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During the recent days of heartache and anger, Erika Kirk has found herself returning, as if by gravitational pull, to a single moment. It is the recollection of how, on what turned out to be the last night of Charlie Kirk, her husband, he was too excited to sleep.
“His adrenal glands were just going off,” she recalled during an hour-and-a-half-long interview on Thursday, eight days after Charlie Kirk, 31, one of the nation’s pre-eminent conservative influencers and the founder of the youth activist group Turning Point USA, was gunned down while debating students at Utah Valley University.
“He got up, and I could hear him eating something in the kitchen. He’d been waiting all summer to begin touring.” The visits to college campuses, she said, “were like an Olympic event for him. He trained for them. He had whiteboard sessions for hours. Mock debates. He was just so excited”.
Erika Kirk speaks at the memorial service for her husband, conservative activist Charlie Kirk.Credit: AP
Charlie Kirk finally fell asleep sometime later, in another bed in the house. Erika Kirk heard him slip out early the next morning. She texted “I love you” to him before his chartered plane took off for Provo, Utah. A staff member later told her that he had overheard her husband proclaiming to the pilot as he disembarked, “Today’s going to be a great day.”
Erika Kirk, 36, spoke in a composed voice while fighting through tears about a husband lionised on the right as an inspiration to young Republicans and pilloried on the left for his attacks on civil rights, feminism and Islam. She acknowledged her struggle to make sense of an unfathomable tragedy.
“I’m allowing myself to feel this so deeply,” she said, “without medication, without alcohol. The Lord is giving me discernment.”
She sat in workout clothes with her legs folded under her on a couch in a rented condominium in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her husband often used the condo as a way station between their home in a gated community outside Scottsdale and the Turning Point USA headquarters in east Phoenix.
Around her neck was the pendant of St Michael that her husband was wearing when he was shot on September 10. The medics had ripped it from his body while attempting to stop the bleeding. A trace of blood remained in the crevice of the cross.
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The bathroom floor of the condo was still littered with towels from her husband’s last shower there, a little more than a week ago. “To this day, I can’t go into my bedroom,” she said. “I’m rotating where I sleep.”
Turning Point USA announced the day before the interview that Erika Kirk would replace her husband as its chief executive. The organisation’s spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, described her as its “beating heart, spiritual centre and life force”.
But he said that no one could be expected to fill the shoes of Charlie Kirk, who had built Turning Point from scratch, starting in 2012, into a sprawling conservative behemoth with $US96 million ($146 million) in annual revenues. It was not immediately clear whether Erika Kirk would seek to continue her husband’s daily podcast or, for that matter, to joust with liberal students on college campuses.
Still, numerous Turning Point staffers said Erika Kirk had the fortitude to be the group’s new leader. She has also received a vote of confidence from US President Donald Trump, who has called her twice since the shooting. The two have known each other since 2012, when Trump was running the Miss USA beauty pageants and she was Miss Arizona.
“Charlie was like a son to him,” Erika Kirk said. “And when the president said, ‘Just let us know how we can support you,’ I told him, ‘My husband just loved conversing with you and using you as a sounding board for all sorts of things. Could we continue that?’ And he said, ‘Of course’.”
The president’s tone, she said, “was soft and embracing. I could tell he wanted to hug me”.
Others have responded in the same manner to Erika Kirk, now left to care for a three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son. That new life, she said, “is actually the least traumatising thing for me”, since she herself had been raised by her mother after their parents divorced when she was young.
Erika Kirk provided the outside world with a glimpse of her resolve during an emotional 15-minute speech to a livestream audience, two days after her husband was killed and hours after the 22-year-old man charged with his killing, Tyler Robinson, was taken into custody. Reading from notes that she had mostly compiled the previous night when she was unable to sleep, she vowed, “No one will ever forget my husband’s name, and I will make sure of it.”
She insisted on giving the speech live, rather than recording it ahead of time, she said, “because that’s what Charlie would do, for sure”.
‘I want to see what they did to my husband’
On the evening before Charlie Kirk travelled to Utah, he and his wife met for dinner in the Phoenix area with a friend who was a faith leader. The purpose was to pray together over Kirk’s imminent tour of roughly 20 campuses. Both Erika Kirk and the friend were worried.
Charlie Kirk, whose appearances on college campuses drew ardent support and fierce condemnation, had received numerous death threats over the past year and had been travelling with a security team for months. Over dinner, Erika Kirk implored her husband to start wearing a bulletproof vest. When he demurred, the friend suggested that he speak behind bulletproof glass.
“Not yet,” Charlie Kirk replied. He said that he felt confident in his team, and that there would be additional security at the Utah event. But Erika Kirk, like several of her husband’s subordinates, had occasionally heard him imply that his life could be cut short by violence. She found herself wondering if a part of him had already surrendered to such a prospect.
Charlie and Erika at a Turning Point USA event in January.Credit: Getty
It had been Erika Kirk’s plan to accompany her husband to Utah. But her mother would be undergoing medical treatment in the Phoenix area that same day. “Home needs you,” her husband told her. They agreed that she would instead travel with him on the next leg of the tour, to Colorado State University.
Erika Kirk was sitting in her mother’s hospital room at 11.23am on Wednesday in Phoenix (4.23am Thursday AEST) when she saw the number of her husband’s long-time assistant, Michael McCoy, appear on her phone. In retrospect, she said she knew the words – “He’s been shot!” – before McCoy screamed them.
