A lawyer who helped Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann reach settlements with media outlets has joined Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal team.
“I’ve been hired to head the effort to determine whom to sue, when to sue, where to sue,” attorney Todd McMurtry told Fox News Thursday. “We’re going to look at everything that’s been said, determine which of those comments are legally actionable and proceed from there.”
Rittenhouse was acquitted of homicide, attempted homicide and other charges when his trial ended in acquittal in November 2021.
Jurors believed Rittenhouse’s claims that he acted in self-defense when he pleaded not guilty in his trial for the August 2020 shootings of three men during riots in Kenosha last August. Civil unrest followed news of a white police officer shooting Jacob Blake, a black man who became paralyzed after being shot seven times.
Two of the men Rittenhouse shot that night, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, died.
McMurtry said an initial review indicates approximately two dozen solid cases but said there may be many more. He pointed out Facebook, now Meta, as an egregious example of social media making factually false statements about Rittenhouse. Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, designated the Rittenhouse-involved shootings as a “mass murder” incident.
“They said that he was involved in a mass murder incident,” McMurtry explained. “This was not a mass murder incident.”
“It was clearly factually false.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board blasted Facebook at the time for its ham-handed designation that WSJ called an alarming resort to censorship.
Rittenhouse’s newest lawyers declared calling somebody a mass murderer is seriously defamatory. He claimed that using the power of social media to basically censor contrary views constitutes a serious effort to destroy his character. McMurtry alleges Rittenhouse’s character was seriously defamed by the social media giant.
McMurtry helped his former client, Sandmann, reach settlements with legacy media outlets like NBC, CNN and The Washington Post. Although the settlement amounts were not revealed, Sandmann had brought suit against NBC for $275 million, CNN for $275 million and The Washington Post for $250 million.
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