Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Sep. 9, 2025
September 9, 2025 · The White House · 0:44:13
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt briefed the media at the White House on September 9, 2025, carried on the White House channel. She opened with the week’s schedule: the President would commemorate the 24th anniversary of 9/11 at the Pentagon Memorial on Thursday morning and attend the New York Yankees game that evening, and the President and First Lady would depart the following Tuesday for their state visit to the United Kingdom.
The briefing’s lead item was the murder of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Today, I would like to address the tragedy that has not received nearly enough media attention — the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska,” Leavitt said, recounting as the White House presented the facts: the 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee was stabbed on Charlotte’s rail system on August 22 traveling home from her pizzeria job; the alleged killer, Decarlos Brown Jr., had been charged with crimes “no fewer than 14 times” dating to 2011, had served five years for robbery with a deadly weapon, and had been released in January 2025 on a written promise to appear. “This monster should have been locked up and Iryna should still be alive,” she said, calling the killing “the failed experiment known as cashless bail” and criticizing North Carolina’s earlier racial-equity task force recommendations and the media’s initial coverage.
Why it matters
The September 9 briefing is the White House’s fullest statement of the Charlotte case — the facts as the administration presents them and the cashless-bail argument built on them — delivered two days before the President signed the era’s crime measures into the record this site tracks, and the briefing that set up both the 9/11 observance and the U.K. state visit.
Scoreboard watch
This briefing is a scoreboard reference point: the administration’s stated account of the Zarutska case — 14 prior charges and a January 2025 no-bail release, as stated by the Press Secretary — and its cashless-bail position, to be checked against the court record and subsequent policy actions.
Sources: The White House, “Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Sep. 9, 2025” (official upload, embedded above; the upload’s description places the event at the White House). All figures and characterizations as stated by the Press Secretary in the briefing.