Robinson had texted his partner about Charlie Kirk after the shooting. “I’ve had enough of his hatred,” he wrote, according to court papers.
Charlie Kirk’s chartered plane travelled back to Scottsdale to ferry his wife to Provo. He was pronounced dead as she was airborne. “I’m looking at the clouds and the mountains,” Erika Kirk recalled of those surreal hours. “It was such a gorgeous day, and I was thinking: this is exactly what he last saw.”
The sheriff met her at the hospital. He offered her the option of seeing the body but, she said, advised against it. The bullet, he explained, had ravaged her husband’s neck.
“With all due respect,” Erika Kirk remembered saying, “I want to see what they did to my husband.”
Erika holds her husband’s hand after he was shot dead, in an image she posted on Instagram.Credit: Instagram
She was braced for the worst, but what she saw surprised her. “His eyes were semi-open,” she said. “And he had this knowing, Mona Lisa-like half-smile. Like he’d died happy. Like Jesus rescued him. The bullet came, he blinked, and he was in heaven.”
She had not been able to kiss him goodbye when he left the house earlier that morning. She did so then.
Dating a Miss Arizona
During an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show on radio and streaming earlier this year, Erika Kirk joined her husband and read out some questions the audience had submitted. The first questioner wanted to know which of the two was more conservative.
“Erika,” said Charlie Kirk. “By far. Not even close. I am a moderate compared to Erika.” His wife concurred.
In the interview, Erika Kirk described their bond as one modelled after the fifth chapter in the Bible’s Book of Ephesians, in which the wife submits to the husband, who in turn, according to the Bible, protects and cherishes the wife, “just as Christ also loved the Church and gave himself for her”.
A photograph Erika posted on Instagram after Charlie’s death.Credit: Instagram
Charlie Kirk first met the former Miss Arizona at a Turning Point event in 2018. He later flew to New York, where she then worked as an entrepreneur of Christian-themed clothing, ostensibly to interview her for a job.
As they met over burgers in Manhattan, it quickly became apparent that the two had chosen different paths while remaining not so far apart. Both were born in the Midwest, Charlie in Illinois, Erika in Ohio. Both had been basketball stars in high school. He had never attended college but was a voracious reader. She had received a bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University and a master’s in legal studies at Liberty University in Virginia.
And while Charlie Kirk was building a conservative powerhouse in Phoenix, Erika Kirk, who had spent her adolescence in nearby Scottsdale, had chosen to live in Manhattan.
Once he had confessed that he wanted to date her rather than hire her, and she recovered from the shock, “he engulfed me into his world”, she said. “I made that choice. It’s so hard to articulate the beauty of an Ephesians 5 marriage when you actually have a man that’s worth following, to have a true example of a leader to look up to. And I had that in Charlie.”
In other words, she said, their conservative Christian union felt organic rather than imposed. They watched sports and played one-on-one basketball together. He never drank, and she seldom did. They preferred each other’s company, she said, over hanging out with others.
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Once they married in May 2021, Erika Kirk said she tolerated his dude-ish clutter, seeing the clothes on the floor as the detritus of an intensely focused young man. He avidly wrote in journals, which she never read while he was alive. Only after he died, she said, did she look at a few of his pages and marvel at “the intricate inner workings of his brain and his heart”.
Still, nothing that she read in the journals was new to her. “I was his vault,” she said. Despite his fame in conservative circles and the debates he relished with college students, she described him as an introvert. In turn, Charlie Kirk sought to fulfil his own Ephesians 5 covenant in cherishing and protecting his wife. Every Saturday, he would leave a handwritten note for his wife, always asking some version of: “How can I best serve you?”
She never answered.
“I’m not saying he was perfect, by any means,” Erika Kirk said. “But I knew my expectations and role, and he knew his. I wasn’t going to be the nagging wife who he wouldn’t want to come home to. I wanted to create a sacred landing space for him. And I think that’s why he was always eager to come home.”
Blood on a ledger
As Erika Kirk prepared for her husband’s memorial service on Sunday, when Trump and nearly every other major conservative figure sanctified her husband, she had her own mortal preoccupations.
Beyond the grief, she said, sometimes she is able “to see the Bible in such technicolour. To be so serene in saying, ‘Thy will be done. I surrender to it’. Do I like it? No. That was the love of my life, my soul mate, my best friend. But God’s plan is always greater than ours”.
Like other Christians at Turning Point, she said she sees a divine logic to her husband’s death: a young prophet whose fleeting life has achieved lasting resonance after his martyrdom. While others seek out conspiracies beyond the death of Charlie Kirk at the hands of a lone gunman, Erika Kirk is not among them.
In her view, a young but towering spiritual voice was silenced by a young lost soul. “I’m a strong believer that this was God’s plan,” she said. “And it’s so clear-cut. It couldn’t be more Charlie.”
US President Donald Trump, left, hugs Erika at the memorial service.Credit: AP
She added, “I’ve had so many people ask, ‘Do you feel anger toward this man? Like, do you want to seek the death penalty?’ I’ll be honest. I told our lawyer, I want the government to decide this. I do not want that man’s blood on my ledger. Because when I get to heaven, and Jesus is like: ‘Uh, eye for an eye? Is that how we do it?’ And that keeps me from being in heaven, from being with Charlie?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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