On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Tulsi Gabbard braved the triple-digit DC heat in black tie— “my penguin suit,” Vance called it, grasping at his hillbilly roots—to show face at Turning Point USA’s donor ball.
Inside Washington’s Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium under LED-projected stars, the crowd of more than 1,200 was a study in American exceptionalism, right down to the “250” shaved into one young man’s hair. Many of them weren’t there to see the vice president or the secretary of war. They were there to see Erika Kirk.
Kirk took the stage in an off-the-shoulder bronze gown and an Eras Tour–style stack of bracelets as the crowd cheered with their phones in the air, recording her. “This is a special night,” she said, revealing that it was the last event her husband, Charlie, had planned before he was fatally shot last September.
He’d wanted to return to the room where he spoke on behalf of Donald Trump at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Erika explained. “Charlie only ate ice cream twice a year,” she said. “Once on his birthday. And once on the Fourth of July.”
After the young widow stepped back behind the black curtains, where scoops of mint chocolate chip in disposable bamboo bowls drifted through a room of donors and White House staffers, the evening moved from celebration to wake. One by one, Kirk embraced each guest, clinging to them until tears left pale streaks through the orange-tinted foundation on her cheeks. Her assistant stayed close, slipping her tissues between embraces. The swarm of hulking, tattooed white men who are always at her side, even when she’s home, created a physical barrier around her.
This is Erika Kirk’s life now—traveling across the country as her husband’s proxy at Turning Point, speaking at events that double as memorials, where supporters come to grieve with her.
Before he was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University last September, Charlie Kirk had built Turning Point, the nonprofit he founded in 2012 when he was 18 years old, into one of the most lucrative and influential conservative youth organizations in the country. It received more than $150 million in donations in 2025 and was instrumental in mobilizing the young Republican base that helped send Trump to the White House in 2016 and again in 2024. When he was killed at 31, Charlie had already ascended to the highest echelons of MAGA power, considered an adviser and a son by the president, a brother by Donald Trump Jr., and the hero who won Vance the vice presidency. (Vance made the unprecedented move of treating Charlie’s death like that of a fallen soldier rather than the private citizen he was, escorting his body home on Air Force Two.) Many of his supporters believed Charlie was destined for the Oval Office one day.
Eight days after Charlie’s murder, Erika was publicly appointed his successor, making her the de facto leader of the youngest tranche of the Republican Party’s powerful evangelical wing. But after an initial surge in interest in Turning Point, with new chapters popping up at high schools and colleges across the country, the future of the organization in a fracturing MAGA movement now seems less certain one year later. At the same time, a relentless conspiracy campaign led by one of Charlie’s former allies is eroding trust in Erika’s ability to lead.
“It’s a lose-lose,” one former employee says of Erika’s appointment as CEO. While she may have been the best choice to lead the organization in the aftermath of Charlie’s death, the former employee says, “the downside is that she’s not Charlie.” So who is Erika Kirk?
That is the question I set out to answer. Over four months earlier this year, I was given unprecedented access to Kirk, her mother, and Charlie’s mother, who has never before spoken to the media. I spent time with Erika’s team at Turning Point’s headquarters in Phoenix, with her children, friends, and pastor in Scottsdale, and everyone from Turning Point’s top donors to its youngest members during multiple trips to Washington, DC. Between these meetings, she spent five days in Utah for a pretrial hearing for her husband’s alleged killer.
Across hours of interviews, Kirk spoke with remarkable candor about the most intimate details of her husband’s death. Her faith—which she describes as a “hybrid” of the Catholicism she was raised with and the evangelical Christianity she embraced as a young adult—came up in every single one of our conversations, but politics rarely did. In fact, she seemed uneasy articulating her own political views. I couldn’t tell if it was because she lacked conviction or if she simply didn’t want to offend me. Either way, it was hard to see how she could lead the movement Charlie Kirk created. She told me that every decision she makes is based on one question: “Will this bring me closer to heaven or further away from it?”
“I am so fixated and paranoid,” she says, “of having anything keeping me from going to heaven to be reunited with my husband.”
