Sarah tells Mike how a superhero’s genesis was a supervillain’s origin story all along. In our new deep dive, we tackle Nancy Grace’s “Objection!” and debate how defendants should behave at trial, why prosecutors seem to make good daytime TV stars and whether Nancy really came to New York City with a curling iron and a dream.
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Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah tells Mike how a superhero’s genesis was a supervillain’s origin story all along. In our new deep dive, we tackle Nancy Grace’s “Objection!” and debate how defendants should behave at trial, why prosecutors seem to make good daytime TV stars and whether Nancy really came to New York City with a curling iron and a dream.
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Deep Dive: Nancy Grace's "Objection!" (Week 1)
Sarah: Yeah, I was thinking I should write like fan fiction about like Hermione starting a Wizarding Innocence project, and everyone being a dick to her the way they were about her House Elf Liberation project.
Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the true crime podcast that tries to focus on the true part more than the crime part. How's that?
Sarah: I would say that we are a true crime podcast focused on the impossibility of ever knowing the truth about anything. And then that determines how we look at the crime part. But we have our own approach to this.
Mike: I was trying to say something that sounded pithy and cute. But it didn't have to be accurate. I think you're taking the opposite approach.
Sarah: Oh no. Oh, well, this episode is all about that, so strap in.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I am Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic.
Mike: And you can support the show on Patreon and on PayPal. Or you can buy a cute t-shirt, or you cannot do any of those things and donate to other stuff. We still love you. And today we're talking about Nancy Grace. I'm nervous.
Sarah: Yeah, how come?
Mike: First of all, I don't want to be wrong about Nancy Grace. I think Nancy Grace has done harm to the country, and I'm not ready to give that up. And I'm afraid that you're going to make me feel complicated about her.
Sarah: I don't know. That's not really my goal here, to try and facilitate empathy for Nancy Grace. And I feel like my approach to whatever subject we have is dictated by like the kind of run they've had to this point. And Nancy Grace has been in charge of her own narrative in a way that very few women are, because she has been on TV for hours every week for years. She has helped define what true crime media is in this country, and her view of things has found a lot of purchase in American media. She has not been unheard or unlistened to, and she has been able to make her point of view extremely clear. And so it is not my job to help her do that.
Mike: Thank God. Thank God.
Sarah: I have other jobs today.
Mike: But yeah, we're talking about her book, one of her books.
Sarah: So she has a few books, but the one that we're talking about is called Objection!, Which I don't know about you, but when a title has an exclamation point in it, I assume it's a musical.
Mike: Or like a Flash Gordon serial.
Sarah: Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System.
Mike: Oh no!
Sarah: To me the most interesting thing about that title is that it implies correctly that Nancy Grace is throughout this book in a way she doesn't seem to notice, arguing against her own job. I would like to know from you what is your mental image of Nancy Grace?
Mike: So, my understanding of Nancy Grace, which is probably totally wrong is that she is a former prosecutor who rose to prominence during I think the OJ Simpson trial. And then she has parlayed that into a journalistic, true crime entertainment, swirling smoothie of a career. Whereover, I mean, I don't know if she was always like this, where if this happened to her over time.
But I'm most familiar with her as someone who goes after the sort of, you know, criminals getting away with it. That's what I associate with her is she's always wanting harsher punishments, more police powers. She is very skeptical of criminals in a way that she is not skeptical of the criminal justice system.
Sarah: What's actually interesting is that I would dispute what you're saying, because I think that she sees herself and others see her as this great defender of the legal system, but she's really not because she does not give a shit about due process. So, this book, Objection, like not to spoil too much, but we are going to get into many moments in many arguments, where he is basically, she's like, and then this defense lawyer defended their client. Yeah. That's their job, it is adversarial system you know, perfectly well as a former prosecutor that both sides have to be working. And she is actually kind of anti-illegal system.
Mike: She's a nihilist. She's technically Antifa.
Sarah: Uh, Hmm. I don't know Mike, but I don't actually know of her commenting on the OJ Simpson trial.
Mike: Oh, see, I could have completely made that up, I thought that that's where she came from, but I might be mixing her up with somebody else.
Sarah: But yeah, she has been on TV since 1996. She is on TV still. She has a daily true crime radio show. And she has a new book coming out in September called, Don't be a Victim Fighting Back Against America's Crime Wave, which is a fascinating title because America's crime rates have been steadily falling for 30 years.
Mike: Yeah. That's really shameless.
