Some might view Nancy Grace as anything but a journalist. But in response to a lawsuit filed by the parents of a woman who killed herself after being grilled by Grace, the histrionic talk-show host claims she was only practicing “aggressive newsgathering.”

Melinda Duckett	Nancy Grace

“Courts around the nation have acknowledged the well-established right of journalists to ask questions aggressively,” Grace attorney Judith M. Mercier says in a motion to dismiss the talk-show tort case of Beth and William Eubank.

The plaintiffs' daughter, Melinda Duckett, taped a phone interview with Grace about the disappearance of Duckett's two-year-old son. She committed suicide with a shotgun a day later and, according to the Eubanks' suit, CNN, Grace and her producers are to blame for the emotional distress “which was a cause or the proximate cause of her death.”

During the interview, the complaint alleges, Grace subjected the “anguished mother” to “severe interrogation, fist-pounding, and veiled accusations that she was responsible for her child [Trenton's] disappearance and death.”

A claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress is actionable “where the conduct has been so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency.”

But Mercier argues in her brief that her client was merely responding to the evasiveness of Duckett, who would not reveal whether she had taken a polygraph test and what specific stores she had visited with Trenton on the day of his disappearance.

“[O]nly when the mother's answers were less than forthcoming did the host repeat the questions in an effort to secure more informative responses,” the brief says, and

it is simply not ... in any sense “outrageous” for a journalist to attempt to unearth clues about a child's disappearance by asking questions of his mother in a voluntary interview.

Grace, of course, was trained as a lawyer, not a reporter. But that distinction isn't likely to deny her protection from the Eubanks' claim.

"I think the question of who's a journalist and who's not is less relevant nowadays than the question who's involved in active journalism,” the president-elect of the Society of Professional Journalists told the Ocala (Fla.) Star-Banner.

By Matthew Heller
8/10/07