HLN host Nancy Grace stormed out of a SiriusXM interview after the hosts accused her of “capitalizing on tragedies,” and more specifically, “dead kids.”
Grace is leaving her HLN post this week after 12 years at the helm of her show, which focuses on cold cases, missing-child investigations and true-crime stories. She was being interviewed by SiriusXM hosts Jim Norton and Sam Roberts on Tuesday when the walkout occurred.
Grace, who turned to law after her fiancé was murdered in college, worked in an Atlanta-area district attorney’s office and became a go-to television personality commenting on trials in the post-O.J. Simpson era. For those unfamiliar with her, she’s widely known as no-nonsense: when Grace forms an opinion on a case she pursues it with a barracuda-like intensity.
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Right at the outset of the SiriusXM interview, things got awkward. Norton said pointedly, “I’ve had a problem with you for a long time because I felt like you were capitalizing on tragedies.”
“I help find missing people,” she retorted. “I help solve unsolved homicides.”
Grace has often been criticized for her on-air anger and propensity to whittle serious, dense cases into quick sound bytes. She’s explained before that it’s a habit she developed in law school, where she would have to “condense a very difficult, convoluted case into something simple for juries.” Many critics also point out the high frequency of Grace pursuing out-there theories and conspiracies.
After questioning Grace about multiple cases she’s done in the past (which you can hear in the video, above), she’d had enough.
“You obviously don’t like me. That’s OK,” she said. “So, I’m OK with my show. I’m OK with representing crime victims. The two of you are so anxious to just throw a shot at me. You haven’t asked one decent question since I’ve walked in here. Everything both of you have asked has been an attack.”
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Norton hit the final nail with his last question: “How do you justify latching on to hashtags and things without saying you are capitalizing on dead kids?”
“My program is to help solve unsolved homicides and find missing children, which we have done,” said Grace, trying to describe her show again. “If you don’t like that and you don’t like the way I do it, then don’t watch it. Oops! I think your time is up. Bye-bye.”
With that, Grace was out, and Roberts took a parting photo and posted it to Twitter:
Grace then appeared on The View as a guest, looking no worse for wear.
Arguably Grace’s biggest moment was when she “found” a missing child in a basement in June 2014.
Her popularity boomed when missing children cases like Caylee Anthony, Natalee Holloway and Elizabeth Smart dominated mainstream news. But fewer of those cases have broken through to wide attention in recent years. In the age demographic that television executives seek, her audience dropped to a third or quarter what it was in its peak years.
“She gave a voice to the voiceless and we are extremely grateful for her contributions to the network,” said Ken Jautz, HLN’s chief executive.
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Grace said the show “created an unparalleled platform that gave crime victims a voice and succeeded in helping to find missing people and solve unsolved homicides.”
“I will continue my fight for justice across a variety of traditional and new media, where victims’ voices can reach an entirely engaged audience,” she said.
HLN didn’t provide a specific reason for the show’s cancellation.
With files from David Bauder and The Associated Press
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