Erika Kirk knows she doesn’t make sense to most people. “I’m built different,” she says. “I do not know how to explain it other than this world will not break me.” It’s true, she is an enigma, right down to her clothes. The first time we met, in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Washington the morning of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I came dressed in my best Jackie O. impression—conservative shift dress, ballet flats, and an overcoat. Kirk was dressed like a 2016 Kardashian, wearing a black silk set and “Freedom” cap, which she paired with glittery high-top Golden Goose sneakers. Her fingers, capped in a fresh set of baby pink acrylic nails, were embellished with Super Bowl–size rings featuring her kids’ initials, a blinding diamond (engagement ring), and a copy of Charlie’s Presidential Medal of Freedom. “I love your rings,” one of Turning Point’s high school members would tell her weeks later. “Thanks,” she said. “They’re real, like my hair.”
In a different life, back when her hair was more Victoria’s Secret than Little House on the Prairie, Kirk might have been a reality TV star.
Just eight years ago, 29-year-old Erika Frantzve was living in Manhattan with a roommate from her days competing for Arizona in Trump’s Miss USA pageant (not to be confused with the better-known Miss America pageant) and working several jobs. “I’ve always been a jane-of-all-trades,” she says. Her list of gigs included running her Bible studies company, BIBLEin365; launching Proclaim, her American-made biblically inspired streetwear brand; earning her real estate license (she was planning to join Corcoran that fall); and scouting talent for shows including Survivor and The Amazing Race at local coffee shops and churches, from St. Patrick’s to the infamous megachurch Hillsong. Bravo producers had recently approached her about joining the cast of Summer House, alongside future breakout personalities Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo (who did not respond to a request for comment).
“My role would’ve been the Bible-banging Christian girl who doesn’t party,” she tells me with a grin. She says she told the producers she preferred a small part that allowed her to pop in and out of the show. She ended up appearing in two episodes as the potential love interest of a Christian castmate.
“That’s just around the same time that I had met Charlie,” she says.
Charlie, then 24, was a fresh-faced wunderkind already making waves in the Republican Party. He took just one course at a community college before leaving to start Turning Point in a garage 40 minutes from his hometown in the Chicago suburbs. The nonprofit’s founding mission was to educate college students about conservatism—“to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.”
In 2018, Charlie moved Turning Point’s headquarters to Phoenix, in the politically significant swing county of Maricopa. That’s where Erika was introduced to Charlie by Tyler Bowyer, a mutual friend and soon-to-be head of Turning Point Action, the organization’s 501c(4) political advocacy arm. Bowyer had asked her to stop by the offices during a visit home to see her mom—he thought she might be a good fit for Turning Point. It was a brief and professional first interaction, recalls Erika—a quick handshake and “nice to meet you.”
“I didn’t know until years later that Charlie went with Tyler back into the office downstairs and goes, ‘Who is that girl?’ ” Erika says, laughing. “Tyler looks at him and goes,‘No. She is out of your league, we need to hire her. Please focus on hiring her.’ ”
A few weeks later, Charlie asked Erika to a late-night dinner at Bill’s Bar & Burger in midtown Manhattan, not far from the Fox News offices, where he had been filming a segment.
“I literally had just finished wrapping our portion of filming [Summer House],” Erika recalls. “I remember telling him about it and he’s like, ‘I don’t even watch Bravo.’ ”
What followed was the stuff of a MAGA rom-com. They dove into an engaging debate on politics, philosophy, and religion. The only thing they disagreed on was urban sprawl—Erika is opposed, but not because she’s concerned about climate change. “Anything dealing with building on open land makes me cringe,” she explains.
Three hours later, Charlie finished his burger and declared, “I’m not going to hire you. I’m going to date you.”
“I call my mom on the walk home and she’s like, ‘Oh, did you end up getting a job?’ And I was like, ‘No, I have a boyfriend.’ ”
And Charlie, for the first time, had a girlfriend.
A proud virgin, he’d spent hours preaching that women in their 30s were past their prime and collectively made up an unattractive dating pool. Erika, who was five years his senior and pushing 30, with a roster of past boyfriends who hadn’t impressed either her mother or pageant coach, was not the most obvious choice for Charlie, but she says he never commented on her age. “Because I don’t look my age, maybe,” she suggests. “I really...I don’t know. He would always say, ‘You’re so fun. And you’re so cool.’ ”
Within a month, Erika would forgo her life in New York for this younger man. One morning, sitting at the Corcoran office, she says, she got a call from Charlie, who had thrown out his back and was stuck in a California hotel room. “I remember thinking to myself, I’m just about to really dive into real estate, but here I’m getting a phone call from this guy that I love [who] really needs me.
