Nancy Grace hasn’t been this cheesed off since Michael Jackson beat the rap last year for child molestation.
When the lab report came back with no DNA matches for the Duke University lacrosse players, accused of raping a woman during a party, steam began pouring out of Nancy’s ears.
All week long, she had been worrying the case from every angle. There was the race aspect: “I understand they specifically asked for a black stripper!” she said, eyes narrowing with the sort of flinty indignation that would send a young boy’s ball-sack right back into his pelvis.
There was the white privilege slant: Southern college, lacrosse as an expensive sport peopled by privileged white jocks from leafy suburbs. Most of all, there was the WOMAN RAPED hysteria, which dovetailed neatly with Nancy’s recounting of slavery days when master imposed himself on hapless black servant girls, a scenario that borrowed heavily from the blackspoitation tradition of Mandingo.
“I’m. Telling. You. People.” Grace said in her characteristic chop-shop approach to Important Announcements. “This. Is. A. Disgrace!”
When one of her guests mentioned that the accuser was, in fact, a stripper with a police record, Nancy rose up like a dragon. “Nobody chooses to be a stripper,” she snapped with fire-breathing irrelevance.
Her guest was a man, Nancy’s favorite foil, and with fumes billowing from her words, she reminded him that the accuser was “the sole support of her children” and even strippers were not “sub-human garbage” and that “some people should put a sock in their piehole!”
Ah Nancy, full of Grace!
We confess! She is our guiltiest guilty pleasure, reliably delivering a dozen bellylaughs per show, and not always at her own expense.
A former prosecutor who obviously loved her work in unhealthy proportions — her fiance was murdered, as she frequently reminds us in a stricken voice that quickly fills up with its more accustomed Southern bile — Grace is forever the vengeful hanging judge whose special target is the caddish male.
Her coverage of Scott Peterson and Kobe Bryant, for instance, was beyond stunning for its endless ingenuity in finding yet another detail for Nancy to go ballistic over. She was sure Jennifer Wilbanks, the “runaway bride,” was hacked up by her husband-to-be and strewn all over the highway. The Dutch boys who had partied with Natalee Holloway the night she disappeared on Aruba were described as “serial predators” because they liked to hit on tourists girls.
No matter that the runaway bride turned up alive, or the Dutch boys were released from custody for insufficient evidence, handsome young men haven’t a chance in the Court of Nancy Grace. In our many devoted years of watching her travel between Court TV, CNN and Headline News, we have yet to hear her side with the defense. She is too invested in nailing the accused — “the criminals,” “the bad guys,” as she habitually refers to defendants. Watching her is an exercise in the bloody thrills of the Roman Coliseum, the lusty self-righteousness of the instant thumbs-down verdict.
We love her all the more for it somehow. Grace is a born TV entertainer, who knows innately — with her chopped up speech — how to pace us so we can catch our breath. Right before a commercial break, she throws up a picture of some beautiful soldierboy killed that day in Iraq, her voice dropping to a prayerful hush as the music mounts ominously. It’s the bravura flourish of a master.
Even if it is total bullshit.
Nancy Grace basks in such sentimental tripe. Her rush to judgment against the Duke University lacrosse team, for instance, is utterly middle-brow and lacking in nuance.
We’ve heard this line of argument before, and its appearance now as a pop-culture rationale is quite revealing.
It originates, of course, in the ivy-covered obscurantism of the faculty lounge. Any recent college student will recognize it as the sort of canards mouthed by career feminists and “queer-scholars,” who throw around words like patriarchy and fascism at every passing blur.
In this spiteful, childish vision of the world, all men are cavemen (as if! we wish!): Rapacious, exploitive, one handgun away from mayhem at any given moment.
The obsessive and fantastical quality of this view is reminiscent of the “Traditional Family” crowd who are always conjuring up images of gay men in ass-out chaps, barebacking each other in one continuous orgy. It smacks of sexual frustration and unrequited, unacknowledged desires for the very murderous brutes they consciously (and sincerely) revile.
The absence of DNA evidence in the case of the lacrosse players — a very public absence of DNA evidence — is a serious obstacle for the prosecution (and one that makes Hang-em-High Nancy furious, however hard she tries to minimize its absence). It creates the doubt — and a lot of it — that will prevent a jury, if they are reasonable, from convicting the students. All the woman in the case has is her assertions — repeat, assertions — with no evidence to back them up, as far as we know at this point in time.
We don’t give the woman a pass simply because women have been raped in the past, anymore than OJ Simpson should have been given a pass because black men have been lynched in the past. Women are not born pure and truthful, while men devious and cruel, as these neo-Victorians like to imagine.
Yet the male-phobic invective against the lacrosse team has not stopped. It may even have accelerated as the blunt absence of evidence spurs the faithful to make even more elaborate professions of belief.
We expect this sort of paranoid skew from the right; here it is coming from the left. Self-righteousness and smug irrationality tempts us all. It’s what you’re left with when you either can’t or won’t think for yourself. When everything is a metaphysical battle, rather than a consideration of the prosaic facts.
“As a victim of violence myself,” Grace wraps up, referring again to the murder of her fiance, “I know that this woman’s ordeal. Is. Just. Beginning. Just beginning, people! The defense will put her on trial, not their clients. Her behavior. Her life. And if the prosecution isn’t on its toes, those boys will buzz out of there — Scott. Free!”
