Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro Offers Up Wild Defense of Kyle Rittenhouse

It’s still unknown whether Kyle Rittenhouse’s tearful testimony will help him avoid going to prison for killing two people amid the chaos of violent demonstrations last spring in Kenosha, Wisconsin. But he definitely convinced Fox News host Jeanine Pirro.

“He was a good kid, he went there to clean up the graffiti on the buildings.” Pirro declared of Rittenhouse on The Five, leaving out the part where he brought along an AR-15 with him. She went on to describe him as an “exemplary” witness, praising him for speaking “clearly” and “directly” and calling the prosecutor in the case “so desperate, so out of control that he’s even got the judge going through the roof in that courtroom.”

Of the four other co-hosts on the panel, only Geraldo Rivera pushed back, calling Rittenhouse a “dopey kid with a hero complex” who “shouldn’t have been there.” But that being said, he predicted that the defendant “walks” on the murder charges.

“First of all, I don’t think he’s a dopey kid!” Pirro shot back. “Just because he isn’t Mr. Cool from New York City doesn’t make him a dopey kid, OK? This kid practiced CPR training, he was a police explorer, he was a fire cadet.”

“He’s a 17-year-old guy, a kid that takes an AR-15 to a neighboring state!” Rivera cut in, but Pirro was on a roll.

“You don’t know what it’s like in that part of the country or maybe you do,” Pirro told Rivera, who said he does know because, unlike her, he’s lived there. “That’s a good kid. That is the kind of kid who can grow up and have a moral core.”

Pirro’s latest commentary echoes what she and other Fox News personalities have been saying about Rittenhouse for months. “Kyle Rittenhouse has been villainized here, and he’s been demonized, and I think it should be just the opposite,” she told Tucker Carlson last fall. “This one kid is an innocent man, he’s looking to help, he’s all-American, and he’s trying to just make sure his town is safe.”

Editor’s note: Early reports that Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon turned out to be untrue; he had a friend buy him the weapon in Wisconsin and retrieved it there.