So now that he has been cleared in the shootings. Regardless of ones opinion on the justification…how does the dust settle legally if he goes all lawsuit happy on various media outlets who were painting him in an extremely unfavorable light.
Im also particularly curious about things like GoFundMe who understandably block fundraising for violent crime defense will play out. Legally now he was the victim. His attackers collected hundreds of thousands that I know of in GFM campaigns. I’m sure that he could pursue civil actions against the estates but I am also curious if GFM and its ilk bear any legal accountability for ending up on the wrong side of such matters, at least on paper.
There is nothing illegal about raising money for a defense fund for someone accused of a violent crime. It’s just company policy by GFM to not allow them on their site. There is no responsibility on their part for allowing campaigns for the named victims.
Lawsuits against media outlets end with him sucking eggs. Also, “after the verdict” featured him being interviewed by Tucker Carlson and visiting Trump at Mar-A-Lago. And with an unfavorable light illuminating him through his days.
IANAL. What would be the basis of such a lawsuit? Libel/slander? Media outlets reported facts, which were probably verified during the trial itself, and immune to lawsuits. Remember, the facts of the killings were not in dispute, only their interpretation under Wisc. law. Media also published op/ed pieces, which are generally immune from such suits if they are represented as opinion and not fact. Further, he would have to demonstrate damages resulting from such coverage, and I don’t see any such damage evident.
Typo_negative posted in the Pit thread about the perfectly reasonable amount of schadenfreude concerning Trump and his enablers a quote (not his own words, as I read it) about the teenager this thread is about that I copy&paste here in case it is relevant:
Right-wing darling Kyle Rittenhouse, the teen acquitted of murder for killing two people at a racial justice protest, sent the QAnon world into a tailspin when he said in interviews that Lin Wood, a leading QAnon believer and Trump attorney who briefly represented Rittenhouse, was “insane” and had “taken advantage” of him.
I don’t know anything about that, not even if it is true and I don’t really care, but it seems to indicate that the relation between this immature teenager and the teeming loonies will not be boring. When his Orangeness in Mar-é-cage hears about this I reckon that the “almost anonymity” just postulated will become improbable.
Nothing GoFundMe did exposes them to any meaningful legal liability.
I would be surprised if most of the major media outlets have exposed themselves to meaningful legal liability either. Much of the negative press concerning Rittenhouse was in Op-Eds and opinion segments of TV / radio shows, which are almost impossible to successfully sue for defamation because they are presented as opinion. Now if any of the fact-based reporting stated something as fact that is clearly provable as false, and you can also prove that the media outlet knew it was false when they posted it (they are given a legal leeway of being incorrect), you would have a case. But that’s a very hard set of circumstances.
The right, if you recall, believed the infamous case where some conservative High Schoolers from Kentucky traveled to DC and got confronted by some Native American protesters was a watershed event that would result in similar successful lawsuits against liberal media outlets. But that hasn’t happened. Why? Mostly because the facts of that case were quite specifically good for the kid and his legal argument, and the behavior of a few of the major outlets involved like the Washington Post were quite bad and in violation of journalistic good behavior. There is good evidence that in that case the media was very deliberately distorting evidence of the days events to make a minor look like some sort of evil white supremacist.
What’s interesting is because the difficulty of proving the elements of defamation are fairly hard, I’m still not even sure that the kid would have won at trial. But I think the case was such egregiously “poor behavior” by the media, that they chose to settle to avoid a trial, because the trial would likely have resulted in subpoenas of Washington Post internal communications and et cetera which conceivably might have shown some very bad taste things being said or etc. As much as the far right will never agree, most major media outlets do attempt to broadly follow established journalistic ethics; they all have lapses, but they also tend to try and handle those lapses appropriately. That’s why there hasn’t been a surge of similar such cases–the behavior of the mainstream media, as often as it is maligned just rarely strays so far afield. And even in that case I think they likely had some good chance of beating the rap so to speak at trial, but the specifics of the event–and particularly because it involved a minor child, means that even if they won at trial they still probably would have lost. A settlement was the prudent thing and that is what occurred.
He is a legal resident of Illinois, living with his Mother. It’s his Father who lives in Kenosha, WI. So he would have to pay out-state tuition in a Wisconsin College, which is pretty expensive. It’d be cheaper for him to go to one of the branches of the University of Illinois.
I think that he is/was studying at the University of Phoenix, which is , despite the name, a private company offering online classes & degrees. It started in Arizona, but really operates nationwide, virtually.
This. The last thing he ought to do is become the next George Zimmerman.
And the student groups at ASU can go fuck themselves. Rittenhouse may have been a spectacular fuckup caught in a situation he shouldn’t have been in resulting in a tragedy largely of his making, but the best thing for him after the verdict is to get better educated. Otherwise he’ll end up taking one of those stupid Congressional intern jobs, learning nothing, and having no useful life skills.
To be clear, I’m not hoping for this, but I predict he’ll commit suicide in the next 10-20 years.
The right-wing are going to use him up and then spit him out when they’re done with him. Soon he’ll be forgotten by his “supporters”. However, he’s always going to known as that guy who shot and killed two people. He’s going to have to deal with the Mark of Cain complex. It isn’t psychologically easy to kill two people like that in a high-stress situation. But worse, he’s unlikely to get treatment, because he’s a right-wing manly man now, and manly men do not get psychological help. They just deal with it.
That is what I assumed. The media covers it like he’s going to classes in AZ. So, I wonder if he is actually progressing or he just registered and is drifting.
As for progressing, he’s 18. He just graduated high school. The last year he’s been under indictment. Finishing one class his first semester would be an accomplishment. Who knows? I’m guessing he’s soon going to fade into obscurity
