Nancy Graceless
I became a TV critic because my parents were murdered by an impoverished TV actor and I decided to devote my life to championing their work so that no performer would have to become so desperate as to turn to a life of crime.
Well, not really. Not at all, actually. My parents are still alive, in fact. But it makes for a stirring story, no?
Nancy Grace, she of those teeth-on-tin-foil Court TV and CNN Headline News series where she declares every suspect guilty-before-proven-innocent and every defense attorney a soulless traitor to the human race, would apparently agree. The New York Observer reported today that she sexed-up her admittedly tragic past to justify her cartoonish on-air contempt for criminal defense attorneys.
What’s indisputable is that Grace’s finance was murdered in 1979. The rest of the story as she has told it – the killer was a stranger with a long rap sheet who insisted he was innocent and has filed appeal after appeal to get released from prison – is bunk. As, apparently, is her assertion that she testified in the case that she didn’t think the killer deserved the death penalty.
Grace’s fiancé was murdered by a former co-worker who confessed immediately to police and was spared the death penalty because he was mildly retarded.
How cynical is it to not only exploit the death of a beloved one but to enhance the circumstances so as to promote one’s own career? Keith Olbermann, on his MSNBC show, named Grace “The Worst Person in the World� today. That’s letting her off light.
And I thought Grace’s TV shows were reprehensible.
