Virginia Cop Who Lost Job for Donating to Rittenhouse Defense Demands His Job Back
“My opinion on the self-defense claim of Mr. Rittenhouse has no impact on my ability to do my job as a police officer.”
The Norfolk Virginia Police Department fired Sgt. William K. Kelly III for donating anonymously $25 to Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense.
The department only found out because a hacker group released the information of the anonymous users.
A jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts.
Kelly wants his job back.
Kelly told The Daily Mail he thought Rittenhouse was innocent based on videos. He also explained why he donated:
‘Everything I’m saying is just my personal opinion. I’ve been a homicide detective, a violent crimes investigator for years. I have a background. I watched the video of the shooting and I’d seen the video of the journalists of Mr. Rittenhouse before the shooting and the protesters before the shooting and I thought it painted a pretty clear picture that Mr. Rittenhouse had a very strong claim for self-defense.
‘I was very surprised when he was charged soon after the shooting with these murders and the shooting of the third victim,’ he said.
Kelly, a self-confessed ‘news junkie’, saw that a GoFundMe account for Rittenhouse had been canceled, and a site called Give Send Go had set up another page for him.
He logged on and donated, making sure to leave out personal details because he says he didn’t want to associate himself with the police department.
‘I was interested in giving him the chance to defend himself in front of a jury. I know that lawyers are expensive, and it’s hard sometimes to get the message out there. I wanted to make sure that he had the means necessary to make his claim in court.
‘It mattered. The comments I made, my belief that he has a strong claim for self-defense was a personal opinion. I didn’t want my city or police department to be associated with it, so I chose to donate anonymously.
‘It was only after the hackers broke into it that they were able to connect those dots,’ he said.
Kelly also mentioned the comments and demands for his firing did not come from local people. But the department decided Kelly’s donation “eroded the public’s trust in the police.”
He wants his job back. Kelly wishes the department waited to make a decision about his employment instead of rushing to appease the woke mob:
Speaking from his home in Norfolk, he said he wishes the city officials had waited at least until tensions surrounding the case had calmed, if not until the trial.
‘If people consumed as much information as I did about the case they may have come to a different conclusion. And honestly even if they did consume as much information as I did and they came to a different conclusion – that’s fine.
‘This is America. You can agree with your neighbors and other people in your community and you can disagree with them. Just because someone has a different opinion than you, it doesn’t mean you should destroy their lives, take their job away.
‘My opinion on the self-defense claim of Mr. Rittenhouse has no impact on my ability to do my job as a police officer.’
He says the only reason he was fired was because he supported the teenager.
‘If I had a different opinion and I donated to a fund for the victims and made comments about how Mr. Rittenhouse was a murderer, nobody would have cared or tried to get me fired.’
Kelly filed a grievance. He mentioned police chief Larry Boone attended a BLM protest while in uniform and on duty:
In the photo, Boone is holding a sign that reads Black Lives Matter, with the names of people who have been shot by cops – including some in Norfolk – around it.
‘The hypocrisy is dumbfounding. For the leader of our organization to be able to advocate support for a movement that is at the very least divisive in America today, in uniform while on duty… he was holding carried the name of a person who had recently been shot by a Norfolk police officer.
‘The sign demanded justice for that person, but that shooting was still under investigation to determine whether or not that officer should be charged criminally. It’s very inconsistent.
‘Yet I cannot, off-duty, on my own time make a donation and some comments that are well within the realm of public, acceptable discourse?’
The bigger issue, he says, is that he was fired for daring to have an opinion that went against woke officials and public pressure to condemn the teenager.
‘The outcome of the trial has nothing to do with my vindication – right or wrong, an American has the right to express their opinion within the realm of public discourse.
‘That same freedom exists regardless to the outcome.’
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Comments
Whoever thought it was appropriate to fire him needs to be fired themselves, and have their pension revoked. Until these woke pricks start hurting, they’ll keep trying shit like this at every turn.
SGT Kelly should sue and make himself a very rich man. I truly think that is the only message that this woke mob will understand.
