Courtney Clenney Trial: The Case That Has No Clean Answer

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1:04pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full-terms and conditions. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time. Now, through April 2nd, spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Hunts, Nerds, Pillsbury, Lowries, Briars, Quaker, and Culture Pop. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full-terms and conditions. It's tax season, and by now, I know we're all a bit tired of numbers, but here's an important one you need to hear. $16 billion. That's how much money and refunds the IRS flagged for possible identity fraud. Here's another one. One in four honest, hard-working, tax-paying Americans has been a victim of identity theft. But it's not all grim news. LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second for your personal information,

2:04and alerts you to threats you could easily miss on your own. If your identity is stolen, LifeLock's US-based Restoration Specialist will fix it, backed by another good number. The million-dollar protection package. In fact, Restoration is guaranteed or your money back. Don't face identity theft and financial losses alone. There's strength in numbers with LifeLock identity theft protection for tax season and beyond. Visit LifeLock.com-iHeart and save up to 40% your first year. That's 40% off at LifeLock.com-iHeart. Terms apply. There is a moment in the interrogation footage that stops people cold in this case, Courtney Clinton, who was the only fans model. You may have heard of this one. The only fans model trial. Yeah, this is what it is. It's the one where she was twerking in court during a

3:04hearing and given the big old duck lips thing to the camera. You know what I'm like to do when you're being tried for murder. But there is a moment in the interrogation footage that stops people cold. Courtney Clinton has been sitting in that room for hours. It's covered in blood or boyfriends blood and she's been talking to Miami detectives about what happened and their apartment earlier that afternoon. She's told them the story, she threw an eye from 10 feet away to scare him off. She didn't stab him. She was defending herself. She called 911. She tried to help him. Then the detectives leave the room. They come back and they tell her Christian is dead. Her boyfriend. Her response on tape. Christian is dead. Oh my God,

4:05it's not real, right? Can I please have a hug? That's a reaction of someone who is void of empathy or human emotion. How? Why? Your guess is as good as mine. I'm sure there's a trauma story behind Courtney Clinton. Probably quite a few, quite honestly. And if you look back, I'm sure it's sad. I'm sure it's disturbing and I'm sure it's a God. I don't even know her back story and I'm sure there's something like that there. But it doesn't excuse the behavior. When your whole life is a performance, based solely on your physicality

5:08and that's all people want for and that's all you have the energy to give them or that you choose to give them. Sometimes that emotional aspect, the parts that parts in life that truly matter, they're not there. And sometimes that ability to connect with other human beings and understand that it's written right and wrong and murder and not murder is also God. Doesn't exist when you're asking the people who just told you your boyfriend is dead and you likely did it. Can I have a hug? It's out of that works. Courtney, it is twirking in court. People watch the moment and they split immediately. Some see woman coming apart,

6:12genuine shock, genuine grief. Everybody grieves differently. Remember? Yeah. There's a healthy and an unhealthy way. There's genuine shock. There's genuine grief. Someone who threw a knife to create distance and didn't know it would kill him. Others watch at exact same tape and see something else, something rehearse, something hollow, something very strange. Here's what I watch understand before we go any further. Both of these reads are reasonable. That's not a a cop out. That's is the case. This is the situation where we're missing facts. We have the tape. We have the recordings. We have the medical examiners report. We have surveillance footage. We have police body chem. We have text messages. We have years of documented incidents across multiple cities. We have all of it. And none of it has settled this because this case is not a question of what happened. It's a question of what it means. At an April 27th, 12 people in a Miami court room are going to have to pick one meaning and live

7:13with it. Let's start with who these two people actually were. And I'm curious to get your thoughts in the comments section as we work our way through it. Christian, a bloomsae, 27 years old, Nigerian American group in Dallas, Texas went to Plano East Senior High School, graduated Texas Tech with a degree in communications and business management. Built his own company, Wiseman and Peachtree LLC was working as a cryptocurrency trader by every account from people who knew him, soft spoken kind, someone with a life. He was actively building his cousin, Karen Egbonna, stood in front of a camera days after his death and said this, devastation doesn't quite describe what my family is experiencing right now. Yesterday, we finally told her 93-year-old grandmother that her grandson who was expected to come home for his 28th birthday will no longer ever be returning home. His brother, Jeffrey, was more

