Nancy Grace this month ceded a cushy bully pulpit from which she played judge, jury and executioner for 12 years — and it’s unclear where her zealous brand of fire-and-brimstone gusto belongs now.
After her fiancé’s 1979 murder, the Georgia native attended law school and went on to prosecute violent felony cases in Atlanta for almost a decade. She would ultimately helm a successful — if oft-maligned — crime-news show rallying for victims’ rights, sometimes to the detriment of the judicial system.
The hourlong HLN program curdled with melodrama as she howled about “Tot Mom” Casey Anthony, slap-checked the falsely accused Duke lacrosse players, blazed against pot advocate 2 Chainz, and informed a dumbfounded dad on live TV that his missing 12-year-old son had been found alive in his own basement. In 2006, a woman committed suicide after Grace grilled her about her missing toddler.
It was, in a sense, the stuff of Lifetime movies.
Yet it was Hallmark Movies & Mysteries — the sister channel of safe, sanitized Hallmark, purveyor of comfy Christmastime drivel — that took in Grace after her HLN signoff, adapting her book series into the film “Hailey Dean Mystery: Murder, With Love.”
Grace, long a fan of the movie’s star, Kellie Martin, finds a certain appeal in the feel-goodery.
“I want to do something that my children can watch. I don’t want to send them out of the room,” Grace, 57, tells the Daily News of her 8-year-old twins. “I had a really happy childhood, didn’t know anything about violence or hatred, until my fiancé was murdered . . . And I want that same bubble, as long as I can have it, for the children.”
Amid her mid-October departure from HLN, the onetime “Dancing with the Stars” contestant waltzed into plugging Hallmark’s “Hailey Dean Mystery” — which she executive-produced and made a cameo in — and her new novel, “Murder at the Courthouse.”
But the publicity tour was overshadowed, in part, by a viral clip of her abruptly exiting an interview with SiriusXM radio hosts Jim Norton and Sam Roberts, who in a ruthless cross-examination accused Grace of “capitalizing on dead kids.”
The ex-prosecutor shrugs off the familiar line of attack, labeling the duo “Beavis and Butt-Head” and likening them to “gnats flying around my head.” Still, she admits comments like theirs are “always hurtful.”
“It was very hurtful that a lifetime of hard work, really hard work — forsaking a personal life, forsaking having a family for so many years in order to fight crime in the trenches for practically no money — could be made so light of and made fun of,” Grace says.
“But . . . what I do is not about me,” she adds. “It is about, in my mind anyway, doing something bigger than me. And that is fighting crime.”
Grace’s longtime fixation with “fighting crime” — she uses the phrase frequently during a brief interview — will soon take flight in a comprehensive “crimefighting website,” featuring forensics, missing children cases and unsolved homicides, that she plans to unveil after the Nov. 8 election.
“(The HLN show) is one hour at a certain time,” Grace says. “But crime doesn’t sleep — and in order to fight it effectively, 24/7/365, I think that can be done digitally.”
Grace also plans to pursue a “traditional TV platform,” as well as keep up her notoriously vivid hashtags, which have included BoxofInfants, TooFatToDie and HotCupOfPoison — an outgrowth from her law-school days of distilling complex ideas into pithy mnemonics.
She boils down Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, for example, to the hashtag TheyBothSmell.
The jury’s still out on whether Grace’s vigilante approach to justice can endure. But she remains unflinching in the face of her many detractors, chalking up their “potshots” to a mere “part of this business.”
“That is their prerogative to have whatever opinion they want,” she says. “And whatever their opinion may be is not going to change the fact that I’m going to continue fighting crime as best as I know how.”
