Megyn Kelly Says She Doesn’t ‘Feel Sorry’ for Alex Pretti Because He Was ‘Resisting Arrest’ Like George Floyd

Megyn Kelly kicked off the latest episode of her podcast by declaring that she did not “feel sorry” for Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents over the weekend, even using that clip on social media to promote the show.

Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked for the VA, was fatally shot by Border Patrol agents on Saturday. Shortly afterwards, multiple Trump administration officials called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and accused him of “brandishing” his weapon and intending to “kill” or “massacre” federal agents, among other unfounded claims.

Video evidence taken by several bystanders, reviewed in frame-by-frame detail by multiple media outlets, contradicted these claims. During the incident, Pretti was only holding his cell phone, he had a permit to carry his gun, and he never took the gun out. An agent found the gun in its holster while Pretti was being held down by multiple agents, and removed the gun before another agent began firing at Pretti’s back.

Nonetheless, Kelly presented her own slant to the incident, an interpretation that differed notably from that of the The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, among numerous others.

She began her comments by accusing Pretti of “being subversive” and insinuating that he was part of a group of “organized agitators”:

On Saturday, a 37-year-old man, Alex Pretti, was shot by Border Patrol agents there, after a confrontation. Alex Pretti was there being subversive. He was there trying to interfere with the traffic, trying to direct traffic into an ICE operation, from the look of it.

He was not there to help. He was not there to assist law enforcement or make things easier for them. He was there with a loaded gun looking to cause trouble for the Border Patrol agents and that trouble came back on him.

We’ll get into the specifics and the frame-by-frame and all of that in a minute, but I just want to say, like, I don’t personally — I’m, I’m so sick of this bullish*t — I, like, these are organized agitators who train to disrupt and, in some cases, hurt law enforcement.

They go out there looking for confrontations that they can make go viral on their social media or that they can use as propaganda to turn people against the good guys, the ones who are trying to rid us of the scourge of child-molesting illegals. That’s what they want to do. They want to paint themselves as noble and the ICE or the Border Patrol agents as awful and get some sort of confrontation on camera or something that’ll make them look silly or bad or brutal.

And then when things turn actually bad and brutal and dangerous, and in the case of Renee Good and now this Alex Pretti, all of their remaining enablers rush to social media and the cameras to say, “You see, see, we told you.”

No, no. Even if I, Megyn Kelly, went to interrupt law enforcement, conducting lawful arrests and law enforcement operations with — with a loaded gun tucked into the back of my pants and then I engaged in a physical confrontation with them — physical, where I’m shoving and they’re shoving — I’d be in grave danger. Grave danger. Yes, the gun is definitely going to amp up the police officer’s reasonable fear for their own safety, but even without me having a gun in this scenario, I’d be in grave danger because resisting arrest can lead to very bad things.

“And just ask George Floyd,” Kelly continued. “Like, you don’t do it, bad things can come — resisting arrest. You don’t antagonize cops in the middle of the street in a law enforcement operation and then when they’ve got hands on you trying to place you under arrest, you submit! That’s it. Submit.”

Kelly seems to have borrowed a page from the playbook of her former Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson in making a wildly depraved misrepresentation of the facts about Floyd’s death under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is currently serving a 22.5 year sentence after a jury found him guilty of Floyd’s murder.

On May 25, 2020, police body cameras and bystander cell phones recorded Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, including 3 minutes and 51 seconds in which Floyd was non-responsive. (That 9:29 figure was amended from the already egregious 8 minutes and 46 seconds found in the original criminal complaint filed against Chauvin).

That cell phone video of Floyd went viral, showing him dying while handcuffed and pinned down, face down into the pavement by four police officers with Chauvin kneeling on his neck as he cried out for his mother, repeatedly said he could not breathe, lost consciousness, and his pulse faded away — all while Chauvin ignored bystanders’ pleas to remove his knee and even repeatedly rejected offers to provide medical assistance from an off-duty firefighter and then the EMTs who arrived at the scene.

One would hope that Kelly would not argue Floyd had failed to “submit” when he was unconscious and handcuffed with four police officers pushing him face down into the asphalt, his pulse growing weaker and weaker and finally fading away.

Kelly continued, saying that she had “had this conversation” with her children about “if you get pulled over by a cop or find yourself interacting with a cop, you submit,” and “if they are being a prick, a racist, a bully, overbearing, if they’re wrong, if they don’t actually have the right person, we will deal with it later, because you don’t antagonize a law officer with a gun,” because “they face too many threats that are deadly to them” and “we have to be the ones to be extra careful about not antagonizing.”

