Dozens of Americans across a variety of professional fields have been fired or put on leave from their jobs after conservatives contacted their employers over social media comments they made about right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week, following his assassination. Others have been punished for small acts of defiance — everyone from an Office Depot worker in Michigan who was sacked for refusing to print tribute flyers with Kirk’s face on them, to late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who ABC suspended after he seemed to criticize how MAGA supporters responded to Kirk’s death. Attorney General Pam Bondi faced a backlash even within the Trump base for saying the administration would crack down on “hate speech,” suggesting the Justice Department could prosecute businesses and individuals on those grounds. But Vice President J.D. Vance has endorsed the idea of calling the employers of anyone seen as dancing on Kirk’s grave.
Kirk, for the record, wrote on X last year: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.” In practice, though, he and Turning Point USA, the non-profit he co-founded and led, could be openly retaliatory against those they disagreed with — the organization has long maintained, for example, a “Professor Watchlist” of educators they claim push liberal propaganda and discriminate against conservative students in the classroom. College faculty members have called it an attempt to intimidate and inspire harassment.
It’s no great shock, then, that Kirk’s allies and admirers took it upon themselves to surveil public reactions to his death, singling out those who expressed a lack of sympathy or outright contempt for the activist — or simply quoted his most inflammatory statements. Right-wing influencers have relentlessly campaigned for these people to lose their jobs, tagging their employers’ online accounts and inundating their places of work with aggrieved emails and phone calls. But the most concerted effort on this front came in the form of a website initially called CharliesMurderers.com, which was accessible as of last Thursday, the day after Kirk was assassinated. Billed by its anonymous organizers as “a searchable database of 20,000 people celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder,” the page provided, along with names and photos, personal information such as an individual’s social media handles, employer, city of residence, and email address.
Rachel Gilmore, a Canadian journalist and podcaster, appeared at the very top of the list, merely for theorizing on the day Kirk was shot that this violence would result in more of the same. “Terrified to think of how far-right fans of Kirk, aching for more violence, could very well turn this into an even more radicalizing moment,” she posted on X. “Will they now believe their fears have been proven right and feel they have a right to ‘retaliate,’ regardless of who actually was behind the initial shooting?”
For Gilmore, the effect of being put on blast by CharliesMurderers.com over this measured comment was swift and frightening. “I was getting death threats, rape threats, and people claimed to know where I live,” Gilmore tells Rolling Stone. “Luckily, none of them provided an address, so I’m hoping it was all bluster — but there’s no way to know for sure.” She’s concerned she could wind up banned from the U.S., “despite the fact that I never celebrated anything,” calling the possibility “surreal.” She reported the incident to police.
Rolling Stone reached out to a dozen other people targeted on the website for what they said or shared about Kirk, but most did not respond. All had deleted at least one or more of their social media profiles, including X, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, presumably due to a torrent of harassment like the one Gilmore has endured.
Hannah Molitor, another woman listed on CharliesMurderers.com, was subsequently fired from her job at Next Door, a Milwaukee childcare organization. Her entry included a screenshot of a post on her Facebook page, which began: “What happened to Charlie Kirk is horrible and no person should ever lose their life to gun violence.” She went on to point out, however, that Kirk’s political movement had actively worked against attempts to reduce unnecessary gun deaths, adding, “If all you do is spew hate, you’re bound to get some in return.”
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“It is really important to me that people realize both in my post and in my own personal opinion that I would never wish death upon anyone or celebrate anyone’s death, especially victims of gun violence,” Molitor tells Rolling Stone. “I may have disagreed with Charlie Kirk politically, but no one deserves to be killed, especially in such a horrific and visible way.” She says far-right extremists distorted her comment and “spread misinformation about me all over the internet.” After her post was shared on the anti-LGBTQ hate account LibsOfTikTok the night of the shooting, she says, her email inbox filled up with “hundreds of vile messages telling me to either kill myself or that they wished I would die a horrible death.” Her phone number and home address were leaked. Molitor was also “receiving pictures of guns,” with people threatening to show up at her home or workplace.
“I know I am not the monster these people want to paint me out to be,” Molitor says. “I refuse to let the bully win, and I know these people just want to scare me, and I will not give them the satisfaction.” She started a GoFundMe campaign called “Support Hannah’s Fight Against Online Defamation” to cover living expenses after her firing — as well as the costs of potentially taking legal action — and has so far raised more than $2,000.
Indeed, many observers speculated that those anonymously smearing random social media commenters as Kirk’s “murderers” (while an actual suspect in the slaying, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, had been arrested and charged) could face lawsuits from the individuals who had their personal information shared on the site. A number of lawyers publicly volunteered their services, including civil rights attorney J. Alejandro Barrientos.
“Many of the people listed on the ‘Charlie’s murderers’ website may have viable defamation claims,” Barrientos tells Rolling Stone, noting that “many of the posts contained statements that could not be reasonably interpreted as supporting political violence” while others “only quoted Kirk’s own words.” He adds that the site, by collating personal data, “may have also violated anti-doxing laws that some states began enacting in recent years.”
Nora Benavidez, another civil rights attorney and senior counsel at the watchdog group Free Press, called the site “dangerous” in a post on X, and agrees that it may have violated anti-doxing laws. She says that “alongside employment law remedies, people on the list may have a legal case in those instances,” but cautions that under the lawless Trump administration, “these avenues for relief offer little comfort.”
“We are witnessing a chilling attempt to silence free speech,” Benavidez says. “This list was created to intimidate, harass and exact economic consequences. And now, the president and the vice president are promising fascistic revenge to classify people and organizations as terrorists if they exercise their own First Amendment rights criticizing Kirk.” She adds that MAGA world’s hypocritical and “selective support” for Constitutional rights is nothing new, and has corroded discourse in the public square. “The ‘free speech for me but not for thee’ attitude Trump embodies is dangerous, divisive, and helps create, not quell, the conditions for political violence,” she says.
Late on Sunday night, the person or group behind CharliesMurderers.com announced on X that they were “rebranding” as the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation,” switching over to the web domain CharlieKirkData.org. The new site included a jumbled disclaimer saying that it “lawfully” collected “publicly available data” on “support for political violence,” but was “not a doxxing website” and did not identify individuals. There was no accessible list of people supposedly celebrating Kirk’s murder, and a submissions portal for offending posts about him remained inactive. As of Wednesday, this page had also been taken fully offline.
While it’s not clear why the two successive websites went dark — there were unsubstantiated claims that the original was hacked — Barrientos says “the change towards less inflammatory language” on CharlieKirkData.org “suggests a concern for liability,” observing that the organizers “should have thought about that more seriously” before creating CharliesMurderers.com. “I have already had one person reach out to me about harassment they’ve received over a post about Kirk,” he says.
Molitor does intend to pursue legal action, per her crowdfunding page. Gilmore, for her part, has not taken a step in that direction just yet. “That said, I haven’t ruled anything out,” she says. “You can’t just paint people as a murderer, inciting the hell I’ve lived through in the last few days, and have zero accountability. It doesn’t seem right.” And while both women say the threats and harassment have fallen off since CharliesMurderers.com went down, the fact remains that they could be on the radar of extremists looking to avenge Kirk. The seeming retreat of the site’s author(s) in the face of potential defamation claims has not undone the damage wrought by their overreach.
“Could someone still be planning retribution?” says Gilmore. “That’s the thought that keeps me up at night.”
From Rolling Stone US
