Investigating Kylie Kirkpatrick Part 7: Media Lies, Creates A Monster, Refuses To Retract Fake News
Kylie Kirkpatrick has been incredibly effective at using the media to her advantage. As a direct result of her lies about alleged lunch shaming at West Park Elementary, and her lie about her son Ryan Kyote using his allowance to pay off school lunch debts, she’s been able to get legislation passed, gain endorsements from several candidates for President, and was even used in a Kamala Harris campaign video.
Ryan shows us that no matter your age, one person has the power to lift other people up. pic.twitter.com/PCRuC6Ko9z
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) July 3, 2019
My thanks to superhero Ryan Kyote for using his super powers to help us call more attention to feeding our kids .
It’s just not okay to deny kids a hot lunch because their family owe lunch debt. Let’s get this done this year , our children are depending on us💕#EndLunchShaming pic.twitter.com/uNlGwXEtq6
— Marcia Ranglin-Vassell,M.Ed (@MRanglinVassell) December 14, 2019
But she could not have done any of this without a complicit media. Kylie has weaponized the media by using their coverage as proof that she’s not lying, which she made clear in a “Kylie’s Love Blog” Facebook group.
The School District recently issued a sharp rebuke to Kylie’s lies, laying out their school lunch policy.
It all began with the Napa Valley Register. Kylie contacted them in May when she sent an email to editor Sean Scully, telling Ryan’s fake story and explaining why she believed it was “worthy of some attention.” Meanwhile, Kylie claimed that it was an anonymous donation, despite posting about it everywhere.
The NVR published their story on June 8. By June 12 it was covered by national media including NBC, CBS, CNN, USA Today, People Magazine, The Hill, The New York Daily News, The Today Show, and countless others. As a direct result New York Mayor and then presidential candidate Bill de Blasio used the story to publicly shame West Park Elementary, telling them to give Ryan his GoFundMe money back.
Around this time the school started to receive threats on social media and images of children on the school’s Facebook page began to get distributed. The school took the page for safety reasons, and many in the community knew that the whole thing was based on a lie.
Kylie has admitted in private emails to concerned parents who brought this problem to her that West Park Elementary is a “fantastic school,” where “no children are denied a meal.”
Yet when she contacted people about it on social media she lied and said that both she and her son witnessed kids having meals taken away from them at school.
Since it was clear Kylie was going to continue to lie, parents in Napa who were concerned about the safety of their children began to contact Napa Valley Register editor Sean Scully. He refused to retract the story because his reporter believed Kylie, despite her extensive criminal background involving fraud.
After speaking with his reporter he later wrote that Kylie claimed that the money Ryan donated didn’t come from the $100 she raised with the GoFundMe, while suggesting that he was aware that Kylie was doing this for ego satisfaction.
Scully went on to say that Kylie’s personal character (i.e. her long and documented criminal history of fraud) wasn’t germane to the story (even thought she’s now being investigated for fraud) and since Ryan didn’t orchestrate the scam, and the story was about him, the truth didn’t really matter.
The NVR took the story down from their Facebook page in June after hundreds of commenters told them it was inaccurate. When someone asked them where it went they responded by saying that they removed it from their page not because it was inaccurate, but because there are “many people who hate the mother and they gathered to attack her in really vicious and inappropriate terms.”
According to Sean Scully and the NVR, exposing the truth is “vicious and inappropriate.”
In October Ryan met with Governor Gavin Newsom for the bill signing in Sacramento leading to more media coverage. It was around this time that a parent made a Facebook post that first came to our attention, calling out Kylie for lying. Despite that, Sean Scully still chose to honor Ryan at the annual Peace Awards, as “Youth Activist of the Year.”
In November Ryan was featured in a book titled, “Unselfish Kids.”
In December he was featured in Time Magazine as one of the most influential people of 2019.
A concerned parent wrote to Time reporter Madeleine Carlisle, showing her proof that Ryan raised the money via GoFundMe, and didn’t donate his allowance. She chose to dismiss the parent because although West Park Elementary didn’t do the things Ryan and Kylie said it did, it still led to legislation that the reporter thought was positive in California.
In other words, she believes it’s OK to teach children to lie, so long as her progressive goals are satisfied at the state level.