With the situation in Minnesota, Kelly argued, “there’s actually a greater, ironically, responsibility on those protesters — they’re terrorists in my view — to behave well and submit immediately than there is on anybody else, because they have put these guys on on the razor’s edge.”

“Like, I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don’t! I don’t,” Kelly said. “Do you know why I wasn’t shot by Border Patrol this weekend? Because I kept my ass inside and out of their operations. It’s very simple.”

“If I felt strongly enough about something the government was doing that I would go out and protest, I would do it peacefully on the sidewalk without interfering via a whistle, via shouting, via my body, via any other way,” she continued. “I would make my objections known by standing there without interfering because interfering is where you go south. And laying hands on a police officer trying to or Border Patrol officer or ICE officer trying to conduct a law enforcement operation is a felony and now you are going to get arrested and if you do anything anything that resembles resisting you’re in serious trouble. Doesn’t give them the quote ‘right’ to shoot you. It amps up the situation and the danger such that they may be found in reasonable fear of their safety if they do.”

Kelly’s show used the clip of her saying she did not feel sorry for Pretti to promote the episode on social media.

Despite Kelly’s repeated references to Pretti as “resisting arrest” or “laying hands” on law enforcement, that is not what factually occurred.

Rob Doar, a criminal defense attorney who serves as the general counsel for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, a pro-gun rights group, posted a long tweet detailing the case law across the U.S. that has clearly held that “protective posture” and movements made out of “survival instincts” do not constitute “resisting arrest.”

“Poor or uncoordinated officer tactics that create instability, pain, or involuntary movement during a restraint do not transform self-protective reactions into resistance,” Doar added. “Resistance requires intentional volitional opposition, not motion induced by the officers’ own use of force.”

Furthermore, as reported by multiple media outlets that reviewed the videos, the first contact with Pretti was initiated by the agents, and that at that moment, he was helping a woman that the agents had shoved to the ground and pepper sprayed, as described by The New York Times in its analysis:

A small group of protesters stands in the street, speaking to a federal agent as whistles sound. Mr. Pretti appears to be filming the scene with his phone and directing traffic.

An agent begins shoving the demonstrators, and squirts pepper spray at their faces.

At this moment, Mr. Pretti has both hands clearly visible. One is holding his phone, while he holds the other up to protect himself from pepper spray. He moves to help one of the protesters who was sprayed, as other agents approach and pull him from behind.

Pretti “was clearly holding a phone, not a gun, before the agents took him to the ground and shot him,” reported the Times, adding that that the agents had disarmed him and held him down “with his arms pinned near his head” before the first shots were fired.

Several eyewitnesses who saw the shooting, including a physician who attempted to render aid to Pretti, also submitted sworn affidavits saying that they “didn’t see [Pretti] reach for or hold a gun,” “did not see him attack the agents or brandish a weapon of any kind,” “didn’t see him touch any of [the agents] — he wasn’t even turned towards them,” and was “just trying to help the woman up.”

“I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping,” wrote one woman in her affidavit. “I was five feet from him and they just shot him.”

It was further reported on Monday that the Department of Homeland Security has bodycam video footage from the agents’ shooting of Pretti. This has not yet been released to the public but considering how quickly the Trump administration made comments attacking Pretti and posted a photo of the gun that Pretti was legally carrying, it stands to reason that if this bodycam video provided any sort of exculpatory evidence to justify the shooting, it would have been released already.

Kelly wants her audience to believe she knows what happened last Saturday in Minneapolis better than the woman who was “five feet” away during the shooting, a ridiculous assertion. We could spend hours going line-by-line through Kelly’s podcast clips and social media posts, debunking more of her remarks as unfounded nonsense, misrepresentations, misleading, or just flat-out lies — but the fundamental sin of her commentary is that it reveals a betrayal and abandonment of core constitutional principles.

Kelly, who is both an attorney and a journalist, should understand and value the protections guaranteed by the First Amendment. Pretti had every right to be present there, to record events on his cell phone, and helping a woman up from the ground is not a crime. He also had a legal right to own and possess his gun; the Second Amendment does not disintegrate merely because a Border Patrol agent or other law enforcement officer is present.

Watch the video above via The Megyn Kelly Show on YouTube.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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