Viral Post Misrepresents Facts in Rittenhouse Trial
Quick Take
Kyle Rittenhouse said that he went to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to defend a car dealership during protests against police brutality in August 2020. He was not there to defend his grandparents’ gas station, as a viral social media post falsely claims. He was not related to the family that owns the car dealership.
Full Story
On Nov. 19, a Wisconsin jury found Kyle Rittenhouse,18, not guilty of two counts of homicide and one count of attempted homicide.
The trial had become politically charged and drew national attention, since Rittenhouse shot three people — killing two and injuring one — during protests against police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020.
Rittenhouse and his largely conservative supporters argued that he acted in self-defense, while prosecutors and the primarily liberal crowd who wanted to see him punished argued that he was a vigilante who had been spoiling for a fight.
The sharp divide in public perception of Rittenhouse has led to the proliferation of false claims that support the view of either the right or left. We recently wrote about one such claim circulating on left-leaning social media accounts. Another widely shared claim, which we’ll address here, has been circulating on right-leaning accounts.
The post has been copied and shared thousands of times, according to data from CrowdTangle. It makes numerous claims – several of which are true, or at least partly true, and some which are inaccurate.
Here are the facts relevant to each claim in the post:
Claim: “Until I watched the trial for myself, I didn’t know the gas station where it all started and where Kyle stayed up until they started attacking him, is owned by his grandparents. They came on to his property to attack him.”
This is false. Rittenhouse that he had seen videos on social media showing at Car Source, a
