Black Guy Lights 2 White Guys on Fire
Rittenhouse had just started a new lifeguarding job when Blake was shot. On the second night of the protests, he finished his shift at around 8 P.M., and hung out with Black at Black's stepfather's place, two miles west of the courthouse. On social media, people were spreading false rumors that rioters planned to attack residential neighborhoods. The teens watched live streams of events that were unfolding so close to home that, when they stepped outside, they could smell smoke and hear screams.
The next day, Rittenhouse and Black cleaned graffiti in the protest zone, then offered to help guard what remained of Car Source. The business was insured, but one of its owners, Anmol Khindri, said to reporters that it was devastating when the police "did nothing" to stop rioters.
Black kept his rifle disassembled in the trunk of his car. On the second day of the protests, the stepfather had removed Rittenhouse's rifle from the safe, to keep it handy, he later told police. The gun was fetched from the stepfather's house. Black later told a detective that this made him uncomfortable, but added that if he'd objected Rittenhouse "would have threw a fit." The night of the shootings, the rifle was equipped with a thirty-round magazine and hung from a chest sling that Rittenhouse had bought that afternoon.
At dusk, Black was on the roof of the mechanic shop while Rittenhouse and others stayed on the ground. It was Black whom Rittenhouse called following the first burst of gunfire. After the second round of shooting, Black came down and found Rittenhouse sitting in a chair inside the shop, "all shooken up." Rittenhouse had placed his rifle on the flatbed of a truck.
Black later told a detective that he drove Rittenhouse home to Antioch, where Wendy gave her son two choices: turn yourself in, or leave town. Around 1 a.m., she drove him to the police station in Antioch. They waited together for more than two hours, Kyle crying and vomiting. Finally, two Kenosha police detectives, Benjamin Antaramian and Martin Howard, took them into an interview room. When Antaramian explained that he needed to read a police form aloud, Rittenhouse asked, "Is it Miranda?," and then said, "I know how Miranda works." He did not know how Miranda works. He both wanted a lawyer and to talk—incompatible desires. The detectives halted the interview.
Rosenbaum, the man who had chased Rittenhouse into the parking lot, was dead. The man who had struck him with the skateboard, Anthony Huber, a twenty-six-year-old demonstrator from Kenosha County, was either dead or dying. The third man shot—the one with the handgun—was also a twenty-six-year-old demonstrator, Gaige Grosskreutz, who lived near Milwaukee. Videos were already starting to make their way online: Rosenbaum taking his final breaths; Huber clutching his chest and collapsing; Grosskreutz shrieking, his right biceps mangled.
Messages from strangers were appearing on Wendy's phone: "Your son is a white supremacist murderer bitch. You and your family need to count your fuckin days"; "We going to make your home look like Beirut." They knew where she lived. Wendy told Kyle, "We can't go back."
When Rittenhouse learned that he was being arrested, he exclaimed that someone had hit him "with a fucking bat! " (Widely circulating videos show no such attack.) Antaramian explained that the charges could "range anywhere from reckless injury to reckless homicide to second-degree homicide." Wendy wailed, "Murder?"
Rittenhouse, who had been speaking with the detectives in a familiar manner, requested a favor: "Can you guys delete my social-media accounts?"
On August 27th, the Kenosha County D.A. charged Rittenhouse with Wisconsin's most serious crimes, among them first-degree intentional homicide, the mandatory punishment for which is life in prison. Other felony charges included reckless homicide, and he was also charged with a misdemeanor: underage possession of a dangerous weapon. Thomas Binger, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case, has said, "We don't allow teens to run around with guns. It's that simple."
Conservatives denounced the homicide charges as political, noting that both Binger and Graveley, the district attorney, are Democrats. Criminal defendants who cannot afford a lawyer are typically appointed a public defender, but so many conservative and far-right figures rallied around Rittenhouse that private counsel was all but assured.
Among the attorneys who stepped forward was John Pierce, a civil litigator in Los Angeles, who believed that, in the digital age, lawyers needed to "gang tackle, swarm, and crowd-source." His firm, now known as Pierce Bainbridge, had reportedly received nine million dollars from a hedge fund, Pravati Capital, in what The American Lawyer called possibly "the first public example of a litigation funder investing in a law firm's portfolio of contingent fee cases." The firm would bring cases against big targets, and Pravati would receive a cut of any damages. Critics have called forms of this practice "legal loan-sharking."
Pierce secured a few high-profile clients, including Rudolph Giuliani and Tulsi Gabbard, who sued Hillary Clinton for saying that the Russians were "grooming" Gabbard to run as a third-party Presidential candidate. But, by the spring of 2020, Pierce Bainbridge reportedly owed creditors more than sixty million dollars.
Last August, Pierce launched a charitable nonprofit, the #FightBack Foundation, whose mission involved raising money to fund lawsuits that would "take our country back." A Trump supporter, he was hostile toward liberals and often expressed his views crudely. One Saturday, during an argument with his ex-wife, he unleashed a stream of increasingly threatening texts, including "Go watch an AOC rally. Fucking libtard"; "I will fuck u and ur kind up"; and "People like u hate the USA. Guess what bitch, we ain't goin anywhere." Not for the first time, she obtained a restraining order against him.
#FightBack was registered in Dallas, where one participant, a lawyer named Lawson Pedigo, had joined Pierce in representing the former Trump aide Carter Page. Pierce and Pedigo were also working with Lin Wood, a well-known defamation attorney. When the Kenosha protests began, #FightBack leaped into the fray, declaring that "law-abiding citizens have no choice but to protect their own communities as their forefathers did at Lexington and Concord in 1775." The Rittenhouse shootings gave the foundation a face for its cause.
