Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Illinois resident who’s set to go on trial for charges related to the shooting (and, in two cases, killing) of three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin back in August, is now out on bail. TMZ reports that Rittenhouse’s defense team (who’ve pushed his alleged actions as self-defense, and played heavily into efforts to paint Rittenhouse as a sort of conservative hero) raised the $2 million cash bail through a series of high-profile donations, including—and no, this isn’t where we were expecting this story to go, either—a sizable contribution from former Silver Spoons star Ricky Schroder.
Specifically, Schroder—who starred in 116 episodes of the NBC sitcom in the mid-’80s, in addition to a long run on NYPD Blue the following decade—is stated to have donated some $150,000 to the campaign to get Rittenhouse, who was previously deemed a flight risk due to the potential life sentence he’s facing on account of allegedly murdering two people, out on bail ahead of his trial. In a tweet, Rittenhouse’s attorney posted a picture of the alleged shooter with Schroder, who he thanked—along with the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell—for “putting us over the top” to get Rittenhouse, who, again, is accused of shooting and killing (on video) multiple human beings, back out into the wider world where he can continue to exercise his own judgment about what the right thing to do might be. In the photo, it’s worth noting, both Rittenhouse and Schroder seem just pleased as punch that this event has occurred.
Rittenhouse will be back in court on December 3 on a preliminary hearing.