Sarah: And so, I mean, do you know which case is kind of like her big case.
Mike: Ooh, no.
Sarah: Casey Anthony.
Mike: Oh, this is one that we need to do because I have been staying completely spoiler free. I literally know nothing about this case.
Sarah: This was a case where a young woman in Florida was accused of killing her daughter who was a toddler. And was in the end found not guilty, and the verdict that I think the majority of the American public disagreed with. She really looked bad, the trial made her look bad, but ultimately the jury found her not guilty. And it is just rare that that happens in a high-profile trial.
And so, Nancy Grace had been kind of leading the charge and the medias’ crusade of, you know, Casey Anthony is a monster and she called her ‘Tot Mom’. This was like, one of the things who became notorious for is. She's like a walking, talking tabloid headline and so I called Casey Anthony Tot Mom.
Mike: Man.
Sarah: So here's what Nancy Grace said about where ‘tot mom’ came from. This is a quote from an interview she did with Bill O'Reilly. She says, “When I was in law school, I would often give cases that I would have to memorize hundreds and hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages of legal documents for class. And it was easier for me to remember a case by the content of the case, not the name. So, I would name each case by the content and in this case, I needed content that would fit at the bottom of the screen. So our viewer would know what we were talking about and Tot Mom fit. It was nothing personal.”
Mike: Sure.
Sarah: To me the point of the legal system and the way the media works around it is that the public is already going to be pretty poisoned by the presumption of guilt.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: So it seems really counter to the ideals of justice to have a media that enthusiastically encouraged them to travel even farther in that direction. Especially if that particular media person is a former prosecutor like knows what the goals of this system are supposed to be. So, I guess, you know, what I find most interesting about Nancy Grace is that I started researching her a couple of years ago. And I remember suggesting her as a show and you are like, is there really a story there? No, but there is a book. So now we're going to go through it like a few minutes before we started recording today, I had this moment of realization. I was, oh, I get it now, Nancy Grace is my shadow self.
Mike: Oh God.
Sarah: Right. Because you contain always a little bit of your opposite and I feel like inevitably I understand her. I understand why someone would want so badly to be a crusader for good and for justice. I'm like, part of me wants that too. Of course, I feel bad, of course, I want that. I guess I have gone about it in a different way and try not to go on too many ego trips. But I still have them. So like Nancy Grace is like my Kylo Ren.
Mike: It is like Sarah Marshall anti-matter, this is great.
Sarah: Yeah. So that's kind of my interest in Nancy Grace at this moment. And maybe let's jump into her book.
Mike: Let's dive in, I'm so excited. So does she in the book, does she go through like case by case, or is it a memoir or like, what is this actual book?
Sarah: It has some memoir stuff in it, but it's really kind of, it's a polemic and it's a polemic on the subject of the title, which once again is, Objection How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24-7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System by Nancy Grace with Diane Clehane.
Mike: So the criminal justice system has been hijacked. It has been taken away and turned into this thing that is not working, I guess.
Sarah: Yeah. And Nancy Grace is standing up and saying, oh, junction. I love how, when we do these book clubs, your like, I will pick a nice book that people will enjoy. And I'm like, I'm going to pick a terrible book. This is kind of a long opening scene, but this is really her whole genesis story.
Mike: I love this.
Sarah: “I remember as if it were yesterday sitting on the brick steps of my family's home in Georgia that August. It was so still and hot and soundless, nothing moved, not a breeze, not the song of a bird, not a single movement to be heard or felt. The heat was so intense, it seemed as if I could actually hear it rising up off the dirt in invisible waves.”
This makes me feel like Nancy Grace wants her life story to be made into a to Kill a Mockingbird type movie. But about a little girl in the deep South who grows up wanting to convict everyone. “A few weeks before my fiancé had been murdered.”
Mike: Holy shit.
Sarah: “Keith was shot five times in his beautiful face and back. It was only a few months until our wedding, but the gunman couldn't wait. Violence doesn't acknowledge weddings and anniversaries, birthdays and celebrations. Random violence entered my world. The world I grew up in did not know violence or hatred, the chimes and the Methodist Church’s steeple literally called everyone home at six o'clock with him. God will take care of you and his eyes on the sparrow. My only encounters with violence and evil came through fleeting glimpses on the evening news at suppertime. All the horror seems so far, far away. In my world, there was nothing as far as the eye could see, but tall pine trees and soybean fields, peach orchards and rows and rows of corn and cotton.”
I hear murmurings, tell me about that.
