Rittenhouse to Newsmax: Telling 'What Really Happened' in Book

Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted after shooting and killing two protesters at a Black Lives Matter rally in Kenosha, Wisconsin in 2020, told Newsmax Friday that a book he's written, "Acquitted," is his attempt to tell people what "really happened" that night.

"I was a 17-year-old kid sitting in this small cell with a 2.5 inch mat and a thick green blanket, scared, not knowing what was going to happen or what the rest of my life was going to look like," Rittenhouse said during an interview on Newsmax's "Wake Up America."

Rittenhouse was jailed after he shot three people during the incident, killing 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and 26-year-old Anthony Huber and injuring 26-year-old Gaige Grosskreutz. He faced multiple charges after the shooting, including first-degree intentional homicide. A jury acquitted him of all charges the next year, however, after he argued that the shootings happened because he was defending himself.

Since then, Rittenhouse said he has had "good times and bad times," and that there were "times where it's very difficult. It's very stressful."

He added that he has met some "really good people" and made good friends who he trusts, but still has nightmares that "come and go in bits and pieces" after his arrest and trial.

"There are still nights that I'll wake up because I'm having them," he said. "There'll be days that just aren't good days because I'm thinking about what happened constantly and I just can't stop thinking about it."

After the trial, Rittenhouse at one point said he would consider changing his name and remaining out of the limelight, but now he's written a book because there "have been so many false narratives about me … as you guys played in the clip before I came on. You heard them, calling me a white supremacist, [having] white privilege and a bunch of other nasty things, and none of that's true."

He said he wanted to "go on the record" and "put it all in words for it to be out there for anybody to read." His book comes out on Dec. 15.

'You can learn the truth," Rittenhouse said. "You can read my story. It's all in there and it disproves all the narratives that I had everything handed to me, that I'm a white supremacist, that I had all of this privilege because none of that's true."

He added that he'll be using "a lot" of the proceeds from his book to pay legal bills, as he still has lawyers to pay "because I am still being sued."

And now, after having had time to reflect on the events of the night of the shooting, Rittenhouse says he might have decided against going to Kenosha if he'd known what was going tho happen.

"If I would have known I was going to be attacked and then put on trial for defending my life, I wouldn't have gone," he said. "It's not worth what I deal with every single day. I wouldn't have gone there. But that's hindsight, 20-20. I can't change that. It doesn't change the fact that I defended myself, but I wouldn't have gone there."

He also called it "frustrating" that his name has been used in political arguments.

"We had Joe Biden, who put my face on his campaign, calling me a white supremacist and I just didn't think that was appropriate," he said. "I was 17 years old at the time, and people put politics into a case that had nothing to do with politics. It had to do with the right to self-defense."

Rittenhouse added that he never got an apology from Biden and said he's "not expecting one anymore."

"I don't expect him to have a conversation with me, and even if we did have a conversation, I don't know how well that conversation would go," he said.

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