After being featured in Time Magazine Ryan traveled to Rhode Island to lobby the State Legislature and the Mayor of Providence (who is running for Governor) to enact a similar law to the one signed by Governor Newsom. Coincidentally this is the state where the daughter she abandoned over 20 years ago now lives, so it was a free trip to visit her.
While they were in Rhode Island Ryan and Kylie met with Representative Ranglin-Vassell, they did many media appearances, and told blatant lies about how his classmates were being denied a lunch.
Watch this video to see how truly pathetic the media can be when you use a child as a prop.
No one verifies or asks any questions. They just see a 10 year old pretending to be an activist and they smile from ear to ear like NBC’s Ashley Cullinane did.
Ryan Kyote is visiting Rhode Island, but he's not just any other tourist. @AshCullinane has the story. https://t.co/kxy7yQVzTf
— NBC 10 WJAR (@NBC10) December 14, 2019
A real reporter asks “Earlier you said that you were inspired by a girl in Indiana, now you’re saying it was kids at your school who were denied lunch, can you please clarify?”
Not Ashley Cullinane. She sat there as this child, who was being coached by his mother, lied to her face. And instead asking a real question she intentionally tossed him cute little softballs so she could feel good about herself.
When a parent emailed Rep. Ranglin-Vassell about her concern the elected official deflected, claiming that she grew up in poverty, and said she verified Ryan’s story on CNN and the New York Times.
The New York Times never wrote about Ryan’s story, nor did the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Jose Mercury, the largest newspapers in the metropolitan area where Ryan lives, which is pretty telling.
Every time Kylie tells her story to a media outlet it changes. On June 11, The Today Show published this never before heard anecdote:
Recently, an investor got wind of what Kyote had done for his classmates and he contacted Kirkpatrick. “He wanted to give Ryan money to put in his savings account,” she said. Kyote, who recently lost his father to ALS, had another idea. “Ryan told the man to pay it forward,” Kirkpatrick said. “So he made a donation to the ALS Association. I can’t even begin to tell you what that meant to Ryan. All he wants is to make the world a better place.”
An investor was offering to give Ryan money, but Ryan is so virtuous that he donated the money to the ALS Association, even though it’s established at this point that Ryan’s father (who he never met) never had ALS. Kylie did start a GoFundMe for him though, and pocketed the money.
Time Magazine called him a hero.
Ashley Cullinane at NBC 10 in Providence flat out lied.
The boy received the honor this week, but earned the title in the spring, when he saw students being denied meals because their families owed the school money on the news.
“The cafeteria person said ‘you don’t have enough money so you need to give it back’,” he said. “So she went to the end of the line. Kids of all ages started making fun of her so she started crying.”
Ryan told Uprise Rhode Island that he saw this same exact incident transpire on the news.
ABC 7 News in California was told the version that Ryan actually witnessed the lunch shaming happen at his school.
We spoke to Ryan and his mom about why he did that.
“I saw this girl was in line and then she was going to get lunch and she got her lunch and they said, ‘You have to give it back,'” he said. “And then she was sad, so she went to the bathroom and then kids starting laughing at her so she went and started crying.”
Liz Kreutz, the reporter who covered that story, tweeted out “I LOVE THIS STORY.”
I LOVE THIS STORY!
Remember Ryan Kyote — the 9-yr-old who used his allowance to pay for all the food service bills of his fellow students? Well, since then he’s been working to create a law banning lunch shaming…and last night @GavinNewsom signed it! https://t.co/dirplaQjqJ pic.twitter.com/haCOJwpRbw
— Liz Kreutz (@ABCLiz) October 13, 2019
Because she did. They all did. They loved the story more than they did the truth, and they all irresponsibly ran with it, knowing that the general public naively trusts them to provide the facts. Remember this the next time the media complains that they are “under attack.”
Here is Liz’ Facebook page if you’d like to let her know that she’s been duped.
Ryan told Kron 4 News in San Francisco that he was happy that his friends would no longer be lunch shamed.
“It was awesome to now not see my friends not have lunch,” he said. “Now I get to see them have lunch and have a happy day instead of a sad day.”
“I felt really sad for them not to have lunch,” he said. “And when I was at my old school, West Park, I saw this kid he didn’t have any lunch so I asked if he wanted any lunch but he said no and I felt really bad for him.”
