Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense attorney sounded off about the publicity his recently acquitted client is now facing, providing the teen with some rather extreme advice.
Change your name and start over.
This may sound drastic until you consider just how many wildly false allegations have been swirling about Rittenhouse, who was acquitted Friday in the shootings of three men who attacked him during the Kenosha, Wisconsin, riots last year.
We have also now learned from Rittenhouse that the high-profile and extremely controversial celebrity attorney Lin Wood essentially allowed him to languish in jail last fall despite having raised the money to bail him out.
The 18-year-old made the shocking revelation in an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Monday.
Speaking with Fox’s Martha MacCallum earlier in the day on “The Story,” Mark Richards, who was part of the legal team that successfully argued Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, sounded off about the misinformation surrounding his client and what he sees as an important need for this now-famous young man to shield himself from the public eye.
“Yeah, my advice would be to change his name and start his life over,” Richards said when MacCallum asked what his advice would be for the newly free teenager.
“He’s very recognizable right now,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who I don’t think have his best interests at heart and probably want to make him a symbol of something I don’t think he wants to be necessarily associated with.
“And once you give up your name and your likeness and you join those causes, I think a lot of people will use you for their own purposes, and you won’t be able to control it.
“We have had that talk with Kyle, and it’s going to be a fine line where he decides to go. Ultimately I hope he makes the right choices, you know?
“I would think his life would be a lot easier being anonymous and going on with his life as opposed to try and keep his fervent supporters happy.”
He told MacCallum that in addition to the wild lies about Rittenhouse pushed to the media, such as the false claims that he crossed state lines with his rifle or that he was a white supremacist, there also have been a number of opportunists trying to exploit his case for their own benefit.
“I think there’s a lot of people who want to use Kyle for their own means,” he said. “I think the way the Rittenhouse name right now has trended on Twitter — and that’s what we live in, is a Twitter society — people want to use his name, get it out there so they can get some publicity. I think it’s cheap. That’s what I think.”
He’s not wrong.
The Rittenhouse case should be sobering, not just because it displays the extent to which the outrageously biased establishment media will distort the truth to suit a political narrative, but also because of the chilling reality that supposedly right-wing figures might have taken advantage of this young man for their own gain.
Rittenhouse has been compared to and seems to have now struck up a friendship with the horrifically defamed teenager Nick Sandmann, whose awkward smile, photographed at the moment that a Native American activist was inexplicably beating a drum in his face amid a boisterous and heated confrontation between a group of pro-life high schoolers and left-wing activists, was splashed all over the internet within 24 hours in 2019.
It was chilling to think that at such a young age, Sandmann, through no fault of his own, would never be able to escape the media sensation that was made of him. Interestingly, it was Wood who secured him a massive payout from some of the outlets that defamed him, although Sandmann has since fired the now seemingly unhinged attorney.
Both Sandmann and Rittenhouse have lives that are just getting started. They are both very young men, and if there was any justice in the world, they’d be allowed to live normal lives.
Kyle Rittenhouse is brave. He doesn’t have to be a symbol for anybody or represent anything. His trial is over, and he is free to act however he wishes.
— Nicholas Sandmann (@N1ckSandmann) November 23, 2021
Sadly, thanks to the determination of those who have politicized their cases for their own selfish means, they will likely never be able to escape the shadow of their time in the media.
Rittenhouse can change his name, but, like Sandman, it’s unlikely anyone is forgetting his face anytime soon.
Let’s just pray that the cases of these two can serve as a sobering reality check to our crazy culture that the time of witch hunts, viral mobs and abhorrent slander must come to an end.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.