Hope he gets reinstated with back pay.
I hope he gets back pay plus some punitive damages.
Cancel culture is real, he just offered someone being charged only money for hi s defense which was legal and ultimately justified and punished severely for it.
I would be looking for council to sue the pants off them.
Had he offered his support to rioting thugs, like Kamala Harris did, he would have been lauded by the left. Make no mistake, he was fired for wrong think.
Kamala Harris is desperate. She’d trn on those rioting thugs in a second if she felt the wind blowing (as it were) in that direction.
Wrong. She is now tied to the commie wing, and as such, she is stuck with that narrative. She’s uniquely unfit to function as a grown-up pol, she just cackles crazily and has no clue. She couldn’t win her own freaking state and pretty much no one likes her (the only more unlikable pol who got close to the Oval was Hillary). There is no way the Dems run that crazy cackling do-nothing loser in 2024. No amount of positive press makes that look good.
The a**holes that fired this guy had better lawyer up if they don’t give him his job back. Otherwise, they’ll be seeing The Mother Of All Wrongful Termination Suits” marching down the pike toward them.
Screw that, he should go for the throat either way. He has the right to support whoever the hell he wants on his free time.
Rick DeSantis: hire this man.
It’s Ron DeSantis, but come 2024 or 2028, Mr. President will do. 😛
Bingo.
Sue the crap out the NPD and go work where you’re wanted.
Suing the NPD and winning will just mean the taxpayers will have to foot the bill.
Justice requires punishment of whoever made the decision to fire him, along with anyone with authority to approve or overrule it.
He has to get that firing off his record to work somewhere else.
“He logged on and donated, making sure to leave out personal details because he says he didn’t want to associate himself with the police department.”
And if he had done that competently, he wouldn’t have put his police email address on the donation. That was the only way the hackers connected the dots, and that was the handy “objective” excuse used by the PD to fire him.
If he really wants to get reinstated, he has to first get out in front of that claim and defang it, rather than to pretend it never happened.
If counterfeiters (criminals) elect a president in the USA, why is it any wonder that hackers (criminals) dismiss a policeman from their jobs?
“‘This is America. You can agree with your neighbors and other people in your community and you can disagree with them. Just because someone has a different opinion than you, it doesn’t mean you should destroy their lives, take their job away.”
Since November of 2020, such concepts have been moot.
Subotai Bahadur
Has those who hacked the GoFundMe site ever been caught?
They probably got promoted in the ranks of the FIB
It was the GiveSendGo site. The hackers were a group called Distributed Denial of Secrets. No progress has been made in identifying and apprehending the criminals, no doubt because the Biden Administration hasn’t the least incentive to do this.
They work for the administration.
Hmm. Isn’t there a law about using stolen/hacked information against someone?
There’s a law against what the hackers did. There’s no law against (say) a police chief using that information to fire a police officer.
Hopefully, he hires an attorney! Is it really coming to this? Where people can’t have a private life and lose their jobs because of where or to whom they donate their own money? CRAZY
Very sadly he isn’t the first this has happened to, and won’t be the last.
How do we donate to his legal fund?
I can see getting the money your due but I would be finding new employment. It won’t take long for them to get rid of you for something.
I think that gross uncivility goes back to at lest 2016, and probably further than that. The current mentality we see is something well entrenched.
While this would seem a textbook example of a government usurpation of an employee’s First Amendment rights (even uniformed service members can express political opinions so long as they don’t do it in uniform or while speaking in an official capacity), there have been some previous cases that didn’t go as you might imagine.
In 2011/2012, there was a college administrator at a state school in Ohio (Toledo, I believe), that expressed a pro-traditional marriage sentiment in an letter to the editor of the local newspaper. She was fired for that. She did sue, but did not prevail. The Sixth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s summary judgement for the University of Toledo
https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/12a0408p-06.pdf
The WOKE war on free speech has been waged for more than a decade now. Some of us are just now becoming aware of it.