8:19direct. I do believe she is the killer. Christian, a bloomsae, is buried in Dallas. He was nine days from turning 28. Courtney Cleaney? 26th at the time. Online, she was Courtney Taylor. Over 2 million Instagram followers, reportedly more than $3 million earned on only fans since 2020. A public figure with a platform and an image she had spent years building, but the person behind that image, the one, her family and closest people describe as someone who had been struggling before April 3rd. She'd been treated for substance abuse. She had PTSD diagnosis. People who knew her privately described someone who was not the curated version online, someone who had her own fractures and her own pain running underneath the surface. Her attorney's subscriber as a domestic violent survivor, a woman who went to police who asked for help who tried to get out of something she felt trapped inside and who has failed at every turn. Her attorney, Frank Pietro,

9:27I said it plainly. She called 911 that day. She tried to stop the bleeding. She did not flee the scene. And from the first moment she spoke to investigators. She has maintained she was defending her life. They met in November 2020 moved in together and from nearly the beginning by almost every account this relationship was violently unstable. Both sides agreed to that much where they part ways completely without any middle ground is on who was doing it to whom. Austin first, then Las Vegas, then Aspen, then Miami police calls in multiple cities documented incidents across two years, a luxury high rise in Miami at $10,000 a month that the building was preparing to take back from them over the constant disturbances. Two days before the stabbing April 1st building security called Miami to police to report a domestic disturbance officers

10:28responded. There is body cam footage from that call. Both sides point to the same trail of incidents and see completely different things. The prosecution sees a man absorbing escalating violence from an aggressor who documented him as her target. The defences of women trapped with someone who was dangerous when the doors were closed and careful when they weren't and who had the recordings to prove she was the problem whether or not they told the whole story. Now, here's the two versions of this case split and they split hard. The prosecution's evidence is built largely around what Christian a blumsy was doing in the weeks and months before he died. He started secretly recording his interactions with Clanny. Hidden phone in his pocket, mostly audio, occasionally video, while those recordings capture was disturbing. Clanny screaming at him, harling racial slurs, calling him the n-word repeatedly, demanding to hit him.

11:34And in at least one recording the sound of a slap and one clip the argument had started because a blumsy said hello to a woman he passed on a bike ride and didn't mention it. That was enough. You can hear her on tape, shot up and let me effing slap you dumb ass and another recording from the building lobby when the judge has ruled it admissible for trial. A blumsy's voice comes through low and controlled as an effing threat. I asked you something and I apologized but you hit me. And then there's the next message, not a recording, something he wrote to her is love going to kill me. Building elevator surveillance footage captured Clanny striking a blumsy in a prior incident months before April 3rd. The prosecutions read of it all, pattern, sustained, documented, escalating, and it ended in a stabbing. Now here's the defense's read on that same body of evidence. And you need to sit with this

12:37because it is not something that you can just walk away from. It's not nothing. Clanny's attorneys argue that a blumsy recorded selectively that he would deliberately provoke her, push her until she reacted and then capture the reaction on tape while his own behavior stayed off the record. And then the defense alleges he would use those recordings as leverage threatened to show them to friends and family hold them over her head that they argue is a specific calculated form of psychological control. The kind that leaves no marks and no police reports because it's designed not to. Defense attorney Frank Pretro stated on the record that an independent writing saw a blumsy hitting Clanny in the head inside their apartment when he believed no one was watching. That witness exists. That account was given to investigators. And the body cam footage from that April 1st call two days before the stabbing includes Clanny telling the responding officers she wanted a restraining order against a blumsy. She asked her protection from him. It's in the police record. The security guard and

13:42that same call told officers he had watched a blumsy come charging toward Clanny in the lobby. Also in the record her attorney attorneys have been unambiguous. Clanny is a victim of domestic violence. It was failed by every system that should have protected her. Two versions. Both with evidence, both with witnesses, neither one clean. Before we go and say, well, I'm going to be on this side or that side. You know, there is a world that exists where domestic violence can be brought onto each partner simultaneously by the other where it's not all one side is right. It's where both sides are completely wrong. And when you have two people, two tornadoes spinning together simultaneously and nothing truly stopping them, someone usually dies. And it's not a clean story.

