Famed Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz sounded off on the “intellectual thugs” at CNN and the “racist media” after a Kenosha, Wis., jury found Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty of murder and reckless endangerment over events stemming from riots in the city last year.
In an interview Saturday with Newsmax TV, Dershowitz declared that it was “racism, pure and simple” for left-wing media members to ridicule Rittenhouse for losing control and crying uncontrollably on the stand during testimony earlier this month when he was attempting to tell his side of the story regarding the shootings that led to his arrest.
In addition, Dershowitz offered to put the teen in contact with legal representatives if he decides to file legal actions against CNN and other outlets for alleged defamation.
“You can watch yourself crying on TV and then you see those jerks attacking him, saying it was staged,” Dershowitz said. “Imagine if it was a black man who was a member of Black Lives Matter who had killed in self-defense and who cried on the witness stand. None of those people would have marked him.
“It is racism, pure and simple. There’s no way of getting around it,” Dershowitz added.
He went on to call for people to return to a dictum espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who called for Americans not to judge people by their skin color but rather the content of their character.
“That’s not what CNN does,” he said. “That’s not what many of the others in the media do. Everything is racial politics, except when it’s not racial politics.”
He went to point to a case in Georgia, where three white men are accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, a black man, “noting the defense lawyer has attempted to remove Black pastors, including Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson, from the courtroom,” Newsmax reported.
“It’s not racial politics, except when the lawyers in Georgia point out the fact that the minister who is coming to the courtroom is Black,” Dershowitz said. “Oh, my God, that’s racism. You can’t mention a person’s race, but you must mention a person’s race when it helps the narrative. It’s so hypocritical. It is bizarre.”
The famed Harvard law professor has also filed his own defamation lawsuit against CNN and has offered to share his research with Rittenhouse’s legal team if he presses forward with similar legal actions.
“I support any lawsuit that he tries to bring against the intellectual thugs at CNN who persists in lying, persistent lying about the case,” Dershowitz said. “If you listen to CNN, this is a young man who came across state lines carrying an illegal gun and caused the confrontation and never had anything in his life endangered.
“All of those are lies, and they keep repeating them over and over and over again, even after the verdict. You just cannot believe anything you see on CNN or on CNBC or MSNBC. It’s just a scandal,” he added.
Dershowitz also said that he believes Rittenhouse will likely be sued by the families of the men who were killed and wounded, “but I don’t think there’s much of a chance that the alleged victims here who were found by a jury not to have been victims essentially can successfully sue him.”
He added: “I think the next step is going to be Rittenhouse suing and making these commentators accountable.”
In interviews with a crew for Fox Nation’s “Tucker Carlson Originals,” Rittenhouse describes what it was like to endure the events of the night in question as well as his trial.
“The jury reached the right verdict,” he said. “Self-defense is not illegal, and I believe they came to the correct verdict, and I’m glad that everything went well.”
“It’s been a rough journey, but we made it through it,” Rittenhouse noted further. “We made it through the hard part.”