Mike: I mean, I'm like struggling not to like interrupt you cause it's all this stuff that we always talk about of this fake juxtaposition between sort of the criminal element outside of her life, and then this beautiful crystal fragile perfect life inside.
Sarah: Yes. You can really feel the ghost writing in this can't you. You can feel the professional writer who knows how to start with a strong image and a strong contrast before you were innocent and you lived in a world of peaches and God. And now your fiancé has been gunned down. I mean, with that makes me think about that plus the kind of prosecutor she became is like, why do we have someone who becomes a prosecutor because they are shocked by the existence of violence relatively late in life? And then decide to stop it by finding the people who do violence and putting them away for as long as possible. That's not really a reasonable approach to violence. It doesn't seem to decrease it. It doesn't make anyone's life better in the long run.
Mike: Right. And this feeling of like criminals took my life from me, which is like a very vengeful way of framing this.
Sarah: Yeah. And you know people are entitled to their feelings of revenge, but maybe not once they become public servants.
Mike: Yes.
Sarah: Okay. “Keith’s world had ended and mine had exploded. I remember trying to go back to classes, I couldn't. The thought of sitting inside the four walls of a quiet college classroom studying Shakespearian Literature. Once my joy was now like a heavy noose around my neck, I knew I could never go back to the world as I knew it. Wife, mother, and schoolteacher, it was not meant to be.”
I love that Nancy Grace once wanted to like teach Shakespeare. She would have been a great college lecture actually. Like imagine Nancy Grace teaching a class on King Lear.
Mike: Say what you want with lady, she is a good talker.
Sarah: And Nancy grace continues.
“I escaped the vacuum the only way I could, I did eventually go back to school, to law school. I knew the law would be my sword and my shield. I had to be ready when the time came, and it did. Seven years after Keith's murder, I tried my first jury trial. At that moment and that Atlanta courtroom, I took to the fight, like a fish to water and trying to cure the injustice heaped on other victims of violent crime. I was curious for the next 10 years I fought in the pit. And felony courtrooms and what was then the murder capital of the country, inner city Atlanta. The battle consumed me. Every case was a cause I could take up because every case represented a victim.”
Mike: Oh God.
Sarah: That's the end of my opening excerpt.
Mike: I mean, she's really describing what she considers to be a crusade. Due to her extremely understandable emotional distress at the murder of her partner. She's now sort of using that as like a quilt to put over all of the other cases that she looks at. She's taking her sense of vengeance and trying to apply it to criminality as a whole.
Sarah: Yeah. What Nancy Grace most certainly appears to want is some form of retribution.
Mike: Do we know anything about the circumstances of her husband's death?
Sarah: Her fiancé’s and yes, we do. Let me jump to a place in the book where she talks about that.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: So this is from chapter one. Defense attorneys and other wiley characters I have known and Nancy writes, “My deep seated, ethical problem with defense attorneys likely traces back to my being a witness in Keith's murder trial. The whole thing has always been a big blur to me, but I do distinctly remember going to the courthouse as a witness. The cavernous courtroom reminded me of the one in to Kill a Mockingbird. The witness stand was several feet high. Directly below and in front of me sat the defendant and his lawyer. The defendant never looked at me in the face. He never could bring his eyes up to meet mine. I didn't know it at the time, but that must have been when I began to formulate my theory on the importance of what I call behavioral evidence. Behavior that is so odd or disturbing, so abnormal or curious, it logically points to either guilt or pangs of conscience.”
Mike: Nooo!
“If I had been on trial for the murder of another’s loved one, I would scream out, I didn't do it, I didn't do it, please believe me. I would never hurt you, but the defendant did nothing remotely like that. He just looked away, avoiding my eyes. Because he knew he had murdered someone and looking at me and the rest of Keith's family, he had to realize the incredible pain he had caused all over a wallet with $35 in it. There was no cross-examination that I recall it was over. I just slowly stood up and made my way down the steps and out of the courtroom, no one said a word. And as I passed the defense table, I slowed down and looked at him. He never looked at me. Even the defense attorney looked away from me.”
Mike: This is like the logic of a child. I mean, look, this guy probably did it. It's completely understandable for her to have this deep infinite sense of anger at the person who took her fiancé away from her that is completely understandable. But what is frustrating is she's literally channeling this into the worst kind of evidentiary analysis.
Sarah: Because this is something you hear all the time. Nancy Grace is not by any means alone here and being like, he wouldn't look at me or he just seemed guilty. He behaved in a way that made it clear he was guilty of this very specific crime. You hear that all the time.
