Julie Grant serves a legal feast each morning on Court TV.
The first word on trials across America comes each weekday morning from Buckhead resident Julie Grant.
As the host of Court TV’s 8 a.m. “Opening Statements” since September 2023, the ex-prosecutor sets the scene for the cases people will be talking about.
“My job isn’t to tell anybody what to think,” Grant says. “It’s to help give some context, explain some of the things that may be hard to understand and guide them as they watch the trial and make those judgments for themselves.”
Her on-air work combines interests that go back to her time at Ohio’s Mount Union College as a broadcasting major with a legal studies minor who worked at the campus radio station. She recalls a professor telling her that Court TV “would be the perfect job for you.”
She and the network needed a few retrials first.
Grant started in TV news in her hometown of Steubenville, Ohio, but stopped to attend the University of Akron law school. She didn’t plan to practice; she just wanted to improve her reporting.
“Then I fell in love with the trial work,” she says. “I think it’s the storytelling because trial advocacy is storytelling. The best advocates are the best storytellers.”
Her four years as a prosecutor in Pittsburgh were hard—“many days you have everybody mad at you”— but rewarding because she was doing the right thing for victims.
“It was such a wonderful experience,” she says. But the chance to tell different stories drew her back to TV news, first in Greensboro, North Carolina, then again in Pittsburgh. When she wasn’t covering legal events such as jury selection for Bill Cosby’s 2017 criminal case— jurors were chosen in Pittsburgh for the trial in Philadelphia—she was earning a degree in trial advocacy from Temple University through remote coursework and one weekend a month in Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, Court TV, which left the cableverse in 2008, was reborn in 2019. That year Grant moved to Atlanta to begin hosting trial coverage.
“Its uniqueness and its realness are what fascinated me,” she says. “Some people will deem it infotainment, but we show people what actually happens.”
She helps viewers understand that not all doubts are reasonable, that forensics aren’t always important and that no case is perfect, no matter what they see on “Law & Order.”
Victims take priority on air, where she emphasizes that behind viewers’ true-crime thrills is real-life trauma, and off, where she serves on the board of the National Center for Victims of Crime and the advisory board of the Pittsburgh- area Crisis Center North’s dog companion program.
She finds her own respite with her dog, Reyna, and cat, Rocky, plus her musician boyfriend, Justin Fabus. A former cheerleader in college and for the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins, she is devoted to lifting weights and enjoys new restaurants, Punchline comedy shows and music concerts of all types. She also flies home to visit her parents in Steubenville every month.
While she misses the courtroom and hopes to serve as a part-time magistrate judge in retirement someday, she has no plans to leave “Opening Statements,” named for her favorite part of a trial.
“Opening statements win cases” by creating lasting impressions with master storytelling, she says. “That’s what we try to do with the show. We set the tone for what’s to come.”
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JULIE GRANT
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