> Update: 4:49pm: “Grace is entertainment and learning, not news. Stop trying to make her sound like news,” an e-mailer says. A second adds: “Jeeze, thats not so bad, Nancy is trying to free this lady for killing this guy…and even if they were public airwaves few would have much of a problem with that.”
The following transcript may make you feel sick to your stomach. If you read it, remember that this dialogue was broadcast into 89 million homes on CNN Headline News.
On July 4, CNN’s Nancy Grace had an “exclusive jailhouse interview” with Stacey Lannert, who was sentenced to life without parole for murdering her sex offender father in 1990. Her family is hoping for clemency.
Grace sat down with Lannert and asked her to relive “truly revolting experiences,” as one e-mailer put it. “Even as her guest hesitatingly stumbled to get the courage to use a word to describe the substance she was forced to ingest, it was Grace who interjected with her idea as to what it was: ‘Come.'”
It went even farther downhill from there:
| GRACE: How long did the oral sex game go on? LANNERT: Until I was nine. GRACE: What changed when you were nine? LANNERT: There were times that instead of just licking, he wanted me to — gosh, this is terrible. He wanted me to suck like a popsicle. And he got to the point where if I did that, he would — in my mouth. And I didn’t… GRACE: … Come. LANNERT: Yes. And I didn’t like that. He said he wouldn’t do that again. GRACE: Then what changed? LANNERT: We had played the game, and he had my mouth — he had — I can’t say it. I’m sorry. I can’t say that part. But… GRACE: … I want the governor to know what happened. LANNERT: I know. But I am so just — to me it wasn’t a bad thing. It was, you know, my daddy loving me at that moment. And then he’d show me all kinds of attention. And so it made him happy. I made him happy. I had the power to make him happy. And I was proud of myself for making him happy. GRACE: But then everything changed. LANNERT: Uh huh. GRACE: What happened? LANNERT: He told me to swallow. And I wouldn’t. And then he told me, ‘You think you’re too good to swallow? You’re just like your mother.’ And got angry with me. I had never seen this side of my dad before. So I ran into the bathroom and spit it out. He caught me right as I was coming out of that door and threw me down on the ground. And he raped me right there on the floor in front of the stove. |
> Update: 4:27pm: “While the emailer may hope the FCC condemns CNN, they have no jurisdiction. This was not on “the public airwaves” it was on cable tv, where the FCC has no content regulation authority,” another e-mailer notes.