Newsmax’s Grant Stinchfield blames Breonna Taylor for her own killing: “She made some awful choices along the way”

Stinchfield: “The bottom line here is the crowd you choose to hang around will have a direct effect on your future”

Special Programs Guns & Public Safety

Written by Cydney Hargis

Published

After it was announced this week that no police officers would be indicted for the killing of Breonna Taylor, former NRATV host and current Newsmax host Grant Stinchfield blamed the shooting on Taylor and her choice in boyfriends. 

Taylor was a 26-year-old emergency room technician and former EMT in Louisville, Kentucky, who was shot six times by plainclothes police officers serving a “no-knock” search warrant early in the morning on March 13. The police officers returned fire with more than 20 rounds after Taylor’s boyfriend, a licensed gun owner, shot and injured one of the officers who he believed was an intruder breaking into the apartment. Taylor’s family sued the city and received a $12 million settlement earlier this month for her wrongful death.    

On September 23, a grand jury in Louisville indicted one of the police detectives involved in the raid on Taylor’s apartment with wanton endangerment for firing blindly into her neighbors’ apartments. The two police officers who shot Taylor six times faced no charges. 

One day after the indictment, on the September 24 edition of Newmax’s Stinchfield, the host said that “what no one will acknowledge about Taylor is that she made some awful choices along the way” and claimed that she would be alive today had she not chosen “an accused drug dealer as her boyfriend”:

From the September 24, 2020, edition of Newsmax's Stinchfield

GRANT STINCHFIELD (HOST): There is no doubt she was a beautiful young woman with the potential for a bright future. But what no one will acknowledge about Taylor is that she made some awful choices along the way. Choices any parent would be mortified over. She chose an accused drug dealer as her boyfriend and at the time, police believe she was even allowing drugs to be pushed in and out of her home for that boyfriend, hence the search warrant. The bottom line here is the crowd you choose to hang around will have a direct effect on your future. That is a lesson I talk about with my son every single day. A tragedy like her death rarely is due to simply just one event. The shoot out, even her death, could have been prevented long before those officers showed up. If she didn’t date the accused drug dealer, she’s alive. If she doesn’t accept packages out of her house in that man’s name, she could be alive. The court most likely would have never issued the warrant that allowed police to raid her home. And then of course her decision to stand next to a different man who was fully willing to fire his gun at officers. Take any one of those facts out of the equation, Breonna Taylor is alive today. But all that is ignored.

Stinchfield’s comments on Newsmax echo his long and bigoted history at NRATV, where he refused to stand up for Black gun owners killed by police, attacked Black gun safety advocates, and smeared Black victims of gun violence.