Is Kyle Rittenhouse’s Lawyer the MRC’s Own Michael Avenatti?

The Media Research Center just loved to spew outrage at Michael Avenatti, onetime lawyer for Stormy Daniels, the porn star to whom President Trump paid hush money to cover up their alleged affair, for doing a lot of TV, and it cheered when he got in trouble with other extralegal shenanigans, while still complaining that his misdeeds didn’t get the media coverage it demanded.

But do right-wingers have their own Avenatti? Nicholas Fondacaro harrumphed dramatically in a Sept. 1 post:

With the liberal media claiming 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was a “murderer” who shot “unarmed” “protesters” in a supposed rampage through Kenosha, Wisconsin last Tuesday, someone had to set the record straight. And in a Monday appearance on Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, Rittenhouse’s lawyer, John Pierce blew up their lies and smears with evidence backed up by a New York Times visual investigation” and with video widely accessible online.

Making the case for how “this is 100 percent self-defense,” Pierce started where many on the liberal media vaguely reference: how his client was running for his life from a mob of leftist radicals who wanted to kill him, before any shots were fired.

After noting that Rittenhouse had helped to clean up graffiti earlier in the day and was asked to help protect a local business (and was not part of militia as the media initially lied about), Pierce detailed how a moving of the police line left his client stranded and subject the villainous hands of the rioters:

[…]

As the segment came to a close, both Carlson and Pierce sat dumbfounded as to why Rittenhouse was charged with a crime while the rioters destroying the city were getting off Scot-free. Both of them deduced that what was happening to the country was “sickening.” 

But Fondacaro has censored the fact that Pierce has his own legal problems. The Daily Beast reported that Pierce and the law firm he founded “are mired in millions of dollars of debt, while a payday-lender-style loan to cover his own expenses prompted him to take a leave of absence. As Pierce’s firm totters around him, he appears to be using Rittenhouse’s legal defense to give himself a new persona as a trash-talking, right-wing firebrand.” At the same time, according to the Beast, “Pierce began to behave erratically toward his ex-wife, according to records of text messages filed in a Los Angeles child-custody case. In those messages, Pierce allegedly made references to the Apocalypse” and “allegedly taunted his ex-wife over politics.” 

His record raised the possibility that the money Pierce was soliciting for Rittenhouse’s defense through his #FightBack Foundation might be misused. Pierce has since resigned from the defense fund. 

A co-founder of that fund is L. Lin Wood, the QAnon-sympathetic lawyer for Nick Sandmann, on whose behalf he filed numerous nuisance lawsuits against media outlets for needlessly huge damages, for which the MRC joined Wood in touting settlements with the outlets as victories even though it’s entirely likely that the confidential settlements gained them little more than a token amount to go away. 

Fondacaro is demonstrating the old MRC double standard of holding media outlets to standards it has no intention of following for itself.