“So am I going to stay sitting at this table at Corcoran going through these premier agent Zillow listings or am I going to get on a plane and go help the man I love?”
She got on the plane. “And I never regret that, still to this day.”
In choosing Charlie, she traded New York for Phoenix and gave up her own burgeoning career to travel the country on his speaking tours.
“I was always backstage. I was always very quiet behind the scenes,” says Erika, adding, “Whenever I’d come into the office for meetings with Charlie, I would just sit in the back and just listen. He would include me in a ton of stuff, but it was always behind the scenes.” She may have been out of frame, but current and former Turning Point employees say Erika was hardly a silent partner. “She was always involved, just not in such a forward-facing capacity,” says Turning Point’s vice president of events, Lauren Toncich, who says she became close friends with Erika because of the time they spent together at Charlie’s events. “I don’t think a lot of people ever saw that because if he was speaking somewhere, she was there, she was just backstage.”
Britt Powell, the former director of the Miss Arizona pageant, recalls the first time Erika left Charlie home alone with their newborn daughter, Genevieve (who goes by GG), in 2022. We’re at a Starbucks in Phoenix, and Powell, who looks like a Jesus-loving Jessica Rabbit—a thin diamond cross nestled between her large breasts, contained in a blue cable-knit V-neck sweater in the 110-degree heat—orders a grande sugar-free vanilla oat milk iced latte, no straw (for fear of lip wrinkles). But she can’t control the way her mouth, meticulously lined and blotted, begins to twist as she recalls Erika’s phone buzzing with a message from Charlie: a selfie of him and GG. “Erika just burst into a laugh and kind of crying at the same time,” says Powell. “What does that do to you, to see your husband be a daddy?”
“ ‘My life is perfect,’ ” Powell recalls Erika telling her at the time.
It was starkly different from the way Erika had been raised.
Erika was born in 1988 Cincinnati to Kent and Lori Frantzve, who was just 19 when she had her first child, Tonya, 19 years before Erika was born. By the time Erika was five, her parents had separated and her mother had moved them to Phoenix to start over.
There, Lori built a security company that won contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the National Guard. Erika grew up in her mother’s office, wandering the halls to “annoy people” before being shuttled between neighbors’ houses and the Boys & Girls Club, where she remembers being the last kid to get picked up most evenings. “Looking back at it, that’s unbelievable,” says Erika of her mother’s ability to juggle. “She gave me a great childhood.” Lori hired Erika’s father, who eventually followed them out West but played a more limited role in raising his daughter. (She later hired Erika’s stepfather as well.) Even through divorces and remarriages, they all continued working together. “It was just the most bizarre thing,” recalls Erika.
It was Erika’s paternal grandparents who provided a model for the kind of relationship she wanted. “I looked at them as the quintessential marriage,” she says, of a “husband and wife [who] loved each other, the balance of everything, having four kids, retiring together, listening to Rush Limbaugh. They love Fox News.” With Charlie, Erika was well on her way to fulfilling this fantasy.
“She had everything she wanted,” says Powell, bringing us back to 2023. Tears fill her dark green eyes, framed in falsies.
Before Charlie was killed on September 10, 2025—the day now referred to by Erika and her world simply as “9/10”—she was committed to a conservative Christian marriage, which meant living out a biblical version of womanhood in which women and men have equal purpose but different roles. Charlie was the leader of the family—he controlled the finances, went to the office early, and stayed there late before coming home to Erika, who would always have dinner prepared. She kept her businesses but delegated daily tasks to her team so she could stay home with GG and Mac, their son born in 2024.
Erika brought the kids to the office most days to watch their dad record his podcast or work at his desk. Today, the toys strewn across Charlie’s office floor and the toddler-size desk and chairs in the room abutting the podcast studio serve as artifacts of their former life.
Even though she’s the CEO, Erika doesn’t have her own office at the Turning Point headquarters, opting instead to work on the couch in Charlie’s office near his desk, which has been preserved as a shrine. When I’m there, Mac climbs into his father’s chair, eliciting a gasp from Erika. “No one has sat there since Charlie,” she tells me before deciding that “only Mac can sit there.” The floor above, which was meant to become a full-floor office suite for Charlie before his death, remains a demolished construction zone, left exactly how it was the day he died.