Mike: Right. There is the logic of fucking Sandy Hook, conspiracy theory videos, where they show footage of these grieving parents and they're, oh, they must be actors, because they told a joke. The fact that he couldn't look at her is interesting, but I can imagine somebody being innocent and also not looking at the person.
Sarah: Oh yeah. Well, listen, one of the things that our friend of the show Laura Babylon has told me is that if you are defending someone who is accused of committing some terrible crime. And if a victim or presumably a victim relative is testifying, the last thing you want them to do is look at the victim or the relative. Because if they think that you not looking at them means that you feel guilty, then they will think that you are looking at them means that you are gloating, that you were trying to intimidate them.
And it's interesting too, because most defendants don't testify at their own trials because that makes them vulnerable to cross examination. So, you've got, you know, these trials where everyone is articulate, but the person who's accused of the crime, it's very weird.
Mike: Yeah. It's also not an argument against defense lawyers, because it sounds like the defense lawyer didn't cross examine her. It doesn't sound like the defense lawyer did anything bad there. So it's weird that this is like bolstering.
Sarah: The defense lawyer just was sitting there. Yeah, it's very interesting. She is like my enmity for the defense attorneys goes back to my experience, having one in my sight line. My favorite part of this, however, is the part where Nancy writes.
“If I had been on trial for the murder of another loved one, I would scream out. I didn't do it, I didn't do it, please believe me, I would never hurt you.
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: So I know this is like the most ridiculous question, but, why Mike, why would the defendant not do that?
Mike: First of all, that can also make somebody look guilty because doth protest too much. And also, this is why we have representatives of the justice system, this is literally the purpose of the justice system is that we don't just have whoever screams the loudest. We believe, or whoever seems the realist gets the verdict that they want. How can a lawyer possibly say this?
Sarah: Although Nancy Grace's career is based on being the loudest, so.
Mike: That's true.
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: So are the circumstances of Keith’s death that it was just like a botched robbery kind of thing.
Sarah: I'm going to read you a bit from another source. This was an article that came out in The Observer 15 years ago by Rebecca Dana. It is called, Did Nancy Grace, TV Crimebuster Muddy her Myth? “Every crime fighting superhero has a creation story. Nancy Grace, the prosecutor, turned breakout star at CNN Headline News has a particularly moving one. As she tells it in the summer of 1980, she was a 19-year-old college student in small town, Georgia engaged to Keith Griffin. Then one August morning, a stranger, a 24-year-old thug with a history of being on the wrong side of the law accosted Griffin outside a convenience store. He shot him five times in the head and back stole $35 from his wallet and left him dead.”
“Police soon tracked down the killer and a new phase of suffering began from Ms. Grace. The suspect brazenly denied any involvement. At trial, Ms. Grace testified then waited as jury deliberations dragged on for three days. The district attorney asked her if she wanted the death penalty and in a moment of youthful weakness, she said no. The verdict came back guilty, life in prison, and a string of appeals and sued. Because of what happened in Georgia, Ms. Grace has said over and over, she knows firsthand how the system favors hardened criminals over victims.”
“It is the foundation of her judicial philosophy, her motivation in life. Her casus belli and much of it isn't true. Nancy Grace was engaged to a man named Keith Griffin. He was murdered in Georgia and the man who killed him is serving a life sentence. In that Ms. Grace’s version lines up with the official records from the Georgia Bureau of Investigations, newspaper articles from the time of the murder and interviews with many of those involved in the case. But those same sources contradict Ms. Grace when it comes to other salient facts of the crime and the trial.”
And then here’s the contradictions. “Griffin was shot, not by a random robber, but by a former co-worker, the killer Tommy McCoy. He was 19, not 24 and had no prior convictions. Mr. McCoy confessed to the crime the evening he was arrested. The jury convicted him in a matter of hours, not days. Prosecutors asked for the death penalty, but didn't get it because Mr. McCoy was mildly, intellectually disabled.”
Mike: Oh my God.
Sarah: “Mr. McCoy never had an appeal. He filed a habeas application five years ago and after a hearing, it was rejected. The justice system, in other words, apparently worked the way it was supposed to. And an emotional phone interview ranging over the inconsistencies in her account. Ms. Grace said, I have not researched the defendant. I have tried not to think about it.”
