuing to do so.
LeBron James is also reported as potentially finding himself at the end of a lawsuit after he accused Rittenhouse of pretending to cry during the trial.
After his acquittal, Rittenhouse was reportedly in communication with Covington High School student Nicholas Sandmann.
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In 2019, Sandmann hit headlines after he was accused of intimidating a US war veteran. However, he launched several lawsuits against media outlets for being 'defamatory', which he later won compensation for.
Sandmann has since encouraged Rittenhouse to sue the media. As per the Mail Online, he wrote, 'The parallels between me and Kyle Rittenhouse are impossible not to draw [...] The attacks on Kyle came from the national news media, just as they came for me.'
Rittenhouse concluded, 'We're going to hold everybody who lied about me accountable, such as everybody who lied called me a White supremacist. They're all going to be held accountable. And we're going to handle them in a courtroom.'
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Topics: Kyle Rittenhouse, Whoopi Goldberg, World News
Poppy Bilderbeck