According to prosecutors, 23-year-old Tyler Robinson, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, including aggravated murder, in Charlie Kirk’s death, told his former partner, Lance Twiggs, that he shot Charlie because “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” (Twiggs also said that Robinson told him “he wishes he hadn’t done it.”)
Charlie was a political savant, known for his hard-line and often deliberately provocative views. His rhetoric veered into vitriol, and he showed little concern for the rights or interests of anyone other than white Christian men. In his daily podcasts, campus debates, and various other speaking engagements—all of which were recorded, clipped, and widely circulated online—he railed against abortion, immigration, and transgender and many other LGBTQ+ rights. He called the Civil Rights Act a “huge mistake,” dismissed Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as a “diversity hire,” and argued that Christianity should once again occupy a central place in American public life. He said it was worth having gun deaths in order to preserve the Second Amendment.
Erika is much less comfortable talking about politics in public, even though Charlie often credited her with pushing him to be more religious and more right wing. “We voted similarly,” she tells me.
In one of our final conversations, she agrees to answer a rapid-fire list of questions about her views on several key issues that Charlie spoke about frequently.
We start with the Second Amendment.
“If somebody wants to murder someone, they will find a way to do it. And they will find the way that is the most convenient,” she says when I suggest her husband might still be alive today if it had been harder for the shooter to get a gun. “It’s a human-soul problem, not a Second Amendment problem.”
Of abortion—which Charlie described as “worse” than the Holocaust—she says, “It’s a human life, and it’s worthy of protection.”
Then there’s “household voting,” a once-fringe idea creeping into mainstream evangelical circles that argues each family should get only one vote in elections, cast by the husband. “If [household voting] works for their family and that’s what they want to do, you’re blessed to live in a country where if you want to do household voting, you can do household voting,” she says. I ask Erika if she sees herself as a Christian nationalist—a label her husband rejected while arguing that Christianity should play a larger role in both political and cultural life in the US. “Do my political beliefs run through a biblical lens? Absolutely,” she says before asking, “If you love God and you love your family and you love your country, can’t you just be called an American?”
Erika has publicly balked at accusations that her husband was racist, though when faced with his language, she seems unsure of what to say. “ ‘It’s happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more,’ ” I say, reading one of her husband’s oft-cited quotes. She asks me to repeat it a couple of times, as though she’s never heard it before.
“I want to be very careful and very genuine in my response,” she eventually says, declining to comment further on her husband’s language. “I don’t want to just give you a response and not have actually watched it.” She tells me later that she watched the clip of Charlie making this statement, which was in reference to a viral 2023 video of a pregnant white woman harassing a group of Black men over a Citi Bike rental. She said Charlie’s words had been taken out of context.
After the 2020 election, Charlie appeared regularly on Fox News suggesting there were “very good questions” about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory and touting Trump’s “plenty of pending legal challenges.” He claimed, in a since-deleted tweet, that Turning Point would send 80 buses of supporters to Washington for the January 6 rally, which turned into the Capitol riot. He was later forced to testify before the congressional committee investigating the riot, where he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Erika, however, demurs when I ask if she thinks the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
“My husband’s the type of person, and I am the same way, that when something is decided, no matter—even in a sports game, no matter if you win or you lose—you have to play the next game,” she tells me. “So are you going to sit and just think about that past game, or are you going to go back out on the field and start practicing for the next game? How we are wired is you go back out on the field and you start practicing.”
This wasn’t the only misinformation Charlie promoted. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was temporarily banned from Twitter for claiming the drug hydroxychloroquine was “100 percent effective” against the virus (it isn’t), and he stoked vaccine resistance, describing pandemic-era mandates as creating “almost this apartheid-style, open-air hostage situation.”
Despite being a supporter of Israel, he also peddled the antisemitic “great replacement theory,” which imagines that elites, mainly Jews, are attempting to replace white Americans with minorities by flooding the country with immigrants, warning, “They won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.”
