Some say Nancy Grace doesn’t exist, that she is a myth, a story that mothers tell their daughters so that they do not grow up to be Lindsay Lohan. Others know that she is only too real – a monstrous trash-cable crime-porn death-beast, and Living Proof that Satan is real and amongst us.
Nancy Grace is the hawk-faced harpy who routinely makes a carnival show out of what seems to be reckless insinuations of guilt with absolutely no pretense of reasoned argument on her HLN show. She is also the reason I ardently avoid HLN, despite my almost animal need for lurid, pointless pop-crime stories. One wrong channel click and there she is – the unholy hair-helmeted spawn of the Marquis de Sade and Paula Deen – boggled-eyed, staring at me, spewing her bellicose harangues. If I could punch a voice – an angry nasal burn with a tinge of trailer trash.
Some fetishize greed or power to pornographic excess. Nancy Grace fetishizes criminal activity to pornographic excess. A bloated hate-maggot spewing on America’s face with slime about “sex-obsessed” female murder suspects, who when you watch, you feel your intellect draining away and the lizard brain throbbing like a toothache. Nancy Grace is pugnacious, grandiose, intractable, a medieval scold – a self-appointed judge, jury and executioner, who unabashedly biases the audience towards her self-proclaimed verdicts of guilt against whomever is the latest high profile crime suspect.
She panders to viewers who need to digest anger/hatred to get through their days, who need someone to blame for their lives failings. You know, Republicans. Her viewers are sycophantic, but also desperate and cruel. They breathlessly coo over Nancy’s beautiful twins, then go on to eviscerate Nancy’s villain du jour, causing a rictus of cruel malignity to light up Grace’s face. She surrounds herself with cloying, shrieking skulls who dance and clamor for a kernel of her approval, clearly fearing her stinging wrath. If someone says something that doesn’t jibe with Nancy’s theory of reality, she adopts an incredulous lilt — a combination of “I can’t believe you’re this stupid” and “I want to rip your fucking throat out”. Nancy Grace has that Conservative habit of tending to look for the evil in people – and psychologically speaking, when people always see evil in others, it is often because they are aware of the evil in themselves. But she always ends each’s night’s horror show broadcast with a parodically sincere/gruesome:
“Good night, FRIEND”.
If covering the snuff porn that was the Casey Anthony trial didn’t kill Nancy Grace, the Jodi Arias trial will. Nancy Grace has been having a non-stop orgasm over Jodi Arias. Everything about this trial – the pretty, eerily self-possessed murderess, the viciousness of the crime, the high-stakes sex, has Grace pulsating with excitement. With each new day of sexually explicit testimony, Nancy Grace’s blood pressure rises like a pressure cooker. I expect her to stroke out soon.
In case you managed to escape last year’s Casey Anthony horror, Anthony is a lady from Florida who probably was complicit in the death of her toddler. Or, according to Grace and expert Americans across the country, she is “Tot Mom”, a person who murdered her child. When reports surfaced that “Tot Mom” had a life, Nancy Grace should have just set up shop at Gitmo.
One thing you need to know about Nancy Grace is that she takes an overextended interest in the sexual lives of female defendants. With the snarling contempt of a pitbull, she accused Anthony of using her “sex appeal”, charm and non-verbal communication skills to project a false image of innocence and naivety. Casey Anthony managed to get off the hook, because there just wasn’t quite enough evidence of what the prosecution was alleging, and there’s this thing in our legal system where you’re not supposed to just give execute people unless you’re absolutely sure they committed the crime. And this is just the sort of dangerous legal loophole that makes Nancy Grace insane with rage!
After the not guilty verdict was read, Nancy Grace became unhinged. She launched into a bug-eyed soliloquy, the moralizing ending with a cable news paroxysm for the ages:
“Somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight.”
Pillow talk, that she probably learned from sidling up to Satan every night.
The surprise verdict gave Grace the opportunity to do her best exorcist impression and gave her her largest audience and best ratings ever: 2.9 million idiots. She ramped up her vitriolic crusade against Anthony, her lawyers and the jurors who acquitted her – attacking the education level of the men and women who gave up six weeks of the lives to sit sequestered on that jury and objectively entertain the evidence.
I think history will reveal that if it wasn’t for Nancy Grace making this case a national sensation, Casey Anthony would have ended up with a public defender. Anthony owes her acquittal to Grace.
OT: I’m not one to mock a lady’s fashion choices, but I’m disturbed by Nancy’s predilection for the barrette, an adorable affect on a girl of 9, but not so much on a 50-something year old woman. It flies in the face of her lips, which curl and snarl in DISGUST, and the menacing heavy mascara accentuating her death stare. And those eyebrows – have there ever been eyebrows that so depicted the malevolence of a person? Plucked to high arch of wicked-witchery, shrouding the swarthy cavern of her soul and the ever present scowl on her face. To make matters worse, she often wears the barrette with a black leather top and a necklace, a pair of handcuffs, accentuating her viciousness.
