Sometimes reality doesn't fit the narrative that you want to tell. So, you add an "embellishment" here, an "embellishment" there and the resulting fiction fits better into the narrative that you are trying to tell. You get a better story to tell when people ask you how you entered your line of work.
Nancy Grace has been telling a story for years about the murder of her fiancee, Keith Griffin, when she was 19 and how her outrage at the criminal justice system drove her to become a prosecutor and then a missing-white-woman reporter. Nancy Grace's fiancee, Keith Griffin, was murdered when she was 19. That part of the story is true, but that is just about the only part of the story that is true.
More below the flip.
Rebecca Dana of the New York Observer checked the court documents and participants of the trial in 1979 and found that they tell a very different story from the narrative that Ms. Grace has built her life around.
http://www.observer.com/...
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, a star third baseman for the Valdosta State University Blazers. The wedding was a few months away.
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 for 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 ensued.
For Nancy Grace, the ordeal she describes felt nothing like justice. And so the Shakespeare-loving teen set out to change the justice system: first as a bulldog prosecutor, then as a Court TV and CNN anchor, crusader for victims' rights and professional vilifier of the criminal-defense industry.
It's a great story, the sort of thing which could be a made-for-TV movie. However, much of it turns out to be false.
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--the facts that form the basis of Ms. Grace's crusade against an impotent, criminal-coddling legal system.
- Griffin was shot not by a random robber, but by a former co-worker.
- The killer, Tommy McCoy, was 19, not 24, and had no prior convictions.
- Mr. McCoy confessed to the crime the evening he was arrested.
- The jury convicted in a matter of hours, not days.
- Prosecutors asked for the death penalty, but didn't get it, because Mr. McCoy was mildly retarded.
- Mr. McCoy never had an appeal; he filed a habeas application five years ago, and after a hearing it was rejected.
Ms. Grace has also misreported the date of the incident--it was in 1979, not 1980--and has given Griffin's age as 25 when it was 23.
The justice system, in other words, apparently worked the way it was supposed to.[my emphasis]
In 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."
"She has bent some stuff," said Steve Griffin, Keith Griffin's brother, in an interview with The Observer. "The reality of it is, the guy killed him. I know that. Our family knows that. There's nothing we can do to bring him back. What she's gonna say, she's gonna say. I'm not gonna stop it.
"But if she doesn't tell the truth, it's gonna come out sooner or later."
I could highlight more of the distortions that she's made but you really owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.
http://www.observer.com/...
Cable News watchers should keep an eye out for whether Grace continues to tell a false story even though she's now been briefed by Ms. Dana. That will be the real test for whether she's a f**king liar or not.
On a related note, it infuriates me that Random House still has A Million Little Pieces listed as "Biography & Autobiography - Personal Memoirs" and that their disclaimer on the book is in a link at the bottom of the page under "Related Links". What a bunch of shit? There should be a big disclaimer in bold letters that says, Warning: Much of this book is false and was known to be false by the author, not something in hidden away in a link.