Nancy Grace facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Quick facts for kids Nancy Grace
Grace at the Arizona Ultimate Women's Expo in October 2014
Born	Nancy Ann Grace (1959-10-23) October 23, 1959 (age 64) Macon, Georgia, U.S.
Alma mater	Mercer University (BA, JD) New York University (LLM)
Occupation	Political commentator television personality former prosecutor
Years active	1996–present
Employer	Court TV (1996–2007) HLN (2005–2016)
Notable credit(s)	Closing Arguments anchor (2004–2007) Nancy Grace anchor (2005–2016)
Spouse(s)	David Linch (m. 2007)
Children	2

Nancy Ann Grace (born October 23, 1959) is an American legal commentator and television journalist. She hosted Nancy Grace, a nightly celebrity news and current affairs show on HLN, from 2005 to 2016, and Court TV's Closing Arguments from 1996 to 2007. She also co-wrote the book Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System. Grace was also the arbiter of Swift Justice with Nancy Grace in the syndicated courtroom reality show's first season.

Grace was formerly a prosecutor in the Atlanta-Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney's office. She frequently discusses issues from what she describes as a victims' rights standpoint, with an outspoken style that has brought her both praise and criticism.

Early life

Nancy Grace was born in Macon, Georgia, the youngest of three children, to factory worker Elizabeth Grace and Mac Grace, a freight agent for Southern Railway. Her older siblings are brother Mac Jr. and sister Ginny. The Graces are longtime members of Macon's Liberty United Methodist Church, where Elizabeth plays the organ and Mac Sr. was once a Sunday School teacher.

Grace graduated from Macon's Windsor Academy in 1977. She attended Valdosta State University, and later received a B.A. from Mercer University. As a student, Grace was a fan of Shakespearean literature, and intended to become an English professor after graduating from college. But after the murder of her fiancé Keith Griffin in a workplace shooting when she was 19, Grace decided to enroll in law school and went on to become a felony prosecutor and a supporter of victims' rights.

Grace received her Juris Doctor from the Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer, where she was a member of the law review. She went on to earn a Master of Laws in constitutional and criminal law from New York University. She has written articles and opinion pieces for legal periodicals, including the American Bar Association Journal. She worked as a clerk for a federal court judge and practiced antitrust and consumer protection law with the Federal Trade Commission. She taught litigation at the Georgia State University College of Law and business law at GSU's School of Business. As of 2006, she is part of Mercer University's board of trustees and adopted a section of the street surrounding the law school.

Career as prosecutor

Grace worked for nearly a decade in the Atlanta-Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney's office as Special Prosecutor. ..... She left the prosecutors' office after the District Attorney she had been working under decided not to run for reelection.

While a prosecutor, Grace was reprimanded by the Supreme Court of Georgia for withholding evidence and for making improper statements in a 1997 arson and murder case. The court overturned the conviction in that case and found that Grace's behavior "demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness and was inexcusable."

A 2005 federal appeals opinion by Judge William H. Pryor Jr. found that Grace "played fast and loose" with core ethical rules in a 1990 triple murder case, including the withholding of evidence and allowing a police detective to testify falsely under oath. The 1990 murder conviction was, nonetheless, upheld.

Career as broadcaster

After leaving the Fulton County prosecutors' office, Grace was approached by and accepted an offer from Court TV founder Steven Brill to do a legal commentary show alongside Johnnie Cochran. When Cochran left the show, Grace was moved to a solo trial coverage show on Court TV, hosting Trial Heat from 1996 to 2004 then Closing Arguments from 2004 to 2007, replacing Lisa Bloom and James Curtis, both of whom were hosting Trial Heat at that point.

In February 2005, she began hosting a regular primetime legal analysis show called Nancy Grace on CNN Headline News (now HLN) in addition to her Court TV show. On May 9, 2007, Grace announced that she would be leaving Court TV to focus more on her CNN Headline News Program and charity work. She did her last show on Court TV on June 19, 2007.

Grace has a distinctive interviewing style mixing vocal questions with multimedia stats displays. The Foundation of American Women in Radio & Television has presented Nancy Grace with two Gracie Awards for her Court TV show.

