“10 Solid Cases”: Kyle Rittenhouse’s Lawyer Breaks Silence: ‘Zuckerberg’s Certainly At Top Of List Because He Has Outsized Voice
Kyle Rittenhouse’s lawyer, Todd McMurtry, spoke to Fox News Digital about Kyle’s legal strategy. McMurty has experience going after the media and large defendants. Curiously he said Mark Zuckerberg is at the top of the list because Facebook has such an ‘outsized voice.’
According to Fox News, “Facebook and Instagram designated the shooting during the Kenohsa riot a “mass murder incident” before a trial or verdict, with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board arguing in 2020 that such a designation hurt the teenager’s shot at due process and called the move an “alarming resort to censorship.”
After the verdict, Facebook did give Kyle his account back so they may have a good defense but Whoopi Goldberg, LeBron James, Joe Biden, CNN, MSNBC, and others will not be able to make the same arguments Zuckerberg and Facebook will use if they are sued.
McMurtry said: “I’ve been hired to head the effort to determine whom to sue, when to sue, where to sue. We’re going to look at everything that’s been said, determine which of those comments are legally actionable and proceed from there.”
McMurtry added it is “pretty much assured” there’s going to be “10 to 15 solid cases” against “large defendants.”
He said: “Let’s just use for an example what Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg said about Rittenhouse.
“They said that he was involved in a mass murder incident. This was not a mass murder incident. It was clearly factually false.
RITTENHOUSE’S REVENGE: Kyle’s Lawyers Confirm ‘Zuckerberg is Certainly at the Top of Our List’ https://t.co/pGQ0Z56Eah
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) June 2, 2022
“To call somebody a mass murderer is seriously defamatory.
“And then to use the power of social media to basically censor any views that would take opposition to that mass murderer statement is a serious effort to destroy his character.
“And it was seriously mistaken and seriously defamatory.
“Zuckerberg is certainly going to be at the top of your list.
“Facebook has an outsized voice, they can do a lot of damage, as compared to somebody maybe who has a small blog with 100 subscribers.
“But we’re going to look at everything that we have access to and that’s been published, and decide which ones are actionable.”
McMurtry also talked about damages and issued a warning saying he knew “for a fact Rittenhouse can prove that his job prospects are permanently diminished.”
He added that he believed he could prove another claim that could result in major damages being paid to Kyle.
He said: “What they call perpetual reputational harm, which means that Kyle is never going to have an interaction with anybody where they don’t know who he is.
“This is going to follow him around for the rest of his life.
“Everybody’s going to prejudge him in every new interaction that he has with everybody for the rest of his life, and that’s called perpetual reputational harm.”
From The BBC Dec 1, 2021:
Facebook has reversed a decision to block searches on its platform for a US teenager who was acquitted of killing two people during unrest in Wisconsin.
Searches for Kyle Rittenhouse resulted in a list of blank pages since shortly after the shooting in August 2020.
Facebook said it would “still remove content that celebrates the death of the individuals killed in Kenosha”.
But “we will no longer remove content containing praise or support of Rittenhouse”, a spokesperson said.
A former Facebook employee said at the time:
This policy was launched last week and is currently being enforced by a team of specialists on the Dangerous Orgs Ops team. It’s a new policy and we’re still scaling up enforcement. 5/n
— Brian Fishman (@brianfishman) August 27, 2020
We’ve had too many tragedies like those in Kenosha. Companies like Facebook owe it to everyone to closely examine the influence of online content on such violence–and to take action to stop it. 6/n
— Brian Fishman (@brianfishman) August 27, 2020