When self-described conspiracy theorist and podcast star Candace Owens began her “investigation” into the killing of Charlie Kirk, she initially promised that she would cease her extraordinarily lucrative infotainment series speculating about Kirk’s death if his widow, Erika Kirk, asked her to, which Erika Kirk eventually did.
So much for that.
Months later, after original theories about Charlie Kirk’s death, which involved secret meetings with congressmen at military bases and Egyptian military planes supposedly tracking him, were debunked, Owens is now accusing Erika Kirk of betraying her husband and being involved in his death — or at least in a cover-up about what “really” happened.
“Erika Kirk should be dragged into a police station for questioning,” Owens said in a Feb. 10 episode of her podcast, which has received more than 3 million views on YouTube alone. “The amount of evidence that is now piling up against Erika Kirk is almost akin to an NBC Dateline episode.”
Then, last week, Owens released a trailer for a new “investigative” series specifically dedicated to “exposing” Erika Kirk, which quickly stirred up viral controversy for the dark, almost demonic way it portrayed the widow and its eerie tone and title: “Bride of Charlie.”
Well, on Thursday, the first episode of this supposed “bombshell investigation” dropped … and to call it a dud is to massively understate the extent to which it failed to provide any evidence of any wrongdoing by Erika Kirk. On the contrary, it almost entirely avoided the subject of Charlie Kirk’s death and the hallucinated involvement of his widow and friends at Turning Point USA. It instead focused nearly exclusively on a mix of unhinged, arcane asides and bizarre, irrelevant gossip about Erika’s family and upbringing.
After all, to torment and humiliate any widow, let alone the mother of your supposedly dear friend’s children, for your own profit and entertainment, is unspeakably cruel unless, of course, you really did have some rock-solid evidence of some wrongdoing on her part that could justify such an extraordinary offense. (Of course, criticism of Erika Kirk’s political decisions or statements now that she is CEO of a large and powerful political organization is fair game, but that’s not really what any of her obsessed critics are focused on.)
You’d think, if such evidence of wrongdoing existed, Owens would focus on it upfront. Instead, the first hour-long episode of her series bashing Erika Kirk contained literally zero evidence of wrongdoing or nefarious behavior related to her husband’s death, and consisted exclusively of a bizarre dissection of Erika’s childhood, extended family, and past.
Such revelations included:
- The parsing of Erika’s past statements about her relationship with her parents, and attempting to cross-reference their validity by consulting her high school yearbook page
- The criminal history and involvement in gambling of some of her grandparents
- The unearthing of the supposed “scandal,” in Candace’s words, that Erika used a grammatically incorrect Swedish word for her grandfather growing up
- The fact that the elementary school Erika attended was previously a Jewish school
- The conspiracy theory that Erika’s mother may not actually be her mother
- The unearthing of a super damning photo of Erika Kirk from her childhood daycare in … a bumble bee costume … making supposed “free Mason hand signs”
- Rants about MK Ultra, tangents about the occult Jews who supposedly pioneered modern psychology, and other bizarre asides totally unrelated to Erika and Charlie Kirk
Oh, and don’t forget the eight, yes, eight ads, which is a very high number for a YouTube video of this length, paid advertisements that Candace pauses her super-serious investigative reporting to deliver. We don’t have access to Owens’s specific finances, but as reporting from Fortune and the Free Press reveals, typical pricing for these kinds of ad reads can run from $10,000 to $45,000, or even $100,000. So, even an inexact, low-end estimate suggests that Candace Owens is earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from every individual podcast episode she does attacking Erika Kirk.
Think about it like this. Candace Owens is “honoring” the death of her “friend” by making millions of dollars by publicly attacking and humiliating his widow and the mother of his children through speculation and gossip that, even if it were all 100% true, which is almost certainly not the case, would not prove or advance in any way her theories about his death.
That’s despicable.
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But Candace Owens is clearly an evil and mentally ill woman, so this is not surprising. What’s much more deeply worrying is that even after Owens has been caught in massive mistakes so glaring even Alex Jones is fact-checking her, and even after she has crossed so many ethical lines, millions of supportive Americans still tune in to her every week and enable this psychotic woman’s vile grift.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
