Who

Loony muckraker Nancy Grace hosts the legal talk show Nancy Grace on CNN. Abandon all hope, ye who argue with her.

Backstory

Born in Macon, Ga., Nancy Grace says she once planned to become an English professor. Her plans changed, so the story goes, in 1977 when her fiancé Keith Griffin was murdered. Soon afterward she enrolled in law school with her sight set on becoming a prosecutor and after graduating, she worked in the Atlanta district attorney's office for nearly a decade. After leaving her job in 1996, she connected with CourtTV founder Steve Brill, who hired her to co-host a legal talk show with the late Johnnie Cochran called Cochran & Grace; a year later, the show was turned into Closing Arguments. From 2005 to 2007, she hosted two shows for the Time Warner family: Closing Arguments and Nancy Grace, which appeared on CNN's Headline News. In May 2007, she dropped the CourtTV gig and is now found exclusively on Headline News.

Of note

Don't expect a fair journalistic debate on Grace's shows. The self-appointed crusader for victims' rights steamrolls her guests with the intensity of a televangelist—as well as the Southern drawl of a one—and she'll do whatever it takes to get her point across regardless of whether she's right or wrong. (And she's often wrong.) Her antics have included badgering kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart and firing accusatory questions at missing-child mother Melinda Duckett, whose subsequent suicide prompted a wrongful death lawsuit against Grace. She spent weeks bashing the Duke lacrosse team only to find out that the charges against them had been fabricated. She never bothered to retract her statements or apologize.

Controversy

While working as an Atlanta prosecutor, Grace was criticized by defense attorneys who said that she often relied on stunts—like pretending to read a Bible in court and wearing cleavage-baring shirts— to win her cases. In 1997, the Georgia Supreme Court overturned a conviction she'd secured and accused her of "an extensive pattern of inappropriate and, in some cases, illegal conduct," after she brought an unauthorized CNN camera crew into a defendant's house. Critics have also pointed out that she seems to have (shamelessly) embellished the story of her fiancé's death to bolster her victim credentials, claiming that he was shot by a mugger, when in fact he was killed by a mildly retarded former coworker. She also said her fiancé's murderer was on parole at the time of the shooting, when the man had no prior criminal record.

In print

Grace co-authored the book Objection! How High-Priced Defense Attorneys, Celebrity Defendants, and a 24/7 Media Have Hijacked Our Criminal Justice System. In September 2006, though, Rush and Molloy of the Daily News reported that a 359-word passage in the book had been swiped verbatim from a Times article. Grace, for her part, claimed the text-lifting was "inadvertent."

On screen

Grace has inspired countless parodies, including portrayals by Amy Poehler on Saturday Night Live, and characters based on her on Boston Legal, Justice, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Personal

Grace got married for the first time in April 2007. The lucky guy? David Linch, an old college friend and an Atlanta-based investment banker. During the summer of 2007, she announced she was pregnant with twins. (She declined to discuss whether she'd used fertility treatments, rhapsodizing that "as part of God's mysterious plan, I'm given this wonderful blessing late in life.") In November 2007, she gave birth prematurely to a boy (John David) and girl (Lucy Elizabeth). Grace lives in two adjoining units in an East 54th Street apartment building and also owns property in her native state of Georgia.