Tina Lawson, Beyoncé’s mother, had some choice words for the defense attorney Laura Hogue for Gregory McMichael, one of the three men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. In her closing arguments, the lawyer referred to the deceased’s toenails as “dirty.”
Hogue was making her final attempt to sway the jury on Nov. 23 during a trial that found three men guilty of murder charges in the February 2020 shotgun slaying of the 25-year-old jogger when she said, “Turning Ahmaud Arbery into a victim after the choices that he made, does not reflect the reality of what brought Ahmaud Arbery to Satilla Shores in his khaki shorts, with no socks to cover his long, dirty toenails.”
After hearing this, Lawson was compelled to speak out that day, calling the attorney a “dumb, evil, racist cockroach” in a caption on her Instagram profile.
“The defendants turned Mr. Arbery into the victim when they murdered him in cold blood, she continued. “This insulting, disrespectful, evil manipulative, racist comment about someone’s loved one who is dead, that she made should get her thrown off this case and charged with reckless behavior.”
“What did the judge do about this disgusting comment?” The woman that helped shape the career of one of the world’s most popular artists further wrote, “Since when are you breaking the law because you wear khaki shorts and no socks. These people feel so emboldened by the Kyle Rittenhouse case they have no limits to their ugliness.”
She concluded by saying that the defense was blaming the victim.
“Let’s just blame the victim,” she ended her message. “Why was she not reprimanded? His mother had to hear her son who has been murdered in the street reduced to dirty Toenails appalling !!!! Do her and the defendants have no soul?”
Arbery’s mother was hurt by the statements. Newsweek shared that Wanda Cooper-Jones spoke to CNN’s John Berman after hearing Hogue’s comments and said that she got up and left out the room after hearing the vile comments.
She shared, “I thought it was very, very rude to talk about his long, dirty toenails and to totally neglect that my son had a huge hole in his chest when he was shot with that shotgun.”
Even a Fox News legal analyst was aghast at the statements and antics that the defense used during the trial. Ted Williams, who is featured often on the right-leaning network, said after the guilty verdicts came in on Nov. 24, “I’m a lawyer and I can tell you I am very, very embarrassed by the manner in which several defense attorneys put on their case and it may very well have hurt them and their clients with the jury.”
“When you give a closing argument and you talk about a dead man’s dirty long, black toenails, that in and of itself is very offensive,” he continued. “When you stand up and you tell a judge that there are Black pastors in the room and that you don’t want them there, that also was very offensive!”
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