Former Covington Catholic high school student Nick Sandmann encouraged 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse to sue the media for defamation after several leftist pundits (and President Joe Biden) smeared him as a “white supremacist.”
“The parallels between me and Kyle Rittenhouse are impossible not to draw,” Sandmann wrote in an op-ed for the Daily Mail this week. “The way the media has treated you is terrible, and you don’t have to face it alone.”
At press time Rittenhouse was awaiting a jury’s verdict in his trial for the shooting deaths of two rioters who pursued him during last year’s civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty and said he acted in self-defense.
The media, however, decided he was guilty from the get-go, Sandmann pointed out.
“Kyle was almost immediately labeled a ‘white supremacist’ and a ‘domestic terrorist,’” he wrote.
“To many, my red MAGA hat clearly meant that I was a racist,” Sandmann continued. “Kyle wasn’t given his day in court by his critics. And neither was I. The attacks on Kyle came from the national news media, just as they came for me. They came quickly, without hesitation, because Kyle was an easy target that they could paint in the way they wanted to.”
Sandmann won his multi-million-dollar defamation case against CNN last year after the outlet falsely portrayed him as the aggressor in a viral confrontation with a Native American activist.
He has said he hopes to become a defamation lawyer someday and hold the corporate media “accountable” for its lies.
“I want to be a lawyer right now and do defamation law, help people like myself and then potentially run for office and help as many as people as best I can,” he said last year.
Sandmann is enrolled at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.
