NEW YORK (AP) — Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted on charges stemming from killing two men and wounding another during the unrest that followed the shooting of a Black man by a white police officer, said in a wide-ranging interview that aired Monday night he’s “not a racist person” and supports the Black Lives Matter movement.
“This case has nothing to do with race. It never had anything to do with race. It had to do with the right to self-defense,” the 18-year-old told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview that aired Monday night. Rittenhouse is white, as were the men he shot.
Rittenhouse was 17 last year when he traveled 20 miles (32 kilometers) from his home in Antioch, Illinois, to Kenosha, Wisconsin, which had been racked with protests in the wake of the Aug. 23 shooting of Jacob Blake. That shooting and the response in Kenosha — protests that turned destructive — became part of the national reckoning over police use of force against Black people following George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis the previous May at the hands of police.
Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-style semiautomatic rifle, joined others who said they were intent on protecting private property from potential damage on Aug. 25. During his trial, prosecutors argued that the teenager was a “wannabe soldier” who went looking for trouble that night. Rittenhouse countered that he fired in self-defense after he was attacked and in fear for his life.
“I thought they came to the correct verdict because it wasn’t Kyle Rittenhouse on trial in Wisconsin — it was the right to self defense on trial,” Rittenhouse said in the interview. “And if I was convicted… no one would ever be privileged to defend their life against attackers.”