The great replacement theory was the motivation for the gunman who opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, killing 11 people. “I honestly think that Jew hate is just complete brain rot and that antisemitism is evil,” Erika says, not explaining if there’s a difference between the two. She suggests that she is opposed to “hatred towards any religion in general.”
“Would you say the same for hatred towards Muslims?” I ask, since her husband often claimed that Islam is “not compatible with Western civilization.”
“Hate towards Muslims?” she repeats, seemingly confused by the question. “What would be an example?” I put forward the example of a shooting at a mosque. “Well, that goes back to my thing earlier about hate,” she says. “Injustice is injustice.”
After Charlie’s death, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him a “lionhearted friend of Israel,” but in his last year, Charlie had become increasingly willing to criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza even as he received mounting pressure from Zionist donors to support the Jewish state—toeing the line between two increasingly opposing factions of the Republican Party while trying not to alienate either. (This is now the primary schism within the party itself.)
“Do I think that you can question how other leaders run their country? Absolutely,” Erika says when I ask her about Israel’s actions in Gaza. “That’s the blessing of living in a country where we have freedom of speech.”
Tucker Carlson told me that, based on his personal conversations with Erika, he knew her to be much more critical of Israel—and the interventionist approach to US foreign policy in general—than her husband ever was. But when I press Erika about her views on Israel, she says, “To be quite honest with you, I don’t sit around thinking about what Bibi Netanyahu is doing.
“My brain bandwidth right now is honoring my husband, loving on my babies, and building Turning Point to be everything it could be. I really don’t have the bandwidth to go down the rabbit holes of all of it.”
Those rabbit holes are part of a conspiracy ecosystem that Charlie helped build and often benefited from. And over the past year, that ecosystem has turned its focus on Erika.
Before Charlie was even pronounced dead, his shooting—which was captured by dozens of cell phone cameras from various angles in videos that quickly spread across the internet—was already becoming fodder for conspiracy theorists, not helped by the fact that police initially arrested the wrong man after he falsely confessed to the crime.
Once Robinson was arrested for Charlie’s murder, the theories only multiplied. Some said Trump had orchestrated the assassination to distract from the Epstein files; others pointed the finger at Israel or white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his so-called Groyper Army. Others suggested that Robinson, who was in a relationship with a trans person, belonged to a “trans terror cell.” But the focus soon shifted to Erika, who, though acutely aware that “everything I do is being watched right now,” could not have anticipated how much scrutiny would follow her every move.
“We’ve almost done it to ourselves,” Erika says of the social media petri dish that has allowed misinformation to flourish. “But when tables are turned and people are doing it to you, you see things completely different.” Initially, she says she tried to preempt potential criticism. The night that Charlie died, she remembers sitting in her Salt Lake City hotel room thinking about the only thing she had to wear on Air Force Two the next day: a Proclaim T-shirt with the phrase “Heaven is my home” printed across the front and “I’m just here recruiting” on the back.
“The last thing I need is...people reading into the fact heaven is my home,” she recalls thinking. So the next morning she had a Turning Point staff member go to Alo Yoga to buy plain black clothes for her and several others, including one young woman who’d vomited on herself from the trauma.
“And it went viral,” Erika says. “Suddenly I’d gone on a shopping spree the day after Charlie was murdered.”
From there, it seemed, every action she took was proof that she was calculating, manipulative, or just creepy.
There was the video of Erika kissing Charlie in his casket at the funeral home (“I don’t regret doing that,” she tells me), followed by the public memorial service with a red-white-and-blue dress code at Arizona’s State Farm Stadium on September 21, where Erika, who had already been announced as the new CEO and chair of Turning Point USA, declared, “That man, that young man, I forgive him,” to a crowd of 100,000. She said this from behind a podium bearing the presidential seal, surrounded by bulletproof glass. The more she appeared in public—sharing an intimate hug with Vance onstage at an October Turning Point event honoring her husband or, two months later, in a gold sequined suit at the organization’s annual AmericaFest convention—the more online critics viewed her mourning as a performance.
“People can see the sparkly suit onstage but have no idea the fact that that was the only thing that fit,” she says. “Everyone gets a half picture.”
When it comes to the trolling she’s experienced online, Erika observes, “What’s been the most interesting is how savage women are to women.”
One woman in particular has been a driving force behind much of the online criticism against Erika: Charlie’s close friend and former employee, Candace Owens.