Everyone knows it is nearly impossible to fire government employees. Except apparently when they contradict The Narrative, then they are out in a New York minute. Teachers, cops, etc. I suppose their unions don’t back them up either in these cases? Is any agency ever going to get slammed with multi-million dollar wrongful termination judgements? I suppose they don’t really care, it’s never their own money paying the lawyers and damages even if they do lose in court.
In 2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris raised money for a bail fund to bail our rioters and arsonists in order to get them back into the action as quickly as possible and to remove any fears of other arsonists that they might get jailed. Her previous career was as a tough prosecutor. It didn’t take long for her to change those stripes.
How to know if the reporter who wrote the article you are reading is a dedicated liar: If “protest” is the term used to describe the sacking of cities but the words “riot”, “arson”, “rioters”, and “arsonist” are not used at all.
Well, no. When BLM first started spreading, they were largely protesting. Cops frequently took a knee, and there were horrible spectacles of white people washing the feet of black people. Nancy Pelosi and her hell hoard took a knee with crazy African scarfs, remember?
Even after the beginning, BLM did march and protest during the day. It was only at night that the burning, looting, and murdering took place. No cop knelt to them then … that I am aware of anyway.
They did in New Orleans, initially. A protest group went up an on ramp and onto the I-10 at night. They were confronted by the NOPD, which in order to defuse the situation, took a knee. They eventually got the protesters off the I-10.
After being such enabled, a group of protestors did the exact same thing, but this time tried to get on the GNO bridge. Only this time, the stakes were higher, as what they were doing was far more dangerous than a sleepy section of I-10 late at night.
They were ordered off the bridge, and when they refused, the NOPD went to bean bag rounds and pepper spray.
The protestors: *SHOCKED PIKACHU FACE*
The articles the day after were full of incredulous protesters complaining about their treatment. HOW DARE THEY USE LOW END FORCE AGAINST US?!!?! The vast majority of New Orleanians were of the mindset that the protestors brought it on themselves.
The last instances of protests getting out of hand proved to be their undoing. One was a protest gathering in Duncan Plaza and an attendee was shot by an unknown person(s). Never did find out who did it, as the witnesses shut up to protect the FTP narrative. The last straw was when a bunch of protesters pulled down the bust of John McDonogh and threw it in the Mississippi River. The instigators were laden with criminal charges, including incitement.
After that, the mayor and the NOPD pretty much tapped down the protests. You’d hear about small groups, but I think everyone knew that the protestors crossed a line that may do well in other parts of the country, but not down here.
He should have never been fired in the first place. The Supreme Court has determined that giving money to a ’cause’ is considered ‘Free Speech’. He did not give the money under fraudulent terms and never claimed it was on behalf of anyone other than himself. He should hire a good Attorney and file a Civil Suit against Norfolk for Emotional Distress.
What part of what I wrote are you saying “No” to? I am not saying there were no protesters attending these rallies. Just that some reporters refuse to mention the riots, looting, and burning when they write about Rittenhouse. These reporters lie by omission.
BLM is NOT a black-centric civil rights organization, despite their effort to masquerade as one. It is a mostly white group that is using race division to achieve their only goal, Marxism.
The two killed by Rittenhouse were not BLM protesters. They didn’t give a flip about BLM. They wanted in on the destruction. They were simply rioters. The wounded guy may have been a BLM sympathizer. The other two didn’t bother. They were just anti social creeps.
I’m assuming this is a response to me? I wrote, “Well, no,” in response to your statement: “How to know if the reporter who wrote the article you are reading is a dedicated liar.” Mary is not a liar, dedicated or otherwise, and I just wanted to point out that the part where she writes about the “protest” was in fact an accurate description of the event she describes (“He mentioned police chief Larry Boone attended a BLM protest while in uniform and on duty.”). She’s accurately reporting what the cop said his chief did . . . during an actual protest (not a riot). Failing to wax on for paragraphs about the criminal activities we–including Mary–have covered and condemned at great length here at LI is not “evidence” that she is a liar, nor that she is “lying by omission.” That was my point.