by John-Quinn Mulquin Jr.
Charlie Kirk’s former security chief filed a federal defamation lawsuit last week against Candace Owens, alleging she falsely accused him of conspiring in Kirk’s assassination. The suit names Brian Harpole. He claims he was in Dallas when Owens placed him at a secret meeting at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and accuses her of running a months-long campaign to destroy his reputation. Owens responded on her podcast, welcoming the subpoena power the lawsuit would give her.
The machinery of that dispute is now in the courts. What interests me — and what’s in the memoir — is what it reveals about a person I was watching closely long before any of this.
She Showed Up Early in the Narrative
The memoir isn’t a fan account of any media figure. It’s a record of what I was consuming, thinking, and processing as a veteran trying to make sense of a fracturing country. Candace Owens kept appearing in that record — not because I went looking for her, but because she was there.
She was at the intersection of culture, faith, and political commentary in a way few others were. She left Turning Point USA, BLEXIT, PragerU, and The Daily Wire. She built her own platform. She was asking questions that the mainstream media was either ignoring or actively punishing people for asking.
By 2024, the memoir records:
Candace Owens had taken her viewers from The Daily Wire, continuing to ask questions and reviewing books forbidden by mainstream accepted narratives.
That sentence is not praise or criticism. It’s observation. She had an audience that trusted her more than the institution she came from. That’s a significant thing.
She Was Doing Something Harder Than Most
After Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, the landscape broke open in ways that were ugly and fast. The memoir describes it plainly:
After a bizarre response from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Candace Owens questioned the narratives surrounding what she described as a Kennedy/King-level assassination and cover-up of one of her closest friends. The media landscape would attack her immediately, choosing to vilify her rather than debate her claims.
I wasn’t tracking her because I agreed with every curiosity she gave her audience. I was tracking her because she was willing to ask common sense questions in search for the truth. Whether her specific imaginations prove out in court or collapse entirely, the pattern she identified — the media’s refusal to engage the questions on their merits — was real and visible to anyone paying attention.
The Personal Dimension
The memoir also captures what happened inside the conservative media ecosystem after Kirk died:
TPUSA went one way. Candace Owens went another.
Charlie’s life was not pointed toward himself or how big TPUSA could get, but toward Jesus Christ. Truth. Hope for the youth of America.
That’s the frame I was working from. Not “who’s winning the media war” but “who’s actually serving the thing Charlie said he stood for.” The battle for his legacy wasn’t just institutional. It was spiritual. And Candace Owens, whatever her perceived errors of method or fact, was at least asking: what actually happened, and why are people afraid to answer?
Those aren’t illegitimate questions. They’re just inconvenient ones.
What the Defamation Suit Reveals
The lawsuit will determine whether Owens’ specific claims about Harpole were defamatory. That’s for the courts. What the suit reveals to me — as someone who wrote about all of this while it was unfolding — is that the chaos following Kirk’s death was real, not manufactured. People who were close to the situation were in genuine conflict. Trust had collapsed. And in that vacuum, information — accurate or not — moved at a speed no institution could control.
I watched that from Fischer, Texas, in real time. I wrote about it. And I put it in a memoir that launched the same week the lawsuit was filed.
Why This Matters for the Book
What Was Meant for Harm is not a political book. It’s a memoir about a combat veteran who couldn’t stay in the military, couldn’t get the VA to move, stopped believing what the media said, and found that the church building mattered less than the people inside it — and found his way back to purpose through faith, family, and honest reckoning.
But the cultural landscape is part of that story. The media figures I was watching were not just entertainment. They were the people narrating the country I came home to. Candace Owens is in the book because she was part of that narration — and because watching what happened to her after Kirk died revealed something true about how quickly the ground shifts beneath people who step out of line.
Whether that’s a cautionary tale or a testimony depends on what happens next.
I just wrote down what I saw.
Read the full account in What Was Meant for Harm — available now on Amazon: https://a.co/d/05juIdfJ
Kindle, paperback, and hardcover.
John-Quinn Mulquin Jr. is a U.S. Army veteran, author, and founder of Quinn’s Next Step. He lives in Texas with his wife and son.
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