That these privileged, arrogant white men may, in fact, be innocent is a possibility that does not trouble the noble Nancy.
What a wonderful Nightcharm rant!!!
Just look at her face and watch her facial features and you can see that she is a very frustrated penis envying female. She is ready to condemn all men without benefit of doubt or trial. I wonder if she could pass a complete look into her background. Methinks she doth protest too much.
Jack
Being in Australia, I’ve never heard of this case, or this woman.
She looks like a drag queen in a bad Streisand wig.
This site has become one of my very favorite reads each day, and great pieces like this are exactly why!
Here’s the thing about Nancy Grace, her “hook” as a legal commentator is that she’s suffered as a crime victim herself. We all know about her fiance’s murder and then how Nancy was traumatized by the system.
Well, it turns out she’s twisting that story and making up some aspects, according to the New York Observer. The fiance’s killer was tried and convicted almost immediately. This was not the miscarriage of justice Grace portrays over and over again.
This is her late fiance’s brother on the situation:
“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.”
End of story. Read it here: (link)
Wait. What about the rape? Why is rape man-bashing?
SO a chick gets raped potentially and bunch of fags
rip on her via the media and feel like men. In prison, you’d all be the punk who gets raped which despite gay fantasies is not fun. I am white. That said.
I don’t give a shit about queer or any other
theory. But I lived through the news puting white
women on screen every five minutes because they are
missing. America likes white people best. They like
men best. It’s just a reality. I just don’t get how
jumping on a bandwagon as a “neutral” party gets you
anywhere except feeling like the homo who gets hit
in the mouth after blowing your “straight” friend
in high school. We are not one of them. We never
will be so stop with the gay marriage and let us
be men bullshit. It’s shit like this that makes me
shun the bullshit gay community. Sick fucks.
Thank you, Craig. I didn’t know if I’d sound too nasty if I made a similar comment about the Streisand appearance, but darn it, that photo doesn’t do her any favors!
I saw the photos and thought this was some dish on the Lady Bunny! But aside from that, I love your writing style, John! I have enjoyed coming to your site for years, and just finally became a paying member. You are clever and erudite and dead-on with your commentaries. How ironic that ignorant “Daniel” who published comment #6 would be perusing your nudie-man site, and would then feel compelled to so publicly display both his bigotry and his illiteracy, as well as his feeble brain power. Save the idiotic rants for Craigslist, you moron. DOH! (And thank you, John, for having this wonderful site for all of us men loving men - I’ll be coming back for years to come.)
Nancy Grace and Rita Cosby will suffer eternity together in their tailor-made little hell.
I love seeing good ass in tight pants, sports rule!
But just looking at the bitch face of this woman, makes me feel sick. Look at that face! God, I don’t know what she’s saying, but she’s lying, or pulling someone down, and she loves it. Arrogant bitch.
Daniel, sigh, your post made no damn sense at all.
Ya this ugly drag bitch thing on TV is retarded but I still think olreally is the worst.
Gawd, Nancy Grace makes me want to hurl chunks every time I see her Kabuki mask venting misandric bile on-air! She’s a caricature of herself. What a pathetic, joyless, humorless, sexless, loveless existence she must lead. It’s obvious that she despises all men, sees them as vile predators, wants them destroyed. I’m sure if she were provided with a sharp knife and a length of rope, and pointed in the direction of the lacrosse team’s locker room, she’d harvest a wheelbarrow full of severed nutsacks in no time flat!
This Duke lacrosse rape story keeps developing and growing, and keeps getting interestinger and interestinger, to put it mildly! No time or space to hash out all the details, but the more that comes out, the more it looks like the stripper lied and the boys have been framed. That self-righteous PC prosecutor in Durham is going to be run out of town on a rail when this thing blows up in his face, as it almost certainly will. No wonder the stripper is in hiding and reluctant to testify–she (IMHO, at least) told a lie to gain sympathy from the cops and avoid an arrest for violating probation, and it’s spun wildly out of control. She’s now thinking, “Holy shit! What have I done? Now what do I do?!”
As someone who cringes at episodes of Law & Order SVU and Dateline specials on Internet predators, and is throroughly sick and tired of the culture’s equation of male sexuality with sickness and perversion, and males with predatory criminals, it will be a real joy and delight to see these cultural assumptions (thanks a million, rad feminism!) unravel in the harsh media spotlight of this case!
tuffy–you’re right in your post above, but throw Greta van Susterhen in there too.
One other point, that I hesitate to mention. Most people know, even if it’s talked about only in hushed tones and denied by PC feminists, that many, many women entertain rape fantasies. Is it entirely out of the realm of possibility that Miss Grace climbs into bed at night, and furiously masturbates at the thought of being trapped in a bathroom with several tall, strapping, muscled, well-hung, attractive athletes and being roughly “taken” by them? Perhaps that’s one reason she’s so livid at how this case has played out and the fact that the boys haven’t been publicly hanged yet–she’s projecting, upset and sickened by her own twisted fantasies. Just a thought.
lol..
I’m a straight guy who stumbled in here through Google.. I stuck around to read the article.. It’s brilliant!.. nice work indeed..
I remember one article that compared Grace to a 60s Batman villainess. It’s apt.