Nancy Grace's worst moments

Nancy Grace's TV show popularized a modern media trend: inane rage built on bullshit that's too satisfying to fact-check. But now she's leaving HLN, and The Daily Beast bids "good fucking riddance" and tallies the worst moments from her career.

Grace’s show was permanently unhinged and consistently wrong. She once staged pro wrestling-style kayfabe arguments with her producers about sexy Paris Hilton clips that were running in the background of her interviews, allowing her to feign disappointment in the producers she put up to it. This ran on a news network, like a gutless H.G. Wells teleplay for the chronically stupid.

Worse, she conducted extralegal investigations that ruined lives and maybe left a woman dead in a cheap attempt to push up the blood pressure of America’s intestinal proclivity for easy TV anger, then rebranded her witch hunts as expert legal analysis. She is, after all, a lawyer. But she’s first and foremost a con artist, who was wrong about grievous shit—specific kidnappers, rapists, and child killers.

The internet has a high noise floor for both outrage and irony, which makes it hard to express just how awful Grace is in terms that don't seem hyperbolic. Her show was among the most profoundly depraved spectacles on cable television. Her hearsay made crimes impossible to solve and her interrogations preceded vulnerable suspects killing themselves. Her narcissism is so unreflective that people are still convinced her real twitter account is someone else's parody.

She reportedly cost CNN vast sums of money in settlements. She was caught faking a split-screen interview in a car lot. She demanded to know if Caitlyn Jenner still has a penis. And much of the media is smarmily fluffing her today anyway, just in case she lands on her feet.