The parents of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich have written a plea asking “conservative news outlets and commentators” to stop peddling “discredited conspiracy theories” about their son.

Fox News and host Sean Hannity have relentlessly peddled the debunked conspiracy theory about Rich’s death even after the Rich family sent a cease and desist order to Fox News contributor Rod Wheeler. The cease and desist came after Wheeler’s recent allegations led right-wing media figures to revisit the story and smear Rich as the person responsible for providing WikiLeaks with DNC emails.

Even after Fox News issued a retraction of their original article noting that “The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting,” Hannity refused to to back off the conspiracy theory.

Now, Rich’s parents are imploring conservative commentators to stop pushing the “unspeakably cruel” and “baseless” smear that their son was the source of the illegally-obtained DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks during the 2016 election. In the letter, the Rich family details the lack of evidence behind the shameful conspiracy, debunks the favorite talking points of the disgraceful commentators pushing it, and make clear the “family’s nightmare still persists,” as “Seth’s death has been turned into a political football,” with “new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching [the family] to take advantage of [them] and Seth’s legacy.” From The Washington Post’s May 23 article:

Imagine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from. Imagine having to face every single day knowing that your son was murdered. Imagine you had no answers — that no one has been brought to justice and there were few clues leading to the killer or killers. Imagine that every single day, with every phone call you hope that it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case.



Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.

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Still, conservative news outlets and commentators continue, day after painful day, to peddle discredited conspiracy theories that Seth was killed after having provided WikiLeaks with emails from the DNC. Those theories, which some reporters have since retracted, are baseless, and they are unspeakably cruel.

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Despite these facts, our family’s nightmare persists. Seth’s death has been turned into a political football. Every day we wake up to new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching us to take advantage of us and Seth’s legacy. It just won’t stop. The amount of pain and anguish this has caused us is unbearable. With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us.

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We also know that many people are angry at our government and want to see justice done in some way, somehow. We are asking you to please consider our feelings and words. There are people who are using our beloved Seth’s memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare. We ask those purveying falsehoods to give us peace, and to give law enforcement the time and space to do the investigation they need to solve our son’s murder.