Time flies, doesn’t it?
It was a year ago today that a Florida jury acquitted Casey Anthony in the death of her toddler daughter Caylee. Now, the lawyer who got her off has written a book about the case.
Jose Baez gave his first TV interview about “Presumed Guilty,” to Josh Elliott this morning on “Good Morning America” and he’ll give his first cable news interview to Greta Van Susteren tonight and continuing tomorrow night, on Fox News.
The Orlando’ Sentinel’s TV guy Hal Boedeker read the book and reveals the media angles in it.
On the issue of ABC News paying to license photos of Caylee, Baez writes, “In exchange for giving photos of Caylee and her to a national news organization, Casey was paid $200,000, most of which was used to mount her defense. Of course, when the media found out, she was roundly criticized for it — unfairly if you ask me.”
However, the media didn’t just “find out” about the payment, Anthony’s defense team brought it up in court way back in March 2010. And it wasn’t Anthony getting the brunt of it, it was ABC which has since changed it policy on paying license fees.
Baez adds, “without that money, we wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of the things we needed to do to fight her case.”
As for the media coverage, Baez says he and Fox News’s Geraldo Rivera have “a true friendship.” He calls Orlando ABC affiliate WFTV “the worst tabloid channel” and “a channel so inflammatory it was just a notch below ‘Nancy Grace.'” And as for Grace, he likens her show to professional wrestling, “where the action and drama are more important than truth or facts.”