Mike: I mean, this is one of those things that under any other circumstances would just be like a sad human story that is just this awful thing happened to her. And in her mind over time, she ends up kind of telling the story in various different ways and kind of twisting it to suit opinions that she holds about the justice system. Which is something we all do, it happens. It's a human thing, especially in something that's just this like earthquake of emotion that comes along with it losing a loved one. So that's completely like everything that's happening with her is understandable until you start making it like a foundation for actual policy changes, and actual sort of twisting other people's opinions about the criminal justice system. I mean, the fact that she is casting as some sort of injustice. A man who killed another person and did a life sentence.
Sarah: It's like the system did everything it claimed to do, but I didn't get chopped nuts on my sundae.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: It's interesting too that the jury deliberating for a long time is supposed to be bad for victims. You are like, Nancy, I realized that if that had happened, which it didn't, but if it had that would have been difficult for you to live in that much suspense. If you are a defendant and a jury is deciding whether you're going to go to prison or not, it's kind of ideal for them to talk about it for more than a couple of hours. Every one of these decisions cannot be dictated by your emotional needs.
Mike: I mean, people that turn their sort of real sense of aggrievement into anger at the justice system you know, women who were sexually assaulted and who got treated like shit by the cops. And then sort of go on this crusade about how there should be longer sentences for rapists. That to me makes some sort of sense because there really is an injustice at the heart of that. Even if I think their response to it is disproportionate, but in this one, it's like, what are you mad about Nancy?
Sarah: I mean, she's really like the patron saint of Karens.
Mike: I was just about to say the original Karen.
Sarah: Right. It's like so Nancy, you're telling me that your fiancé was murdered. The police swiftly identified and the legal system swiftly convicted.
Mike: The intellectually disabled guy.
Sarah: Teenager who had done it and they convicted him in like less than a full day of deliberations and he never filed any appeals and it never looked like he was gonna get out of prison. What are you unhappy with? What did you want?
Mike: But Sarah, he didn't look at her, so.
Sarah: He didn't stand up and shout about how he was innocent. If he had done that she would have written a much longer anecdote in her book about how that made him look guilty.
Mike: It's like the guy I dated that used to yell at Uber drivers when we were stuck in traffic. I get that you are mad that we're now going to be late this thing.
Sarah: But you can't blame this person for what Seattle is.
Mike: Yes, exactly. You are mad at the situation, but you're applying that to whatever person is nearby.
Sarah: Yeah. And I guess according to Nancy Grace the defense becomes the problem. So it's interesting because she thinks she's presenting this like superhero origin story where she is like, my planet was destroyed, and I was raised by farmers. And you look closer, and you are actually a super villain. This is actually a super villain origin story, because it's a story about you responding with irrational, disproportionateness to something that you experienced and then like basing your whole identity around avenging this perceived injustice.
The aspects of the crime that she changes are very interesting. And then the actual story of the crime, too, this to me is maybe the most interesting change that she makes because evidently, the 19-year-old who killed her fiancé, Keith, did so because he had been fired and blamed Keith for it. And so he came and shot Keith.
Mike: It's sort of like what Nancy Grace is doing. It is a bad situation that he is then blaming on this one individual.
Sarah: Oh, you went there. But right something went terribly wrong, and you take it out on one person.
Mike: That's again though, I mean the structural incentives are always toward emphasizing the stranger danger aspect of things. Rather than like the completely everyday thing of a dispute between two people escalates to this place that is totally absurd, which is a much more common story.
Sarah: Yeah, or just like someone who you didn't even know you were potentially having a dispute with, like decides to develop a grudge about you. Yeah, so the stuff that she changes makes it a crime that is emblematic of the kind of crime that she's attempting to be tough on. Where it is like put people in prison sooner and for less of a reason. And also like the idea of like someone whose killing someone for the small amount of money in their wallet. You hear that rhetoric all the time.
Mike: That's true.
Sarah: It's like his victim's life was only worth $13 to him. And it is like, okay, it's not as if this person is sitting around thinking about how they value human life and how they're willing to murder someone for $13. It is armed robberies that end in murder or escalate into murder are not planned events. But anyway, the fact that the Nancy Grace crime in her head kind of evolves into, my fiancé was killed for $35, which was all his life was worth. McCoy apparently did take money out of his wallet, but it was less money than that.
So I don't know why she passed up that as a storytelling opportunity, but it makes it into something where it wasn't about this disproportionate sense of revenge or feeling personally wrong or something. I mean, it's interesting to me that she's shaping her own life quite possibly, not at all consciously to align with like the kinds of crimes that it has become her job to prosecute and to talk loudly about.