While still hosting Nancy Grace, she also hosted Swift Justice with Nancy Grace which premiered September 13, 2010, and ran until May 2011. Grace left the show due to productions moving from Atlanta to Los Angeles. In September 2011, Judge Jackie Glass, who is known for presiding over the O. J. Simpson robbery case, took over Grace's place. The show continued for one more season and ceased production in 2012.

Grace had been covering the Casey Anthony story for years. After the controversial verdict finding Casey Anthony not guilty, her Nancy Grace show on HLN had its highest ratings ever in the 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. hour slots on Tuesday, July 5, 2011.

On October 13, 2016, at the end of her contract, Grace hosted her last show.

On July 13, 2019, an Oxygen TV channel true crime series began, hosted by Grace and titled Injustice with Nancy Grace with criminal cases being the subject of episodes that seek to bring to light unjust accusations, bungled investigations, arcane evidence, new motives, and shocking sentences.

Awards

Grace has been awarded several American Women in Radio & Television Gracie Awards, has been awarded the "Individual Achievement/Best Program Host" honor by that organization, and has been recognized by many other organizations (including, without limitation, the Carole Sund-Carrington Foundation, Crime Victims United of California and The Retreat) for her advocacy work on behalf of victims’ rights.

Other television work

Dancing With the Stars

Grace was a contestant on the thirteenth season of Dancing with the Stars, which began airing on September 19, 2011. She was partnered with pro-dancer Tristan MacManus. The couple lasted for 8 weeks and placed 5th overall in the competition before being eliminated on November 8, 2011, one week shy of the semi-finals.

Raising Hope

In early April 2012, Grace appeared on the last two episodes of the second season of the TV show Raising Hope playing herself.

Law & Order

On May 22, 2007, Grace appeared in the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Screwed" the season 8 finale, playing herself opposite Star Jones.

Hancock

Grace has a cameo appearance in the film Hancock, starring Will Smith.

Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry

In June 2017, Grace sat for a reading by purported psychic medium Tyler Henry on his E! TV show, Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry. Grace believed Henry was communicating with her dead father, as well as murdered fiancé, and said she had received closure. After the reading Grace said "there were many things [Henry] said were impossible for him to have gleaned on the internet or even a computer search, speeches I've given, of things that have happened, I find it difficult to believe … I find many of the things he said to be absolutely amazing." In April 2018, Susan Gerbic analyzed the reading, and detailed in Nancy Grace Should be Ashamed of Herself! exactly how Grace had unfortunately been fooled by the usual fraudulent techniques of cold reading and hot reading used by "grief vampires" like Henry to convince people that they have paranormal powers.

Further work

Grace's first book, Objection!: How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System, was published in 2005 by Hyperion and became a New York Times bestseller. Her first work of fiction, The Eleventh Victim, also published by Hyperion, was released on August 11, 2009. The mystery thriller follows a young psychology student, Hailey Dean, whose fiancé is murdered just weeks before their wedding. She goes on to prosecute violent crime and is forced to reckon with what she left behind. Publishers Weekly described it as "less than compelling"; however, it was also a New York Times bestseller and became the foundation for the Hailey Dean Mysteries series of, thus far, nine movies on the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel. A third New York Times bestselling novel, Death on the D-List, was published by Hyperion on August 10, 2010, and followed by Murder in the Courthouse, published by BenBella Books in 2016.

Grace has also helped staff a hotline at an Atlanta battered women's center for 10 years. Since January 10, 2017, Grace hosted a daily Podcast on Crime Online called "Crime Stories with Nancy Grace".

Personal life

Marriage and motherhood

In April 2007, Grace married David Linch, an Atlanta investment banker, in a small private ceremony. The two had met while she was studying at Mercer University in the 1970s. Grace, who had given up on marriage after the death of her fiancé, said, "We've been in touch all these years, and a lot of time, we were separated by geography and time. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to get married. I told my family only two days before the wedding."

On June 26, 2007, an emotional Grace announced on her HLN talk show that her life had "taken a U-turn" in that she was pregnant and expecting twins due in January 2008. Lucy Elizabeth and John David were born in November 2007.