14:45It's not the always being abused and I know choice and sometimes when you put two things together that do not work, you get an explosion. Now we get to April 3rd and this is where the physical evidence enters and where the case becomes genuinely uncomfortably complicated. They'd broken up a week before, made up a day prior. Sunday afternoon, they went to subway together, came back to the apartment and argument started over phone location sharing. At 430 in the afternoon, a blumsy was at the apartment. Things escalated fast. In April, call 911 111 minutes before clenny did reporting at a disturbance coming from the unit, building security arrived at the door knocked on the door, heard yelling through it. According to

15:48the a blumsy family civil lawsuit, security stood outside that door for approximately 12 minutes and did not go in. Then clenny called. Christian have been stabbed. She was trying to help him. Her account detectives a blumsy pushed her through her to the floor, grabbed her by the throat. She grabbed a six inch kitchen knife and threw it at him from roughly 10 feet away to scare him off. An interrogation on tape. I for dang short did not stab him. That would be insane. I thought it would scare him by just grabbing it. Also on tape unprompted. I am certainly a crazy person too. I am aggressive in particular, you think? The Miami-Dade Chief Medical Examiner looked at the wound and reached a different conclusion. The fatal injury was three inches deep into the chest. It severed the sub clavicle artery. The medical examiner described it as a forceful downward thrust.

16:48The conclusion was direct. This would have not been caused by a knife thrown from 10 feet away. The depth, the angle, the force required, none of it is consistent with a thrown weapon. If the yummy is right, what happened in the department was physically different. In distance, in force, in proximity, from the act Courtney Cleening described to police. The defense's answer to that is Dr. Lenore Walker, the researcher who pioneered battered women's syndrome theory. The argument is a person acting in genuine terror, moving on pure survival instinct can produce actions that outpace their own conscious memory of events. The body moves before the mind processes what's happening. That three inch wound that defense argues does not require intent to kill. It requires fear. The defense retained expert and the separate wrongful death civil case reviewed the same physical evidence and reportedly reached conclusions at according to Clintie's attorney significantly undermined the state's second degree murder theory. Their position at best, this was reckless conduct, not murder.

17:51There's a legal and moral distance between those two things. And this trial is going to have to cross it. And then there's a matter of the investigation itself because this is not a sidebar. This goes directly to whether the case against Courtney Cleening was built on solid ground or compromise ground. Prosecutors allegedly accessed privileged communication between Cleening, her parents, and her attorneys, including what a circuit judge later found were confidential defense strategy documents. That judge ruled the Miami-Dade state attorney's office violated attorney client privilege. The computer tampering charges filed against Clintie's parents related to a blumsy laptop were dropped directly as a result of that ruling. The defense filed motions to disqualify the entire prosecutor's office from the murder case on the grounds of the state had seen the defense's playbook before trial. That motion was ultimately denied, but the underlying finding stands the state violated privilege and the case moved forward anyway. That'll be great for appeal. The defense also alleges that a building employee who entered the apartment before police

18:55arrived and filmed photos and videos inside was told to delete everything. That evidence is gone. What it showed? No one will ever know. Blood evidence. The defense as alleged was destroyed. A witness they have alleged was withheld. She's been in jail without bonds in August of 22 over three and a half years, not convicted, not tried waiting. Her attorneys have argued repeatedly. She's broke, not a flight risk, and that defendants in comparable self-defense cases have been released, unbonded and allowed to go home. The judge has said no every time. During those three and a half years, a blumsy's family has been waiting too. They learned of his death when a medical examiner called to ask about organ donation. That's how they found out their son, their brother, their grandson was gone. Hey, can we take his organs? Have a great day. They've raised the racial dimension of this case publicly and directly. He was black. She is white in the four months between the stabbing and the arrest have never been