Charlie first saw a burgeoning Owens speak in 2017 at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach. Journalist Kyle Spencer writes in her book Raising Them Right that by the time Owens got offstage, Charlie knew “he had to have her,” hiring her on the spot.
Owens joined Turning Point as Charlie’s communications director but quickly became a political firebrand in her own right, accompanying him on his campus tours and speaking often about the ways Democrats failed Black people (leading a movement that later became known as Blexit). That spring, Kanye West, who was publicly supporting Trump, tweeted, “I love the way Candace Owens thinks.” (Owens and West remained close, and she publicly defended him in 2020 when he tweeted that he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.”)
But shortly after Charlie was murdered, Owens began publicly raising questions about his death, asking first whether Israel had been involved and then if Erika had. On her YouTube show, she said that Erika “should be dragged into a police precinct for questioning.” One year later, conspiracy theories about Charlie’s death and Erika’s alleged potential involvement continue to be a fixation for Owens and a frequent topic on her show. (Some of her videos about Charlie have more than 5 million views on YouTube.) In turn, Owens has become the elephant in the room at Turning Point, driving a wedge between the current leadership and some donors, who are among Owens’s listeners.
One former donor, who stopped giving money because she was put off by Erika’s many public appearances following Charlie’s death, says that friends and followers were inclined to make sense of his murder by questioning what happened to him in the same way he might have. “That’s the nature of who” Charlie was, this person says, “asking questions and being critical of things.” The fact that Erika and the inner circle at Turning Point weren’t open to these lines of inquiry raised even more questions.
For its part, Turning Point has spent the last year chasing internal leaks to Owens, even firing employees suspected of being the source. I saw the paranoia play out in real time when Owens tweeted details about our photo shoot in July, causing the Turning Point team to spiral and go searching for the mole to no avail. In their eyes, this isn’t just a media war; it’s life or death.
“My sense is that the leadership of the organization is wholly focused on Candace Owens,” says Carlson, who says he advised Turning Point’s Andrew Kolvet that “if you don’t like Candace Owens, don’t focus on her.” Carlson says he “loves Candace” and calls her a “very humane and decent person”—a position he says has upset some people at Turning Point. (Owens declined to comment.)
The only time Kathryn Kirk, Charlie’s mother, cries is when she starts talking about how upset her son would be over the way his wife has been treated on social media. Kathryn, who has avoided speaking to journalists until now, says that she’s been fielding calls since minutes after Charlie was shot. A TMZ reporter “called me even before I talked to my daughter. Before I was running the car,” she says.
Though she says she’s desperate to remain a private citizen, Kathryn is also coming to terms with the fact that even her silence has been co-opted by conspiracy theorists who claim there is a rift between Charlie’s parents and Erika; that they blame her for their son’s death; that they’re fighting over Charlie’s will—and the legacy of Turning Point.
Kathryn insists that none of this is true.
“We were 100 percent behind her,” Kathryn tells me, adding that “Erika and I have, through the trauma, grown closer.
“We knew Charlie in a way that no one else did. We can look at each other’s eyes and we know the depth of our despair.”
Erika and Charlie had been working on their will when Charlie was killed, says Doug DeGroote, who serves on Turning Point’s board and also manages the couple’s personal finances. Charlie and Erika had planned to go to his office the Monday after his murder to sign the paperwork. Not only did they have two young kids, but Charlie was receiving mounting death threats. The night before Charlie was killed, he had been discussing with Erika and their pastor recommendations from his security team, which included bulletproof glass shields and vests. “He loved showing up to schools where there was going to be death threats because it meant it was going to be great content,” says a former Turning Point employee.
But the risks also meant Turning Point needed a succession plan. Kathryn said Charlie purposely spared them from those discussions—“because it would just go right into our fears”—but members of the board, Erika, and a few close personal allies within Turning Point all told me that, before his death, Charlie had made clear that if anything were to happen to him, his wife should succeed him.
“She knew him more than anyone,” a former Turning Point employee says of the choice to put Erika in charge.
DeGroote says Erika saved Turning Point two or three years of searching for and training a new CEO from outside the organization. The board voted two days after Charlie’s death, hoping to get through his memorial before announcing Erika’s new role to the world. “But unfortunately the media was just all over us and asking the question all the time,” says DeGroote.