Nancy Grace dresses like a 2-dollar whore and talks like one, but she was actually once a prosecutor. Can you imagine how many innocent people she sent to prison because of her tendency to jump to conclusions before the evidence is even in, and then stick with it no matter what? That she’s too stupid for Twitter – see her continuing misuse of hashtags – #BabyinShoebox, #ToddFatToDie? and #CrockPotWifeKiller – should get her disbarred, if not the bullying of guests until they kill themselves. Yes, kill themselves.
26 year old mother Toni Medrano did a terrible thing: she got drunk, fell asleep on the couch with her newborn son, and ended up smothering the 3-week old. The two counts of manslaughter she was charged with were not good enough for Nancy Grace, who derided Ms Medrano mercilessly, dubbing her ‘VODKA MOM’ and DEMANDING murder charges be brought against the bereaved woman. “DID MOMMY BOOZE IT UP AND KILL HER BABY?” she shrieked, demanding to know why Ms Medrano was not charged with “MURDER ONE” (zero intent and what looks like a surplus of reckless indifference). She mocked Medrano, pouring cops of vodka to demonstrate how many full glasses she drank, relentlessly demonizing her, with her typical hyper-ventilating, nostril-flaring faux-persona, and inciting her audience pitchfork style.
Toni Medrano – whom police detectives called a “good and productive mother” who had no intent to harm her child – never did go to trial. That’s because she doused herself in a flammable liquid and set herself on fire in her mother’s backyard. According to Medrano’s mom, her daughter was severely depressed following the death of her baby, but Nancy Grace’s campaign of harassment on national TV, pilloried by her lynch mob fans, made her suicidal.
Granted, some might say a mother who kills her baby by drunkenly blacking out on top of it has problems beyond the bleating of callous news harpies. But, SHE SET HERSELF ON FIRE. According to Nancy’s Law, Toni Medrano was due the same punishment as Jodi Arias – a woman who (allegedly) stabbed and shot her lover to death in a jealous rage. A non psychopath would look at a person who accidentally kills her own child and get that she is going through unimaginable guilt and self hatred, and would consider her off limits.
Nor was this even the first time Nancy Grace’s evisceration of a person led to a suicide. In 2006, she was waging a nightly jihad – with the usual motley collection of bellowing analysts and “experts” – against 21-year old Melinda Duckett – a troubled young woman whose 2-year old son Trenton had disappeared . In an interview, Nancy Grace mercilessly grilled the distraught young mother about her son’s disappearance, strongly implying she was responsible. Grace’s rage grew to histrionic proportions in a near-sociopathic display of morbid prurience and sadistic exploitation.
The video of that interview appears to have been scrubbed from the web and Nancy Grace has since had to settle a lawsuit brought against her by the Duckett family. That’s because, the show was scheduled to air, Melinda Duckett crawled into her grandfather’s closet and blew her head off with his shotgun. She had to be identified by an arm tattoo. Anyone else would have had the decency to not run that pre-suicide interview, but Grace went ahead and aired the interview, adding a little yellow box updating viewers to the fact of Melinda Duckett’s suicide.
Then there was Nancy Grace’s epically awful haranguing of Elizabeth Smart, who had gone on the show to talk about the sex offender registry and asked to not be questioned about the details of her own abuse when she was 14? But Nancy was salivating for details of the child’s time in captivity. She continued to ask the reserved young woman such inane questions, that at one point Smart looked over to the left as if she needed corroboration that Grace was out of her mind.
Elizabeth Smart finally lost it when Nancy Grace showed a photo of the girl at 14 with her captors in burkas and guffawed: “LOOK AT THAT BURKA!! I mean, how’d ya SEE outta that thing!!?”
When Elizabeth insisted Nancy back off, Nancy scrambled to put on her best overwrought -with-anguish- fellow- victim act, backhanding the poor girl with her “understanding” how “victims don’t like to talk about what happened to them.”
Amanda Knox was another plum target for Nancy’s wrath/sexual obsession. Naturally, Grace knew – KNEW – that Amanda Knox was guilty, even after it was pretty well established to have been a witch hunt. To most of us, there was something very wrong with the narrative of the murder that Italian authorities and media presented: the operatic argument that Knox was a “luciferina” – an angel-faced she-devil – capable of female duplicity. But Nancy Grace bought into the ludicrous saga hook, line and sinker; the Pucciniesque closing arguments with the appeals to Dio!; the medieval courtroom with peeling frescos of the Madonna and crucifixes; the apple-cheeked college student/soccer nerd protesting her innocence; the histrionic Italian prosecutor trumpeting a ritualistic, satanic SEX ORGY…….titillating musings for a perverted Italian criminal judge, but also for an American television journalist.
The chief prosecutor, Guiliano Mignini,who led much of the chaos and confusion, had the flair for bombast and drama that was tailor-made for the brutal, bawdy world of Nancy Grace. Mignini and Nancy Grace share a fixation on sex that is more suited to a Jim Thompson novel than the prosecutor’s desk, feeding the worst tendencies of worldwide prurient tabloid media. Their overheated interpretation of Knox’s behavior was a particularly pungent manifestation of a universal trait: overconfidence in the ability to read someone else’s state of mind simply by looking at them. In Macbeth, Duncan remarks how hard it is “to find the mind’s construction in the face”. It’s a warning that Nancy Grace is seemingly unable to heed.