Mike: Right. The purpose of stranger danger killings is making you feel scared because it could happen to you. This is one of the reasons why, you know, human trafficking, every single human trafficking poster you've ever seen. It says it happens everywhere, it could happen to anyone, it's all around us. It's this idea that you're a potential victim. And so this is why you don't ever want to emphasize the interpersonal nature of these kinds of crimes of it was a really messy divorce and this person had a history of mental illness.
And so they kidnapped their own children and across state lines. You never want to tell that story because then it's like, well then there's people at higher risk of this. And there's actually things we can do for those populations. No, you want to emphasize the total randomness of it because then there's nothing we can do other than punish.
Sarah: Yeah. And also, by definition, her audience are people who she can presume to share her fear, which has to be like the sudden victim of stranger danger. And what doesn't occur to her, I don't think is that there are a lot of other people who far more reasonably are afraid of at any moment becoming a victim of the legal system.
Mike: Right, right.
Sarah: Yeah. Do you want to hear some more Nancy Grace’s book?
Mike: Yes. Okay.
Sarah: This is back to her introduction and her description of her time as a prosecutor, she says, “Guilty pleas cause me great personal turmoil. How was I to discern if today's shoplifter would become tomorrow's armed robber? I quickly gained a reputation for being unreasonable when negotiating pleas and vicious at trial, I didn't care. The battle was all that mattered. It is of those years that I am the proudest, I made next to nothing, but the reward to my heart and soul was priceless. I had the opportunity to be the voice of those who have no voice. Most often women, children, and minorities overlooked, and never heard in our system. I learned what they don't teach you in law school, but the Constitution protects the accused, blanketing them and safeguarding their quote, rights. Victims have no voice, no face and no recourse.”
Mike: Super good sign when people put the word rights in air quotes.
Sarah: I know. Yes, and that the Constitution blankets and safeguards the rights of defendants. I love that she uses the word blanketing. It makes me think that her mental image, which I think this is accurate is that the Constitution takes all the criminals and puts a big blanket, you know, big afghan, around their shoulders. It is like cuddle up, sweetie. I don't think it does that.
Mike: Also it is pretty incredible to look about the country and be like the criminal justice system is way too easy on people.
Sarah: And we're, and this book is kind of long form that argument. And one of the things that I find both dismaying and heartening is that it is like really cherry-picking stuff, in the arguments that are defense attorneys are bad. It's like this one defense attorney was sort of jocular with the media one time and it's like, okay.
Mike: Right. It's like, I mean, it has the same structure as every single, campus free speech policing is out of control story where it's, did you know that a 19 year old at Oberlin said something stupid about a sandwich? And you are right, okay.
Sarah: And you're like, so your point is that we shouldn't have liberal arts in colleges anymore, or what. It is also interesting because the position that the criminal justice system is too soft on criminals will always be able to be robust, even as long as we don't have the death penalty in every single state. Because there are really a lot of people in this country whose views of how the system should function are so punitive. You know, that is going to be a significant part of the population. I don’t know what my point was with that, except that it makes me sad.
Mike: But you're right, I agree. Yes, also me.
Sarah: Oh, so I have a clip for you. This is a, we are just gonna watch a couple of minutes of this. This is a news story for when she was still a prosecutor with her 90s hair and it talks about her as a lawyer and her nickname, Amazing Grace.
Mike: That's actually a pretty good nickname to be fair.
Sarah: It is. And also Grace is her actual last name, which I was very surprised by.
Mike: She should have changed it to Nancy Vengeance. It would have been more on brand.
Sarah: Okay. So, I just sent that to you, three, two, one, go when you're ready.
Mike: Three, two, one go. Oh, there she is, wow.
Sarah: First shot, she is putting some hairspray on.
Mike: She looks so different.
Sarah: Yeah. What is she doing?
Mike: She is like shouting in court and throwing things around. Killers, rapists, pimps, punks, she has put them all away. Wow, she sounds like a beauty queen or something. She has this great southern accent and voice. She sounds much less flinty than she does now.
Sarah: She was much more soft-spoken back then at least in the media.
Mike: We found some forensics.
Sarah: Did you hear her say, I believe in redemption, I'm just not concerned with it.
Mike: Nice. A new greed of women tackling America's crime wave.
Sarah: Avenging angels who'd rather bust bad guys than earn big fees defending them. Look at that bow, she has a bow on.