“We can never replace Charlie,” Vance tells me. “But Erika is a fighter, just like he was. I know she is up to the task of defending this country we love and keeping his memory alive for the next generation of young Americans.”
Skeptics, however, worry about whether Erika, or anyone, can fill Charlie’s shoes. He was the sun around which Turning Point revolved. Erika may be the moral heart of the organization, but she’s far from the political animal her husband was.
“It’s terrible for [Erika]. It’s terrible for Turning Point. It’s terrible for those children,” says someone close to the Kirks who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noting that the job is equal parts public speaking and fundraising.
“I’ve never met anybody who could do both of those except Charlie Kirk,” this person says. “The whole idea that he could be replaced by one person is just.... And then a widow with two young children. Are you kidding?” It’s a statement echoed by the former donor as well.
Mikey McCoy, Turning Point’s 24-year-old chief of staff under Charlie and now Erika, says it’s a misconception that Erika intends to fill every role that Charlie occupied. Rather, he says, she’s focused on fostering the next generation of speakers.
“She spends more time being the coach behind the scenes than she does in front of the camera,” he says, describing the web of new conservative voices Turning Point now aims to develop through its Prove Me Wrong series—the on-campus debates for which Turning Point is best known.
For five days this July, Erika and Kathryn sat together in a Provo, Utah, courtroom, just feet from the man who allegedly killed Charlie, for a preliminary hearing to determine whether the case would go to trial. (A judge ruled in September that it will.) In an effort to combat the misinformation and conspiracy theories surrounding Charlie’s death, prosecutors had successfully petitioned the judge to let Charlie’s family view the enhanced surveillance footage of the shooting—a 4K enlargement of grainy CCTV that made Robinson’s face unmistakably clear—for the first time in court.
“Don’t do it. Don’t you dare do it. It’s not too late,” Erika pleaded silently with the man on the screen, gripping Kathryn’s frail arm and crying out as she watched Robinson drop into a prone position to take his shot.
“I knew exactly where I was at each moment of the video,” she tells me, mentally transporting back to the doctor’s office, where she was accompanying her mother to an appointment when she received the call from McCoy telling her, “Charlie, he’s shot. He’s shot.”
She says she asked only one question:
“Is he alive?”
She would later learn that Charlie had died almost instantly, the bullet obliterating his neck. But according to Erika, his heart continued to beat intermittently, creating a cruel window of hope.
In the airport parking lot, racing to a private flight to Utah, she says, “I remember thinking, Oh dear God, he’s going to make it. He has a pulse.” By the time Erika arrived, he was gone. She says the surgeon who operated on Charlie later told her he had used all the blood in the hospital to try to save his life.
“ ‘I can’t tell you not to see your husband,’ ” she recalls a police officer at the hospital telling her, repeating nearly word for word a story she’s told in several interviews since her husband’s death. “ ‘But I’ve been doing this for more than 20 years. If it were my spouse, I wouldn’t want to remember them this way.’ ”
“I looked back at him and said, ‘With all due respect, I want to see what they did to my husband. I didn’t get a kiss goodbye this morning. I just want to kiss my husband.’ ”
The staff removed the tubes from Charlie’s mouth and wrapped his neck, clearing away as much blood as they could. “I’ll never be able to put it into words,” Erika says. “But Charlie had a smirk. It wasn’t sad.” She describes seeing his green eyes half open and the edges of his bloody lips curled upward, as if telling her, “I just saw Jesus. I fought the good fight. I’m okay.”
“The world doesn’t know what it looks like when a Christian woman mourns,” a brawny teenage boy tells Erika.
Twenty-four hours after the hearing in Provo, she is back outside Washington, DC, at the sprawling Gaylord National Resort in Maryland, to kick off the annual Turning Point Chapter Leadership Summit. The cavernous convention center has been transformed into something resembling a miniature republic, filled with thousands of high school students who began lining up outside the auditorium before 7 a.m.
The girls, who are wobbling in their heels with the unfounded confidence of teenagers who think they’re already women, must have spent hours meticulously pinning, curling, and spraying their long locks. The boys, meanwhile, sport TikTok-inspired fades and acne. Several are dressed like Charlie, wearing the same white “Freedom” shirt that he died in. MAGA hats, and even one Trump 2028 hat, speckle the stream of kids red from above.