Ryan wanted none of his friends to be hungry, they later thanked him for helping out.
“That made me feel good because I don’t really get that much attention.”
None of that happened. Watch the interview. The kid can barely put a sentence together.
Yet despite all of this, and an announcement from the Napa Police that Kylie was under investigation, KCBS Radio reporter Carrie Hodousek honored Kylie and Ryan last week, and he had a new piece of information he hadn’t mentioned before.
He had a friend named Dean who was lunch shamed and prevented from buying pizza. We know that this couldn’t have happened due to the policy in place at the school. However, we also were able to track down who Dean was this weekend, and as it turns out the boy is Ryan’s neighbor. Kylie had called his mother in anticipation of the interview to tell her that she would be name dropping her son, and essentially accusing the mother of not paying for her child’s school lunch bill. Needless to say the story about Ryan buying Dean pizza never actually happened. Likely due to the scrutiny we brought upon Kylie, she wanted to have an actual name of a child she could use in order to make it seem like her story was legitimate. It’s not.
The simple gesture of buying pizza in the lunchroom for his classmate put 10-year-old Ryan Kyote of Napa on track to cause schools throughout California to change the way poorer students get meals. @CarrieHodousek reports. https://t.co/6WSEGijZAT pic.twitter.com/OEWpPPZNMo
— KCBS 106.9 FM/740 AM (@KCBSRadio) January 9, 2020
Some more uplifting news as we continue our #DifferenceMakers series. 10-year-old Napa student Ryan Kyote is named one of @TIME’s Heroes of 2019 for helping his classmates with lunch money debt.
The story this week on @KCBSRadio pic.twitter.com/PEd17ZyjLN
— Carrie Hodousek (@CarrieHodousek) January 6, 2020
Over the weekend I contacted close to a dozen reporters who have written about Ryan’s lies. Although there are hundreds of articles out there, I wanted to see if I could get any of them to retract now that it’s been proven to be undeniably false and has caused great harm to many. One of the people I contacted was Providence Journal education reporter Linda Borg, who wrote this glowing story about Ryan. I voiced my concerns with her.
She told me that she was busy covering a “pretty large Ed beat” in the smallest state in the country, and couldn’t verify the facts I provided her with, even though I included links to school district and police press releases.
She’s very busy and doesn’t have the time to report the truth. She sees nothing wrong with keeping a factually inaccurate story up because she’s moved onto the next story.
Shameful.
I also heard back from Timothy Balk who wrote this story for the New York Daily News. He asked me if I had any evidence, despite a long email I sent him with a plethora of evidence.
This is how lazy the mainstream media is. They can’t be bothered to click on a link, and simply regurgitate press releases and quotes from people like Kylie Kirkpatrick. If Tim would like documentation I suppose I could give him this stay away order from West Park Elementary School, after Kylie drove by and called a parent a “f***ing coward” in front of small children. Or perhaps it would be easier for these “reporters” if I just put a nice little collage together like this to show them that she’s committing non-profit fraud.
Or other lies like this that she used to get free trips.
I have contacted the following reporters who wrote stories about Ryan and Kylie, and have not heard back. Feel free to contact them as well with a respectively worded email inquiring about their failure to retract the story.
Rachel Abrahamson (Today Show): [email protected]
Ashley Cullinane (NBC 10): [email protected]
Madeleine Carlisle (Time Magazine): [email protected]
Steve Ahlquist (Uprise Rhode Island): [email protected]
Justin Wise (The Hill, quote tweeted by Bernie, De Blasio, Alyssa Milano): [email protected]
Dan Horn (KRON 4 News): [email protected]
Carrie Hodousek (KCBS Radio): [email protected], [email protected]
Liz Kreutz (ABC San Francisco): [email protected]
Linda Borg (Providence Journal): [email protected]
Timothy Balk (NY Daily News): [email protected]
Adrianna Rodriguez (USA Today): [email protected]
In the era of Donald Trump the term “fake news” is tossed around loosely. However, the reason it resonates with so many people is because of the egregious and intentional errors made by the mainstream media in covering stories like this one. Without their assistance Kylie never would’ve been able to victimize so many people. They’ve profited off of Ryan’s lies, but they won’t be there for him when he needs years of therapy and counseling to undo the damage that his mother has caused for him.
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