Nancy Grace has an endless capacity to speculate on a person’s character, thoughts, and motivations based on the slender evidence of a facial expression, a reaction, even an article of clothing. It is astonishing how quick she is to draw conclusions about how a person ought to look or behave in circumstances she has not even come close to experiencing, absolutely convinced that she knows what happened. She is free to blithely pronounce, from her TV perch, on whether someone in this situation is “behaving oddly” or not, and an inclination to oversimplify the minds and motivations of others – the root of all bigotry, and of all forms of inter-group conflict, violent and benign.
Amanda Knox’s face was tinder to Nancy Grace: pretty enough to incite her sex fantasies and just expressive enough to provide a rich canvas for her to gleefully pronounce on the soul it concealed.
When Amanda Knox was exonerated, and Guiliano Mignini facing criminal charges of his own, Nancy Grace was unwilling to part with the beloved tale of an unspeakably depraved sex monster disguised as a pretty American student. When questioned about Amanda’s exoneration, Nancy Grace shrugged, characteristically tossing aside nuance like unwanted fat on a steak:
“I believe that while Amanda Knox did not wield the knife herself, I think that she was there, with her boyfriend, and that he did the deed, and that she egged him on. That’s what I think happened.”
I just don’t understand why more juries don’t vote the way Nancy Grace wants them to! It’s like she’s fucking irrelevant or something.
Nancy Grace reserves her most stinging contempt for young women who party, drink, dance, and have sex. Her irrational hatred for Ms Medrano stemmed from the Vodka (Grace is a known compulsive booze-scold). Mrs Duckett had nude photos, Amanda Knox smoked pot and had a cute boyfriend.
Maybe Casey Anthony did kill her daughter, Maybe Melinda Duckett did know what happened to her boy. But establishing a woman’s guilt by the way in which she wears her sexuality, slathering them with woman-hate and assholery…once she is finally fired, Nancy Grace should be forced to undergo significant mental health counseling. Credit where credit is due, though, it must be hard to find such creative ways to shame women for being women. Then again, the only time she’s not completely, utterly terrible is when she’s yelling cringe-worthy things like, “BOOZE AND HOTPANTS!”
Grace frequently alludes to the murder of her former fiancé, a fact which drives her “crusade” for justice, and gives her license to cloak herself in the language of victims’ rights. It was okay for her to make a decision about what happened to Trenton Duckett before the police had, because she was just trying to find the baby. It was okay for her to pre-convict case Anthony, because what about little Calee? It was okay for her to violate the terms of her interview with Elizabeth Smart, because didn’t Smart just want to help victims?
Whether inflicting her warped brand of victim-advocacy on the public, or aiding and abetting the death of public confidence in the law, the only thing Nancy Grace seems to feel for the court system is contempt. The cops, prosecutors, jurors and courts are idiots, time-sucks, Keystone Cops or “kooks”.
Grace barkingly refuses to admit her mistakes – she’s just too “real” for us legal elite ivory tower-dwellers who think it’s wrong to prosecute people via spectacle and use a person’s death to stir up scandal. For one solid year Nancy Grace had convicted the Duke LaCross team and vilified the coach – saying, when the coach resigned: “why would an innocent man resign?” Rather than conceding her error, Nancy had another lawyer sit in for her. She similarly made no apologies for her brazen claim that the recently deceased Whitney Houston was probably held under water and murdered, a specious assertion backed by nothing other than Grace’s bulldozing ego.
Following the Elizabeth Smart abduction in 2002, Grace immediately and repeatedly proclaimed that the Smart family handyman was Elizabeth’s abductor. Grace continued to accuse the handyman, even after he died while in custody for a crime he had nothing to do with. When CourtTV confronted Grace about her incorrect information and whether or not she felt bad about, her answer was that the handyman was:
“…a known ex-con, a known felon, and brought suspicion on himself, so who could blame anyone for claiming he was the perpetrator?”
Folks, Nancy Grace has been sick for a long time. I don’t mean just a little under the weather, I mean full-blown sick. it’s amazing those who love her can’t see how sick. Maybe we get the media we deserve, and apparently we deserve rancid detritus with a side dish of mental incapacity. Personally I would love to see her get her comeuppance by being accused of something illegal and then having that terrible Jane the lez Mitchell or that gay guy Vinnie Politan trash her for a few years.
I don’t really hope there are more sensational trials with the defendant getting off, solely so Nancy Grace has an aneurysm and dies. Maybe Nancy Grace will become a footnote, mostly forgotten and referenced only in parody, without a place in the pantheon of cable TV antiheroes. Hating or loathing Nancy Grace understates how painful her existence affects a sane world, the sheer-focused damage to the legal process and the life-ruining diatribes, delivered to millions. I guess all I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t mind seeing Nancy Grace run over by a white Ford Bronco, no matter how fast it was traveling.
May she burn like some slob Icarus in the global warming Midnight Sun of trailer park apocalypse.
“Good night, friend”.
Next on Know Your Monsters: Dr. Drew!