Many of them were inspired to get involved with Turning Point after Charlie’s death, seeing the murder as a call to action. The 2025–2026 school year ended with 3,500 high school chapters (a 180 percent increase from the year prior) and 1,500 college chapters (a 64 percent increase).
A select 100 of these students were chosen to attend a breakfast with Erika. She asks the students where they get their news, to which most respond Fox or that they “do their own research,” echoing a mantra associated with the kind of distrust in mainstream media and institutions that Charlie helped give rise to during the pandemic.
The interactions quickly go from polite to emotional as the students line up at the end of each session to hug Erika.
“I loved Charlie,” they say, tears pouring down their faces. Some close their eyes and smile, as if a hug from Erika is a hug from Charlie.
“May I pray over you?” one young man asks, putting on his best preacher’s voice as the students around them reach out their hands and close their eyes, as if forming branches off of Erika.
“I can’t believe I’m meeting you,” one young woman weeps. “I can’t believe I’m crying.”
“I’m Jewish and you’re the reason I believe in God,” she continues, with a sacrosanct sincerity that stops anyone around her from giggling. “I have to get married because of you. I have to.”
“The greatest cause in Charlie’s life was trying to revive the American family,” Erika said at her husband’s memorial. Seeing her at home gave me the most revealing glimpse into her new reality. She and the kids live in a Scottsdale apartment complex. Erika’s mother, Lori, who is in the late stages of a neurological disorder that mirrors Parkinson’s, also lives in the complex, as does Turning Point’s top fundraiser, Stacy Sheridan, and her 11-year-old daughter, Grace.
“It’s like a dorm,” says Sheridan, who was in her 40s when she also became a widow. Charlie persuaded her to move into the building two years ago, after her husband died of cancer on Grace’s ninth birthday, so that he and Erika could support her through the loss. It’s now a decision that feels eerily prophetic.
Lori can hardly speak, relying on a young nurse who sits at her side to translate her low, pained moans. Her body shakes uncontrollably and her neck folds forward, making eye contact impossible. An IV bag hangs beside her hospital-style reclining chair beneath a portrait of Charlie embracing Jesus. There are crosses everywhere: on the walls, on shelves, even two plush ones tucked into an oversize dog bed beneath the television. “I never missed a basketball game,” Lori says through the nurse when I ask about Erika’s childhood. Erika repeats this fact to me later and notes that she pointed to her own childhood to reassure Sheridan when they met during that first visit to the Turning Point headquarters seven years ago. Sheridan, who was splitting her time between Arizona and California, where she and her husband were raising Grace, was feeling guilty about how much she was working and away from home.
“Still to this day,” Erika says, laughing, “Stacy is hell-bent on making every one of Grace’s soccer games.”
Now Sheridan and Erika are essentially raising their children together, their chosen family dynamic more closely resembling Erika’s unconventional childhood than the traditional unit she created with Charlie.
Each night, Erika, GG, and Mac recite prayers with Lori and tuck her into bed around seven and then go to say goodnight to Sheridan and Grace.
At the end of our time together, I ask Erika how she wants her children to remember her, not their father, whose legacy Erika feels certain she will protect.
She bursts into tears. “That their mom relied so heavily on her faith, that she didn’t care about what the world said about her and that she did her best to give us the best childhood that she could give us,” she says. “And that she did her best to make our father proud.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
Erika Kirk Doesn't Really Want to Talk Politics. So How's She Going to Lead Turning Point USA?
A Deep Dive Into How Larry Ellison Built His Influence
Making the Elizabeth Holmes Doc Fried Nathan Fielder’s and Lance Oppenheim’s Brains
Inside Wallis Simpson’s Quest for the World’s Most Beautiful Jewelry
How I Blew Up My Life. (Or, the Gavin Newsom Affair)
Inside Lane Kiffin’s Trash-Talking, “Joey Freshwater” Era With Nick Saban at Alabama
A “Top One Percent” Vagina Is the Newest Status Symbol in Longevity Circles
The 25 Best Movies on Netflix to Watch This October
An All-American Tragedy: The Story of Brandon and Candice Miller
From the Archive: Inside Elizabeth Holmes’s Chilling Final Months at Theranos
.JPG)
