Earlier this year, it looked like the world had perhaps heard the last from Kyle Rittenhouse. After a jury acquitted him in November 2021, the famous teenage shooter, who killed two people and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the Black Lives Matter protests, had tried to rebrand himself as a Second Amendment influencer. But in the summer of 2025, observers noted that he had quietly deleted all his social media accounts and disappeared from public life.
But not for long. Rittenhouse has returned this month, a resurrection that has only served to remind people of why he should have disappeared in the first place.
On December 10, Rittenhouse, now 22, reemerged from his self-imposed exile to announce on social media that he’d married his “best friend” and that he was back with big plans. “I stepped out of the public eye back in January— I needed peace, a fresh start, somewhere far from the constant noise and chaos. That decision changed my life,” he continued. “I met & married my best friend, and found more peace and purpose than I ever thought possible.” (His wife, it must be noted, is not the same girlfriend whose beauty he was gushing over while making cringey music videos three years ago.)
Rittenhouse then described how the assassination of Charlie Kirk “shook me to the core,” and he came to a momentous realization: “I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore. So, I’m back. Not quietly. Not halfway. I’m coming back in a big way.”
Rittenhouse promised a “big” announcement that would kick off his return from the sidelines. That announcement, however, proved to be as embarrassing as many of his previous attempts to call attention to himself.
Two days later, Rittenhouse posted a video of himself in a suit, standing outside the Walton County, Florida, jail where, according to Rittenhouse, Michael Rediker was being held without bond “for defending himself against three violent criminals who tried to take his life from him.” Claiming that Rediker would be exonerated because of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, Rittenhouse insisted that “Michael did nothing wrong and he deserves all of our support.” He has started a GiveSendGo to raise money for Rediker, which had raised $802 as of Tuesday night.
Joining Rittenhouse in this campaign is perennial Florida candidate Anthony Sabatini, who has “taken the lead” on this case, according to his Facebook post. In 2020, the Orlando Sentinel described Sabatini, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist who served in the Florida House from 2018 to 2022, as “the worst person in the Florida legislature.”
Walton County Sheriff Michael Adkinson, a Republican, was so outraged by the video that he took the rare move of releasing a video of his own to explain the facts of the case. “After 30-something years of doing this, I very rarely get personally offended,” he said, speaking into the camera, “but I’m actually just kind of disgusted with them.”
“A man lost his life yesterday,” he said. Rediker, he alleged, had driven his tractor to the victim’s property, where he proceeded to batter the man’s wife in front of witnesses. When the husband tried to help his wife up off the ground, Rediker allegedly shot the man in the face. “He was unarmed. There was no fight between them. There was no attack,” Adkinson continued. “I’ll bet my badge on this. Not only is that not a stand your ground, Mr. Rediker will face either the ultimate penalty in the state of Florida or, God willing, [spend] the rest of his natural life in prison. Because, come Christmas morning in two weeks, there are two little boys, elementary school age, two children, that are not going to have their father, and there’s a wife who is not going to have her husband.”
Adkinson didn’t end there. He addressed Rittenhouse and Sabatini, directly, “I think both of you are jokes, and I don’t think you should make a damn cent off the suffering of someone else.” He insisted the incident doesn’t have “a damn thing to do with the Second Amendment or Stand Your Ground,” concluding, “I hope that many of you will reach out and tell these two jack-wagons what you think about what they are doing to this family suffering. Don’t let them make a penny off a ‘like.’”
Rittenhouse, who has claimed to have immense respect for law enforcement, didn’t take the hint. He has continued to pester the sheriff’s office to release body-cam footage and other evidence that will be part of the criminal case against Rediker. Apparently, even Facebook has had enough of him—again. (The site had temporarily deplatformed him after the 2021 shooting and blocked searches for his name to tamp down on content glorifying the killings.)
Rittenhouse posted a few days later that “FB censorship is still very real in 2025. I’ve now received warnings for violating standards on every single post I’ve made and they say they are nolonger [sic] recommending the page.” Rittenhouse then declared himself done with Facebook, only a week after declaring he was back.
This isn’t the first time that Rittenhouse has teamed up with someone like Sabatini, who clearly did not have his best interests at heart. After the Kenosha shooting, the teenager was seized upon by any number of right-wing opportunists hoping to use his case for their own advancement.
“People who should have been protecting him used him for their own financial gain by raising money through him, then overpaying themselves exorbitant fees for useless court battles (such as extradition) or arranging behind my back—then over my strenuous objections— to have Kyle talk to the press from jail,” writes defense lawyer Mark Richards in the forward to Rittenhouse’s 2023 memoir, Acquitted. Richards represented Rittenhouse at his criminal trial and is now defending him from pending civil suits that were filed by his victims, and victims’ families.
Rittenhouse’s life didn’t have to end up like this. His acquittal gave him a second chance, and at first, it looked as if he even might embrace it. Four days after his not-guilty verdict, Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time of the shooting, told NewsNation’s Ashleigh Banfield that he was considering changing his name, growing a beard, and losing some weight so people wouldn’t recognize him in public. “I just want to be a normal 18-year-old college student trying to better my future,” he said, “and get into a career in nursing.”
Instead of sticking with that plan, he followed the siren call of right-wing fame. He made a documentary with Tucker Carlson and spent the next three and a half years trying to become part of the far-right influencer crowd as a Second Amendment activist. He embarked on many embarrassing ventures, including launching a video game in which gamers could play him and shoot turkeys representing “fake news.”
He tried reviewing guns on YouTube and launched a legal fund to try to sue media outlets he thought had defamed him by calling him a “murderer.” It all flamed out in less than a year with no suits filed. Rittenhouse did appear on the right-wing lecture circuit, but as a 20-something kid without much to recommend him other than the fact that he’d killed some people, the effort was less than successful. Protests frequently got his appearances cancelled.
In 2023, Richards, his lawyer, told me, “Kyle’s got to make a living, but my advice is to crawl under a rock and live your life anonymously. Obviously, people don’t take my advice.”
Early this year, a gun store in Florida, Gulf Coast Gun & Outdoors, announced that it had hired Rittenhouse to work there. A few days later, the Santa Rosa sheriff’s department helped a company seize the store’s inventory to collect on a debt that had ballooned to more than half a million dollars, according to the Pensacola News Journal. The store closed in October.
This summer, it looked as if Rittenhouse finally might have come to his senses, taken his lawyer’s advice, and bowed out of the limelight. But by November, it was clear he couldn’t stay away. That month, a Republican group in Pennsylvania announced that he’d be headlining their “freedom event” rally in Luzerne County, an event for which he reportedly would have been paid between $20,000 and $25,000. It didn’t take long for local outrage to prompt the venue to cancel the rally, a common occurrence for Rittenhouse’s planned speaking engagements.
One group that apparently will still embrace the radioactive speaker is Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk, who was murdered in Utah in September. Turning Point gave Rittenhouse a hero’s welcome at the group’s American Fest a month after he was acquitted in 2021. He reported on social media that he will be returning to the event in Phoenix this week. The man who shot and killed two people in an episode of political violence will help celebrate the life of a man shot and killed in an episode of political violence. As Mark Richards writes in the forward to Rittenhouse’s 2023 book, “He is a work in progress, like all of us.”
