Isabel Brown, who was the late Charlie Kirk’s protégée, is still grieving his sudden death at 31.
“I think there’s been a difficult level of processing this that’s maybe confusing to the average person,” Brown, 28, said on the Monday, April 27, episode of the “Stay True” podcast, referring to Kirk as her mentor. “Those of us who worked for him for so many years and who knew him personally all talk about it all the time that we have to kind of process in two layers right now. You’re mourning the loss of this amazing person who meant so much to you intimately, someone who you owe your career to, someone who you owe your family to. I can’t tell you how many hundreds or thousands of families like mine met at a TPUSA conference and worked for Charlie, and we all have children now.”
She continued, “There’s this personal aspect to it that, of course, takes years and years and years to get through, and that’s just grief when you lose anyone in your life, but especially in such a traumatic way. Then, there’s this extra societal redefining layer of grief that I think we last, honestly, experienced in culture probably with the death of Princess Diana.”
Kirk, who is survived by his wife, Erika, and their two children, was shot and killed during a speaking engagement in September 2025. Nearly 28 years earlier, Diana died in a fatal car accident in Paris. The late People’s Princess was 36. Her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, received an outpouring of support across the globe after her death.
“I haven’t seen huge prayer vigils all over the world and people leaving teddy bears on the sidewalk and lighting candles in their community and all of these things ever since then,” Brown added on Monday’s episode. “We were toddlers when that happened, so our generation certainly has no level of experience with this.”
Brown, who once worked for Kirk’s Turning Point USA before helming her eponymous show for the Daily Wire, acknowledged that she didn’t even “want to go outside” the day after the activist’s assassination.
“We live in a very tight-knit community, but it’s right in the heart of one of the craziest left-wing environments in the country,” she said. “We ended up at church and we prayed for a while. As we were on our way to church, we sat in this park because I was, like, having this big wave of grief and I just needed to sit down for a second. As I’m sitting in this park … 10 feet away is another bench and a young man is sitting on this bench, scrolling through Charlie Kirk videos.”
Brown also heard two other people speaking about Kirk’s death as they passed by.
“I’m like, ‘This is a level of complete world-changing, cultural change that I don’t really know how to process yet,’ because for me it was just my friend Charlie,” she said. “I think that will take a lot of time to get through. I think our country certainly lost a moral leader of a generation. We are so hurting for what that could have turned into. Maybe he would have been a president of the United States or a pastor or a saint. I mean, who knows what Charlie could have become?”
In the wake of Kirk’s death, Brown also thought about whether to walk away from her duties at Turning Point altogether.
“It was the easiest thing in the entire world for me to look at my husband and say, ‘OK, we’re done. It was nice while it lasted,’” Brown said. “[I thought about], ‘Let’s move to Wyoming. We’re going to buy 10 acres and never speak to anyone again and become cattle ranchers and live off the land and we’ll just literally never do any of this again.’”
Brown ultimately opted against quitting her job based on her last interaction with Kirk one week before his death.
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“I was incredibly fortunate and privileged to share the stage with him in California at one of his last speaking engagements on this earth,” Brown recalled. “He went out on stage, I was so captivated by his message … [and] the very end of his speech was all centered around eschatology and the role that Christians must play in this world to try to make it a little bit more like the next one.”
Brown took Kirk’s speech as a “call to action” to further her mission.
“Christ gave us a very, very specific command to be salt and to be light,” she explained. “Ultimately, both salt and light have one thing in common. They dramatically transform the environment around them. … Our obligation, not just opportunity as Christians, is to do everything we can to fight for what is good and true and beautiful.”
