Erika Kirk is looking back on husband Charlie Kirk‘s murder one year later.
In a new Vanity Fair profile, Erika, 37, reflected on seeing surveillance footage from the day of the shooting, which was shown in court during suspect Tyler Robinson‘s preliminary hearing this summer.
“I knew exactly where I was at each moment of the video,” Erika told the outlet.
In September 2025, Erika was at an appointment with her mother when she received a call from Turning Point USA chief of staff Mikey McCoy telling her Charlie was shot. At the time, Erika’s one question was: “Is he alive?”
Though Charlie died almost immediately, Erika claimed his heart was beating intermittently. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh dear God, he’s going to make it. He has a pulse,’” she said.
By the time she reached the hospital in Utah, however, her husband was dead. (Charlie was 31, and the pair shared two young children.)
Erika Kirk Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
According to Erika, the surgeon who operated on Charlie said all the blood available in the hospital was used in their attempt to save his life. She further recalled making the decision to see her husband’s body despite warnings from authorities.
“I looked back at [the police officer] 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,’” Erika explained.
Recalling the moment she finally saw Charlie, Erika added, “I’ll never be able to put it into words, but Charlie had a smirk. It wasn’t sad.”
Erika Kirk (née Frantzve) initially really struggled to cope with her husband Charlie Kirk’s death. “It took me months to even walk into my bedroom,” Erika, 37, said during a Saturday, December 13, town hall on CBS News, revealing she was sleeping in her 3-year-old daughter’s bed instead. “I can’t sleep, I’m on my phone, […]
In the wake of her husband’s death, Erika took over operations of Turning Point and has been outspoken about her grief in the public eye. She shared a nearly identical recollection about seeing Charlie’s body in her first TV interview after he was killed.
“He was still warm and his eyes were slightly open. He had this smirk on his face,” she said on Jesse Watters Primetime in November 2025. “It meant three things to me. First, that he died doing what he loved. Second was that he was at peace. [Third], I gave him a kiss.”
While speaking with Vanity Fair, Erika noted that she was “always very quiet behind the scenes” of her late husband’s organization before his death, but she hesitated to discuss too much of her personal politics.
“My brain bandwidth right now is honoring my husband, loving on my babies, and building Turning Point to be everything it could be,” she said. “I really don’t have the bandwidth to go down the rabbit holes of all of it.”