Originally posted Tuesday, July 23 2019 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
Passionate victims advocate and talk-show host Nancy Grace is back on TV with a new Oxygen show focused on specific less-heralded crime cases that she felt addressed complicated issues regarding justice or lack thereof.
Called “Injustice with Nancy Grace,” the show is pre-taped and designed like a lot of true-crime shows with re-enactments, testimonials and historical footage. It airs at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays on Oxygen.
“It reminds me of the courtroom,” said Grace, a former Fulton County prosecutor, in a phone interview from her home in Atlanta. “Now I prepare these cases as if I were taking it to a jury. At HLN, things were happening in real time. In this case, I get to look at every angle in and out.”
The Atlanta-based Grace, who was once so ubiquitous she was lampooned on numerous TV shows including "Boston Legal" and "Saturday Night Live," left her HLN prime-time show in the fall of 2016 after 12 years. She has since started her own crime-fighting website and daily Sirius/XM radio show where she still gets to hit breaking news cases on the run.
This series allows Grace to go deeper and each case was handpicked by her and Oxygen. “Each one stands for something critical in my mind about the justice system,” she said.
The first case, which debuted July 13, focused on the murder of a woman Grace knew as a friend. Her husband -a prominent attorney who was a regular on the TV pundit circuit - was the immediate suspect but did he really do it?
There’s another case of a foster child who is adopted by a caring social worker but gets murdered. In another episode, a son goes missing in a lake but the mom doesn’t believe the scenario fed to her by the cops and keeps the case alive, writing the governor regularly for nine straight years.
“These are not cases everybody else has done day in and day out,” Grace said. “They have not had the spotlight.”
She raved about working with Oxygen, which has gone all in on true crime the past couple of years, competing with ID and a raft of true-crime shows on A&E, HBO, HLN, Netflix, “Dateline,” “20/20,” et. al.
“They just struck a chord in me,” Grace said. “I like them because they’re scrappy like me. They work hard. And they think out of the box.”
And while she didn’t end up at the newly revived Court TV, based in Buckhead, she didn’t have anything bad to say about it.
“I have great memories of my time at Court TV,” she said. “I have high hopes for the new version. I wish them well. There is enough crime to go around.”
I spoke with her when Jeffrey Epstein case was in the news and she didn't mince words about his crimes against young girls and the Florida prosecutors who gave him a sweetheart deal.
“Let me give you a technical term: rot in hell Epstein! Rot in hell! He molested children. My Lucy will be 12. Some of these girls were about two years older than that.”
And she was glad to see R. Alexander Acosta, the man who gave Epstein such a big break, lose his job as labor secretary over it.
“They had him in their hands,” she said. “They let him go for political and money reasons. I’m ashamed, ashamed of the system I’ve been part of my whole life. How horrible. They will not be able to sweep this under the rug. I don’t care who it brings down.”
Indeed, seeing all these crimes day in and day out does make her naturally protective of her 11-year-old twins Lucy and David.
When I mentioned someone I had interviewed who had been molested by their piano teacher as a child, she said she purposely hired a female piano teacher and has her come over to her house so she can watch her.
Grace also said she tracks her kids’ devices like a hawk. She resisted giving them a smartphone for a long time but then at a high school football game, she lost track of them at halftime and freaked out. “I was a wreck,” she said. “I could not find them at first. They were running around with their friends.”
She said she really does not want to be known as Big Brother. But it isn’t easy. “I try to give them a normal life knowing how paranoid I am,” she said.
ON TV
“Injustice with Nancy Grace,” 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturdays, Oxygen