Allegations regarding fiancé's murder

In March 2006, an article in the New York Observer suggested that in her book Objection!, Grace had embellished the story of her college fiancé's 1979 murder and the ensuing trial to make it better support her image. Grace has described the tragedy as the impetus for her career as a prosecutor and victims' rights advocate, and has often publicly referred to the incident. The Observer researched the murder and found what it submitted to be contradictions between the events and Grace's subsequent statements, including the following:

Her fiancé, Keith Griffin, was not shot at random by a stranger, but by a former coworker, Tommy McCoy.
McCoy did not have a prior criminal record.
Rather than denying the crime, McCoy confessed on the night of the murder (nevertheless, he subsequently denied the crime by a plea of not guilty and went to trial).
The jury deliberated for a few hours, not days.
There was no ongoing string of appeals (McCoy's family did not want any), though McCoy did file an appellate court habeas corpus petition for a new trial, which was rejected.

Grace told the Observer she had not looked into the case in many years and "tried not to think about it." She said she made her previous statements about the case "with the knowledge I had."

In response to Keith Olbermann's claims in a March 2007 Rolling Stone interview in which he was quoted as saying, "Anybody who would embellish the story of their own fiancé's murder should spend that hour a day not on television but in a psychiatrist's chair," Grace stated, "I did not put myself through law school and fight for all those years for victims of crime to waste one minute of my time, my energy, and my education in a war of words with Keith Olbermann, whom I've never met nor had any disagreement. I feel we have X amount of time on Earth, and that when we give in to our detractors or spend needless time on silly fights, I think that's abusing the chance we have to do something good."

Griffin's murderer, Tommy McCoy, received ten years for aggravated assault and life imprisonment for murder, but was released on parole from the Georgia Department of Corrections on December 5, 2006.

Depictions of Grace in popular media

Law & Order connection

The Law & Order programs often base their fictional stories on real-life events and have featured stories based on Grace on several occasions.

..... Grace herself appeared in the SVU episode "Screwed".

On Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Grace has also been compared to a character named Faith Yancy (Geneva Carr) who hosts a similar talk show (Inside American Justice) that sensationalizes whatever case the main characters are working on and makes it difficult for them to gain access to key witnesses. However, the character could be based on any number of individuals with this type of show. The character has appeared on the episodes "In the Wee Small Hours" (original air date November 6, 2005), "Masquerade" (original air date October 31, 2006), "Albatross" (original air date February 6, 2007), "Neighborhood Watch" (original air date August 10, 2008), and "Lady's Man" (original air date June 28, 2009).

Saturday Night Live

Sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live has parodied Grace, both in and out of the context of her show, a number of times since her rise to prominence. Originally Grace was portrayed by SNL cast member Amy Poehler. Her impression featured in a parody of the Nancy Grace show during Saturday Night Live's 32nd season (in episode 7). The sketch parodied Grace's reactions to Michael Richards' infamous Laugh Factory appearance, the O. J. Simpson trial and her own parking fines. During the sketch, host Matthew Fox portrays a parking attendant whom Grace's staff have brought off the street, where he was giving Grace a parking ticket. Poehler also voiced Grace, on May 21, 2005, as part of the show's Saturday TV Funhouse segment in a Divertor sketch. During this appearance, Grace says little more than "[Name of celebrity in question] should fry."

Grace would later be impersonated by Saturday Night Live cast member Abby Elliott in the sketch 'So You've Committed A Crime... And You Think You Can Dance?', in which Grace features as a judge of the dance contest. In the sketch, Grace calls the show 'Disgusting'.

Most recently, Grace was portrayed by featured player Noel Wells in Season 39, Episode 11. ..... Much of Grace's dialogue from the sketch was lifted directly from an interview she conducted on January 6, 2013, with Brooke Baldwin on CNN's News Room, in particular the phrase 'I've got a sneaking suspicion that you are pro-pot. And I don't like it.'

This Hour Has 22 Minutes

A recurring sketch on the CBC prime-time sketch comedy series This Hour Has 22 Minutes features Cathy Jones as Betty Hope, an obvious send-up of Grace.

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip

During the episode 'Disaster Show' of series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Grace is impersonated by Sarah Paulson as part of a sketch on the titular show within a show. In the episode, Paulson's character, Harriet Hayes, is performing a parody of the Nancy Grace show.

Gone Girl

It is widely acknowledged, by the media and by Grace herself, that the character of Ellen Abbot in the 2014 film Gone Girl is based on Grace. In an interview with actress Missi Pyle, who played Abbot in the film, Grace told pundits she was "very flattered" and that she "laugh[ed] out loud at it," calling Gone Girl her new favorite portrayal.