Less than a week after her husband was killed in the most high-profile political assassination in a generation, Erika Kirk convened a Zoom call for the 1,500 employees at Turning Point USA, the organization Charlie Kirk led until his death.
She assured those on the call that they would not lose their job, that “everything is stable and safe,” Alex Clark, the host of one of TPUSA’s most popular podcasts, told CNN in an interview. The message was clear, Clark said, with Erika Kirk saying that they would “carry on Charlie’s mission exactly as he had planned.”
The call was seen as an indication that Erika intends to be at the forefront of taking TPUSA forward, according to Clark.
On Thursday, the organization announced that she will serve as its next CEO and chair of the board, in accordance with her late husband’s wishes.
“I think she will do everything in her power to protect the legacy of Charlie,” Clark told CNN. “And I think all employees would love nothing more than to be able to have her at the helm steering the ship.”
Nearly a week earlier, in her first public speech two days after his assassination, Erika Kirk had issued a warning and a vow.
“You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife,” she said last Friday. “The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”
“I’ll make Turning Point the biggest thing this nation has ever seen,” she said. “The movement will not die. I refuse to let that happen.”
Even before his death, she had been seen as a galvanizing force for young conservative women, to whom she espoused prioritizing marriage and motherhood over career — even as she had her own business pursuits.
“I would not want anyone else to take over Turning Point besides her,” said nineteen-year-old Faith Merrill, who has been involved with TPUSA for the past three years. “She is just this motherly figure for us. Charlie was that father figure and she is the mother figure for us.”
To Merrill, Erika Kirk “has just awoken something in Gen. Z conservatives, and I can confidently say she will have Turning Point thrive and grow bigger than ever before.”
On Sunday, Erika Kirk will emerge once again in public – this time, at her husband’s memorial – where she is due to be one of the speakers in a lineup that includes President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Her tone and her message will be closely watched — by a nation divided over Charlie Kirk’s legacy and by followers in a movement in which she has already played an important, though often contradictory, role.
Erika Frantzve was raised in Scottsdale, Arizona by her mother after her parents divorced when she was young.
She studied political science in college and was briefly an NCAA basketball player. “I have played basketball since I was five, super tomboy, didn’t like dresses,” she once said.
She later went on to be crowned Miss Arizona USA in 2012, acknowledging in introductory videos for the pageant that she was a late bloomer in some respects.
“I think I always had that girly girl hidden within me,” she said in her introductory video in the pageant.
Six years later, she met Charlie Kirk – five years her junior – in New York City, well after he started Turning Point USA. The two have often told their origin story: Originally, he reached out via a direct message on Instagram, asking to meet with her after she attended a TPUSA event with a family member.
Their meeting at “Bob’s Burgers” in Manhattan in 2018 was initially intended as a job interview, they both have said, with him peppering her with questions.
Then he quickly changed course. “I am not going to hire you, I am going to date you,” Erika recalled him saying, during a speech at a TPUSA event.
The two were engaged by 2020 and married the following year. They have two children, a 1-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl.
Though she did not have a public track record of conservative activism before meeting Kirk, her late husband has described her as coming from a “fiercely right-wing family.”
Erika has said her grandfather, a Swedish immigrant who served in two wars, was “always super far right,” and that she became, “100% more conservative” after she became a mother, “which I didn’t think was possible,” she added.
As Kirk’s wife, she has shared much about these personal ideals, which hew closely to conservative Christian values, on her social media, and through public appearances with him: Faith, marriage, motherhood — and in that order of importance.
In discussing her role in the relationship with her husband, she has often used a provocative word — submission.
“I love submitting to Charlie because he is a phenomenal leader,” she has said. “I want him to come home and be so unbelievably loved on. To be refueled.”
In their public appearances, they have talked openly about what they describe as fulfilling the biblical role and covenant of marriage: Charlie takes care of the finances, earning the money for the family, while she focuses on raising their kids, cooking and running the household to support him — an arrangement they encourage other young people to pursue.
“As a woman you are meant to be the guardian of your home — to be the helpmate of your husband,” she told an audience at the Bloom conference, a Christian event. “Be that biblical wife you are supposed to be for him, and honor the order that God had created marriage to be in.”
“When I met Charlie – that was it, I could care less about the career,” she said last year at Turning Point’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit.
Merrill, who says she has sometimes lacked self-confidence, was first brought into the TP USA community by her mother.
Listening to Erika Kirk “ignited something” in her and her friends, Merrill said, and has committed them to the conservative movement.
“It’s people like Erica Kirk who transform these shy girls, these girls who have no idea what they want do into people like her.”
“I think if she continues that down the line Gen. Z will become extremely conservative and we will stop apologizing for things we don’t need to apologize for,” Merrill said.
For all her emphasis on a woman’s role in the home, Erika Kirk has many endeavors outside of it.
Besides being a public facing figure alongside her husband — one half of a partnership touting traditional marriage —she has a devotional podcast and a Christian clothing company, Proclaim Streetwear, for which Charlie Kirk had modeled. She says she has pursued a doctorate in Biblical studies, and once founded a non-profit.
She has spoken with pride about female entrepreneurship — but at the same time decried “boss babe culture” as “toxic” and “antithetical to the Gospel.”
She has repeatedly said that building a family is far more important as a woman.
Yet there was a lot of momentum inside TPUSA for Erika Kirk to take a CEO role, according to Clark, who told CNN that she sees an avenue for Erika operating behind the scenes of the organization.
“I think it’s really important for the person who knew Charlie better than anyone in this world to have a say in upcoming decisions and the direction the company goes and what different goals are set and what projects we decide to go after next.”
What comes next could be defined by Erika Kirk, who could not be reached to speak to CNN. In the past, she has played a softer image to counterbalance to her outspoken, sometimes fiery husband.
Days before Charlie Kirk’s death, Turning Point USA announced a change to their maternity leave policy, to expand paid leave for mothers to six months. Clark said that while the policy came from Charlie, she perceived that the change was very likely inspired by his family.
As for the college campus debates Charlie Kirk was known for, Clark believes those will be left up to people other than Erika Kirk.
Her leadership prowess seemed evident just 48 hours after her husband’s death.
In her speech last week, she directed “young people who felt inspired by my husband’s faith,” to join and become involved in TPUSA.
“If there isn’t a chapter, you can’t find one, then start one. There is no excuse,” she said.
In the first 48 hours after her appeal, Turning Point received more than 32,000 inquiries to start new campus chapters, according to its spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, adding: “to put that in perspective, TPUSA currently has 900 official college chapters and around 1,200 high school chapters, with a presence of 3,500 total.”
By midweek, it was up to 54,000 inquiries.