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Nancy Grace Pushed Melinda Duckett to Suicide, Claims Harvard Professor

Monday, December 7, 2009 at 5:29 pm
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Melinda Duckett committed suicide two weeks after her son Trenton was supposedly kidnapped
​In 2006, Melinda Duckett reported that her two-year-old son had been kidnapped. When she checked on him after 9 p.m. that night in Leesburg, Florida, she claimed to have found a hole slashed in the screen of his bedroom window. Little Trenton Duckett was gone. Three years later, he's never been found.

Police found her story fishy. A witness reported seeing Melinda with her son at a restaurant during the time he was supposed to have been abducted. The 21-year-old mom remained the one and only suspect...

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According to his mom, someone slashed a window screen and kidnapped Trenton from his bedroom
​But two weeks after the boy's disappearance, Melinda decided to make an appearance on Nancy Grace's CNN show. Relatives would later claim she was suckered into thinking it would be a sympathetic interview. Grace, she was unaware, is not the sympathetic kind.

We'll let a 2006 story from Slate pick up the tale:

"Grace's telephone interview of Melinda Duckett on Sept. 7 for CNN Headline News turned--as it so often does--into a showcase for Grace's worst qualities. The very troubled 21-year-old mother of a missing toddler never had a chance against Grace's trademark steamroller of mean: "Where were you? Why aren't you telling us where you were that day?" Grace hollered, pounding on her table. "Miss Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason?'' she persisted as the young woman attempted to cobble together a coherent sentence. Grace asked Duckett six times whether she had taken a polygraph test as the woman stumbled to explain why she had not."

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Nancy Grace, the epitome of the mean modern cable host
​The interview was recorded to appear the next night. But a few hours before it aired, Melinda used her grandpa's shotgun to kill herself. Grace aired the interview anyway, with a notation across the screen saying, "Since show taping, body of Melinda Duckett found at grandparents' home."

In the aftermath of the suicide, Grace took a pummeling in the press. Many claimed she'd driven the young woman to take her life through her relentless questioning.

Now, as part of a wrongful death suit brought by Duckett's family, a Harvard professor says Grace pushed the mom to suicide. Dr. Harold J. Bursztajn, a clinical professor of psychiatry, wrote in a filing that Grace "struck a highly accusatory tone," contending he witnessed "a distraught young woman who is subject to repeated and increasingly sharp questioning by a hostile interviewer who displays increasing suspicion and anger towards Ms. Duckett."

He also seems to be implying that Grace did a bait and switch when inviting Melinda to the show, giving her the impression that she wouldn't be treated as a hostile guest. "Her apparently unanticipated public humiliation on the nationally televised program in question was a substantial contributing cause of her suicide," Bursztajn wrote.

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Melinda Duckett committed suicide just hours before the show aired.
​The family now claims Grace inflicted severe emotional distress during the interview. Grace won't talk about the suit.

It's hard to say that she's responsible for the suicide. Melinda could have killed herself just as easily over a guilty conscience. Moreover, it appears our good Dr. Bursztajn regularly hires himself out as an expert witness. And the general rule of such witnesses is they'll happily be an expert on whatever you want them to say, so long as the check is good.

But Grace is also the epitome of the mean modern cable host, the woman who berates her guests -- even her own correspondents -- with the delusional assurance that she alone is on the side of truth and justice.

So, dear reader, should she be held responsible for Duckett's suicide? Or did she merely help get rid of a woman police couldn't catch on their own?


Tags: Florida

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