Mike: So she's prosecuting a guy who killed his wife or may have killed his wife.
Sarah: Allegedly Mike, allegedly, look at that hair. I love this look.
Mike: Amazing. I got to admit she's very likable.
Sarah: Right.
Mike: So they're going through the details of this case where it looks pretty clear that the dude did it. His wife was about to leave him, his wife had a thump on the head when they found the body.
Sarah: It feels like watching Dixie Carter on Designing Women.
Mike: Yes. The defendant left a track a mile wide and there is the guy in court. Do you think the state's heart is stone?
Sarah: She is like Blanche DuBois in community theater level, you know?
Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sarah: And see something even I with my naked untrained eyes. You noticed that her accent really fluctuates.
Mike: It's really interesting actually.
Sarah: Yeah. She has like juror accent and then talking to CNN accent.
Mike: Oh, right. And she is now, she's getting emotional, talking about how the victim had been punched and slapped by this guy. It does seem like the guy sucks. I mean, she's pretty convincing.
Sarah: Yes. Based on the literally 45 seconds of evidence and time, we have had to think about it. It seems like a strong case for the prosecution.
Mike: This segment is manipulating me in exactly the way that she is manipulating the jury, it’s working. Oh, now they're doing her origin story about Keith getting killed. Oh, it says Keith was gunned down by a criminal on parole, which it sounds like isn't true.
Sarah: Which we know is not true.
Mike: If he had still been in jail, this never would have happened.
Sarah: She's saying this with total conviction, I think she believes this.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: I think she maybe was told that he had been in trouble and just kind of in town in some general way. And over time that grows into something else in your brain. It feels true.
Mike: It's where they're doing the segment. Why is this newsworthy? It's just like a lady prosecutor.
Sarah: That's the news. They're like lady prosecutors. They are like did you know that when there is a place for women in lawyering?
Mike: I know we got the guilty verdict of the dude.
Sarah: For Atlanta's star, deputy district attorney, it's another big win.
Mike: Wow.
Sarah: Okay. So now you've had kind of a dose of her charisma. Tell me about your experience of prime time, Nancy Grace.
Mike: Yeah. I had assumed that she had kind of always been a talking head or like the way that she came to be known by us, Joe and Janine “Q” driveway through commenting on the OJ Simpson trial. But it sounds like she actually was a media darling as a prosecutor, not necessarily as a commentator. And so CNN or whoever plucked her out of obscurity and started doing these stories on, the lady prosecutor, and then she rose to prominence that way as this like moral crusade that she was on. And then somebody eventually offered her a TV deal.
Sarah: Yeah, well, I do not know how well she was known as a prosecutor, but I do think that like telegenic lady prosecutors were a sought-after media commodity in the nineties. And she is very charming. Can you talk about her charm in this a little bit?
Mike: She's got the whole Clarence Darrow, I'm not some fancy lawyer and in front of you kind of like snapping your suspenders a little bit.
Sarah: I'm just a deputy district attorney.
Mike: I'm just the one who does this for a living.
Sarah: But making yourself personable, making it kind of a personal appeal, a personal appeal to the jury's decency. But I would say before we get back into her book, but what I find compelling about her in this footage, and what I feel kind of less of as she's gotten more and more angry and sort of like focused on a larger audience on her shows now, which I really relate to in this early footage. Especially is because the fact that like she is clearly so sure of her conclusions and there is just something charismatic about that. We are drawn to that as people. And I think that's we are noticing in ourselves and noticing just the charisma of people who are sure of what they're doing with their lives or who act that way.
Mike: Right. There is a reason why con man, the full word of that is confidence man. And what I learned when I was interviewing investigators of white-collar crimes, is it one thing that links a lot of white-collar crime is this like brazen confidence. Just describing a straight up pyramid scheme with this incredible 100% certainty that it is going to work out. And that's a really good way to deceive people is to have this overconfidence. It's a great way to get on TV too.
Sarah: Might be the best way. And speaking of that, here's the next thing Nancy talks about in her book.
“My transition from a courtroom in Atlanta to a New York city television studio was by happenstance while serving as a special prosecutor in Atlanta. I was called to sit on a panel of legal experts in the hall of justice in New York City while still prosecuting in Atlanta. I happened to be seated between two renowned defense attorneys. Johnnie Cochran straight off the OJ Simpson case and Roy Black, straight off a victory and the William Kennedy Smith rape case. Naturally, we got into a huge fight. Several months later, the elected district attorney in Atlanta, my boss decided to retire. I was devastated. Not only had Mr. Slayton given me the chance to become a trial lawyer at a time when very few women in the South were litigating in courtrooms, he was like a grandfather to me.”