The Rittenhouses never returned home. Wendy and her daughters were staying with friends when Pierce tweeted an offer to represent Kyle, who had been transferred to a juvenile detention center in Illinois: "Will fly up there tonight and I will handle his defense with team of best lawyers in USA."
The Rittenhouses' experience with the criminal-justice system was limited to Mike's history, and to a battery charge against Wendy: the month before Kyle was born, she pleaded guilty to spitting in a neighbor's face. Pierce's Harvard law degree impressed them, and, on Twitter, the family could see him discussing Kyle alongside elected officials such as the Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, who tweeted that Rittenhouse's actions had been "100% justified self defense."
Pierce met with the Rittenhouses on the night of August 27th. Pierce Bainbridge drew up an agreement calling for a retainer of a hundred thousand dollars and an hourly billing rate of twelve hundred and seventy-five dollars—more than twice the average partner billing rate at top U.S. firms. Pierce would be paid through #FightBack, which, soliciting donations through its Web site, called the charges against Rittenhouse "a reactionary rush to appease the divisive, destructive forces currently roiling this country."
Wisconsin's ethics laws restrict pretrial publicity, but Pierce began making media appearances on Rittenhouse's behalf. He called Kenosha a "war zone" and claimed that a "mob" had been "relentlessly hunting him as prey." He explicitly associated Rittenhouse with the militia movement, tweeting, "The unorganized 'militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least seventeen years of age,' " and "Kyle was a Minuteman protecting his community when the government would not."
Wendy often appeared with Pierce as a "momma bear" defending her son. "He didn't do nothing wrong," she told an ABC affiliate. "He was attack by a mob." She publicly threatened to sue Joe Biden for using a photograph of Rittenhouse in his campaign materials, promising, "I will take him down."
Such partisan rhetoric rallied support among conservatives convinced that liberals were destroying American cities with impunity. As donations streamed into #FightBack's Web site, other contributions were offered directly to the family, for living expenses. Certain donors further yoked Rittenhouse to the militia movement: in September, the group American Wolf—self-appointed "peacekeepers" in Washington State—presented Wendy and Pierce with fifty-five thousand dollars in donations, after having taken a twenty-per-cent cut.
If Pierce seemed erratic and incendiary, he was more than matched by Lin Wood. A civil litigator in his late sixties, Wood rose to prominence in the nineties, when he won defamation suits on behalf of Richard Jewell, the security guard who was wrongly implicated as the Centennial Olympic Park bomber. Wood often went on TV to defend clients. In 2006, he told the publication Super Lawyers, "A media appearance is really a mini-trial. You may be advocating to a jury of millions." After Wood represented the family of JonBenét Ramsey—the six-year-old girl murdered in 1996—observers characterized the family's flurry of defamation lawsuits as "legal vigilantism."
After Donald Trump was elected President, Wood's work became noticeably ideological. He represented Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the white couple in St. Louis who pointed guns at B.L.M. protesters marching past their house. He represented Nicholas Sandmann, the Kentucky high-school student who sued various publications for their depictions of an interaction that he had, while wearing a maga hat, with a Native American activist in Washington, D.C. (Sandmann eventually fired Wood.)
People close to Wood noticed troubling changes in his behavior. According to a recent lawsuit by three lawyers who worked with him in Atlanta, Wood asserted that Chief Justice John Roberts would be exposed as part of Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking ring, and that Trump would name him Roberts's successor. (Wood denies making these statements.) The lawyers, who were suing to cut their business ties with Wood, cited repeated "abusive" behavior. In a voice mail, Wood called one of the lawyers, Jonathan Grunberg, a "Chilean Jewish fucking crook," and on another occasion he allegedly assaulted him in an elevator. (Wood has called the lawsuit "frivolous.")
Wood, who became #FightBack's C.E.O. on September 2, 2020, attempted to turn Rittenhouse's legal case into a cultural battle, calling him a "political prisoner" and comparing him to Paul Revere. He tweeted, "Kyle Rittenhouse at age 17 warned us to defend ourselves." Wood implied that patriots were needed for an even bigger fight—a looming "second civil war." His Twitter bio included the QAnon slogan #WWG1WGA—"Where we go one, we go all"—and he became a leading promoter of a conspiracy theory claiming that a secret group of cannibalistic pedophiles has taken control of the United States.
In the first few weeks of #FightBack's campaign, Wood announced, some eleven thousand people donated more than six hundred thousand dollars. The foundation paid Pierce and produced a publicity video, "Kyle Rittenhouse—The Truth in 11 Minutes," which framed the case as one with "the power to negatively affect our lives for generations." A narrator intoned, "This is the moment when the 'home of the brave' rise to defend 'the land of the free.' " Wood called the case "a watershed moment" for self-defense; Pierce tweeted, "Kyle now has the best legal representation in the country."
Pierce was a civil attorney, not a criminal-defense lawyer. A double homicide was "not the fucking case to learn on," one experienced defense lawyer told me. In Wisconsin, a homicide case requires representation by a local lawyer. Rittenhouse hired two criminal-defense attorneys in Madison, Chris Van Wagner and Jessa Nicholson Goetz, who had the understanding that #FightBack would cover their legal fees. The Madison lawyers quickly concluded that the #FightBack arrangement wouldn't work for them. Van Wagner told me, "When you have crowdfunding of a criminal defense, they take over—they have their own political agenda." He recalled that one #FightBack conference call began with "Hello, patriots!"
The defense attorneys also found Pierce and Wood's media presence compromising. On September 7th, they e-mailed Wood: "Almost all of the news today about Kyle's case centers not on the case itself but on the two lawyers who have publicly identified themselves as his lawyers, as well as on the 'cause'-oriented Foundation." They reminded Wood that a "proper defense" of Rittenhouse should be the "lone objective."
Black Guy Lights 2 White Guys on Fire
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante
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