19:59adequately explained to their satisfaction. That question will be in the room when the trial begins whether it is spoken out loud or not. The judge is second to green murder. In Florida, that carries a potential life sentence. The defense is pushing for manslaughter, recklessness, without the depraved intent that second to green murder requires. The distance between those two outcomes is not a legal technicality for the families on both sides of this. It's everything. Trial starts April 27th. Prosecutors expected to be done in under two weeks. Christian, a blumsy wrote, is love going to kill me to the woman now charged with this murder? He was afraid of something whether it was her or whether she was equally afraid of him is a question that has driven nearly four years of legal combat, public argument, delayed justice and two families on resolve grief. Twelve people are about to be asked to answer it. We'll be

21:00there for it every day, keeping you updated. Your thoughts, your thoughts in the comments on YouTube and sub-stack. This case is going to open up a lot of questions. It's going to open up a lot of thoughts on the mental state of everybody involved here. And when people go down certain roads in life, what that means. We're going to get into it. Give me your thoughts in the comments section. There's no right or wrong. We'll continue our conversation. I'd be sure to press subscribe wherever you're downloading podcasts. Do you know if there's any of our coverage and commentary on any of these cases? Until then, I'm Tony Bursky. We'll talk again real soon. Subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony Bursky and the Hidden Killers podcast. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time.

22:00Now, through April 2nd, spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Lindor, Chipsahoy, Gatorade, Post, Ziplock and Zoa. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Certified plant genius here. Most people see a busy plant shop, but I see a perfectly balanced ecosystem thanks to genius from global payments. Inventory, tracked, payment, seamless. Reviews in one place? Absolutely genius. From sold-out crowds worldwide to running the shop, genius grows with you. You're on Starras Potted? Healthy roots, strong growth, just like this shop. Big league reliability for your business. That's genius. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time. Now, through April 2nd, spring in for store-wide deals and earn

23:04four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Lindor, Chipsahoy, Gatorade, Post, Ziploc, and Zoah. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it. Asking where this is all going, they come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more. So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through April 2nd. Spring in for store-wide deals

24:08and earn four times the points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Celsius, Body Armor, Oralida, Silk, Capri Sun, Bavarian Meets, and Charmin. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Every day the world gets a little weirder and a lot more awesome. Cool stuff daily takes a look at everything from mining in space to the latest in the fight against cancer to how AI is basically changing everything. It's all the cool stuff you didn't know you need it to know. Join us for cool stuff daily as we take a quick look at science, tech, and the wait, what stories that make you sound way smarter at dinner. Subscribe to cool stuff daily now because the future is happening fast and it's way too fun to miss.

25:29Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store or online for easy, drive up and go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Hey, I'm Josh Speagle, host of the podcast, Lunatic in the newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking, and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button, you're left, you'll cry and gasp and horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news. It's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the newsroom. Listen today. Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time now through April 2nd. Spring in for store-wide deals and earn four times the points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Celsius, body armor or aida, silk, Capri Sun, Bavarian meats, and Charmin. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event long savings. Stack up those rewards to save

26:29even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in-store or online for easy drive-up and go pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Hey, I'm Josh Speagle, host of the podcast, Lunatic in the newsroom. If you enjoy journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking, and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and gasp and horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the newsroom. Listen today. Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a longtime reporter and an on-air contributor to CNBC. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more.

27:35So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Josh Speagle, host of the podcast, Lunatic in the newsroom. If you enjoyed journalism that drifts into mild panic, wild overthinking, and a guaranteed nervous breakdown, Lunatic in the newsroom is for you. It's news like you've never heard before. The only newsroom with a panic button. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and gasp and horror as the show spirals completely out of control. It's not just news, it's emotionally unstable. Lunatic in the newsroom. Listen today. Hey, there it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway. It's stock up savings time. Now through April 2nd, spraying in for store-wide deals and earn four times of points. Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from Lindor, Chipsahoy, Gatorade, Post, Ziploc, and Zoah. Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings. Stack up those rewards to save even more. Enjoy savings on top of savings when you shop in store

28:39or online for easy drive up-and-go, pick up or delivery. Restrictions apply, see website for full-terms and conditions. It's tax season, and by now we're all a bit tired of numbers, but here's an important one you need to hear. $16 billion. That's how much money and refunds the IRS flanked for possible identity fraud. But it's not all grim news. Life lock monitors millions of data points per second and alerts you to threats you could easily miss on your own. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com slash iHeart. Terms apply.