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Ryan Fournier, who co-founded Students for Trump and now leads a website that "watches" and "exposes" purported left-wing radicals on college campuses, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault in North Carolina last week.
Fournier, 27, is charged with assault on a female and assault with a deadly weapon, after allegedly grabbing a woman and hitting her in the head with a handgun, according to court documents. He was arrested Nov. 21 and posted a $2,500 bond the same day. His next court hearing is scheduled for Dec. 18.
After his release on bond, Fournier continued to post political content to his 1 million followers on X with no mention of the arrest or the charges against him, NBC News reported. As of Wednesday, however, he had made his X account private and has not offered a response to media outlets, including NBC News, seeking comment.
Fournier shot to fame as co-founder of the pro-Trump student group in 2015 when he was at Campbell University. He and the other co-founder, John Lambert, also met with the Trump campaign.
In the years after Trump's election, however, things went slightly awry for the group. Students for Trump wrestled with some internal drama, as Politico reported, and a lack of disclosures to the Federal Election Commission led to warnings from the agency between 2016 and 2018. For several years, Students for Trump was affiliated with Turning Point USA, until Fournier separated from Turning Point over the group’s strategy earlier this year, according to The Washington Post.
Media Matters reported in 2019 that Fournier had ties to at least one white nationalist personality. He now runs Radical Alert, a website that creates petitions to expose so-called “radical hate” online. In May 2021, Lambert — who no longer supports Trump, according to his lawyer — was sentenced to prison for pretending to be a lawyer and scamming $46,000 from people seeking legal services.