Photo Courtesy of Twitter (@Phil_Lewis_)
Courtney Clenney’s (currently Courtney Tailor on social media) defense team requested on Friday that the court obscure evidence from the public during Clenney’s murder case—Florida prosecutors denied the request, New York Post reported.
Clenney is the white OnlyFans model who allegedly killed her Black boyfriend, Christian Obumseli, by plunging a 3.5-inch-long kitchen knife into his chest in their Miami apartment, severing his subclavian artery. After emergency personnel rushed him to Jackson Memorial Hospital, medical staff pronounced him dead.
Miami State Attorney Kathie Fernandez Rundle released elevator surveillance footage of Clenney ridiculing and assaulting Obumseli, who shielded himself and attempted to push Clenney away.
The video’s release didn’t sit right with the social media influencer’s lawyer Frank Prieto and his team.
“It’s been the defense that has been frankly keeping this case within media attention,” Prieto’s assistant claimed. “Mr. Obumseli was dead for five days, and the defense was making statements to the media both in print and on television and local news.”
Prieto deprecated Miami State Attorney Kathie Fernandez Rundle for releasing the video, claiming it’s “an attempt by the government to prejudice and taint potential jury members against the defendant.”
The stabbing occurred in April, and authorities arrested the 26-year-old in Hawaii on Aug. 11. She was charged with second-degree murder with a deadly weapon by the Hilo Circuit Court and was held without bail. She waived extradition and agreed to return to Florida to face her murder charge.
Miami-Dade Police will get Clenney from the Hawaii Community Correctional Center and bring her back, Fox News reported.
Prieto maintained that Obumseli strangled Clenney, and she acted in self-defense. Yet, on Aug. 9, Rundle said their relationship was “extremely tempestuous and combative” and that the two had had issues between them since November 2020.
There had been “multiple incidents of domestic violence from both sides.”
The Miami Police Department initially cleared Clenney after she told them she acted in self-defense, but the pressure from the family’s lawyer Larry Handsfield led investigators to continue the investigation and arrest Clenney. Her lawyers tried to request an inspection of Obumseli’s body, but the family laid him to rest weeks ago in Dallas.
“It would be sacrilegious and go against [the family’s] religion for the body to be exhumed at any time,” Handsfield said to the court.