“I didn't know what I would do. I had not gone to law school to handle slip and falls, argue whiplash car accidents, or haggle over contracts. I wanted justice for crime victims. I considered public service with the battered women's center, but then the founder of courtroom television network, Steve Brill flew to Atlanta and asked me face to face to join his new experiment, co-anchoring illegal talk show with Johnny Cochran. I deeply disagreed with the Simpson defense and with the option of high-priced defense work looming. I wanted to take Cochran on. I took off for New York shortly after Mr. Slayton served out his office.”
“In 1997, I arrived in New York City with two boxes of clothes, a curling iron and $200 in my saving account. Even now, all these years later, while sitting in a dark set, staring into a camera lens. I wonder if I should go back to the courtroom to battle adversaries who trick lady justice. I accept but justice, I was led to the airwaves. I know God will lead me to my next battle.”
Mike: I mean, whatever Nancy. I don't know why she's pretending that when she moved to New York to be a television personality, it was like arriving at Ellis Island with like nothing in my pocket.
Sarah: I find this moment really funny because that's the standard. I started from nothing I'm scrappy thing, but she's 37 years old and she's been a prosecutor for years. And so, it's like, Nancy.
Mike: She's been like a middle-class professional, it’s fine.
Sarah: It seems irresponsible, but you have so little saving, what were you spending it on?
Mike: I know, why build up this myth? And also, she's doing the thing that I think women are like conditioned to do, is this huge leap upward in my career was just a coincidence and it had nothing to do with my ambition. And I think probably she is pretty ambitious and that's fine.
Sarah: Yes. Well, this is a classic thing whenever women are called to account for their achievements, you have to, somehow in order to remain likable, suggest that like you didn't get where you are by working really hard and being strategic about it. And you have to blame your success on someone else, like God.
Mike: She probably was getting more media attention and she thought like this could be a second or a better or more lucrative, who cares career for me? And, yes, people do this all the time.
Sarah: Or maybe I want to get out of lawyering.
Mike: Yes, and she probably like whatever, sold her house in Atlanta and bought a new house when she moved. It's probably like she didn't show up there like Rose getting off the Titanic. I do not know why we need this myth.
Sarah: No, Mike, she had $200 and it was 1997.
Mike: It is fine Nancy.
Sarah: She says her savings account, she doesn’t say what was in her checking account. It's just so obviously fake, it's fancy, you can make stuff up that seems reasonable or that makes sense. But it's the part in the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin where he's like, I don't drink beer because it's expensive for very little nutrition and it serves no real purpose. And it's like, okay, Ben Franklin. There is lots of stuff you can lie about but draw a line somewhere.
Mike: Not everything has to match up with like the myth that you're trying to build it.
Sarah: Uh, okay. Let's get through this. We have one more rich page. Isn't this fun?
Mike: Oh my God, so fun.
Sarah: This is what I know. “There is a very real struggle going on in our world today. The age-old struggle between good and evil, maybe it sounds simplistic, but it is true. Nevertheless, I find my sharpest sword to be the truth and I use it whenever I can.” This isn't a very funny statement. You know, we will get much more into this later, but one of her main functions apparently is to inject half-truths and confusion into the record as the story is developing, which then makes them harder to remove.
Mike: Right.
Sarah: I think she's speaking sincerely here. I think that her own emotional truth is the story that she is wielding.
“When the sorrow, the frustration, the moments with Keith forever lost resurface, my response is to fight. Here in is the truth, as I see it. I'm on the inside of the struggle for justice calling out all who will listen. This is what I see and what I know, regardless of whether it is politically incorrect, or disturbing, or tastes bitter going down. The battle of good against evil is real and palpable and as being waged in your local courthouse. And what’s funny is that I totally agree with that last paragraph. It's just that we are on different sides.”
Mike: Ooh, yes. Meeting Miss Anti-Matter.
Sarah: So yes, I am very excited to continue this book and basically to go through the arguments that Nancy is putting forth in it and just meet them on their own terms and explore the charisma of the crusader role. Because I think that is a very important theme in our world today.
Mike: Yeah. And I am looking forward to next episode when you will be wearing a bow and speaking with an accent.
Sarah: I'm telling you, true as I can hear with my own naked ear.