Michael Jennelle, 53, Guilty on All Charges of Raping Granddaughter; He Faces Life in Prison

The jury had a choice: to believe Diana (*), a 12-year-old girl, who testified that Michael Jennelle, the biological grandfather who had adopted her as her daughter after her parents lost their rights over neglect and drug use, the man she loved, the man she called Poppy, had repeatedly sexually abused her when she was between 7 and 10, just as he had his now-adult step-daughter Penny (*) when she was 9 or 10.

Or the jury could believe Jennelle, 53, who said he did none of it, and believe his defense, that the whole allegations were a conspiracy between Diana, Penny and their mother V.J. to get at Jennelle in a child-custody dispute involving Diana and her little brother.




At the end of a three-day trial and just 75 minutes of deliberations this afternoon, the jury of four women and two men believed the young girl.

The jury found Jennelle guilty on all seven charges he faced, including two counts of raping a child under 12, three counts of molesting a child under 12, and two counts of exhibitionism.

Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols, who had urged Nichols to accept a deal in December, will sentence him to mandatory life in prison at a later date. She has no discretion under the law’s guidelines. The sentence is delayed to allow for a pre-sentence investigation, to which Jennelle is entitled regarding two counts.

The judge had asked everyone in the courtroom to respect the verdict with dignity, including the victim’s grandmother (Jennelle’s ex-wife), who sat on one side of the gallery with numerous supporters, and several of Jennelle’s children and friends who attended the trial in support, sitting on the other side. There were only quiet sobs from both sides.

Jennelle himself stood ramrod next tom his attorney, shook his head, but otherwise kept his expression as placid as it had been throughout the trial.




Some 48 minutes into their deliberations, jurors had asked to see a set of notes Diana had written to herself before each of the two interviews she had with a Child Protection Team therapist, the sort of interview conducted in a safe setting where the therapist is trained to elicit, but not lead, a child victim of physical or sexual abuse to describe for the record what may or may not have taken place.

The interviews took place a few months apart in Virginia, where Diana lived at the time with her mother. The second one was requested by the Flagler County Sheriff’s detective who was investigating the case, since all the charges resulted from alleged incidents at a Palm Coast apartment on Pine Lakes Parkway and at the Hilton Garden Inn on State Road 100. The detective had not been able to attend the first.

Diana had been extremely descriptive in the two interviews, just as she had been when she took the stand on Tuesday. She detailed what she had written in the separate notes, in language and script still of a pre-pubescent child who until the spring of 2023, when she learned in her fifth-grade class about “good touch” and “bad touch,” had no idea that what her Poppy was doing to her was wrong. She considered it normal. He had told her so. He lavished her with compliments, gift, money, make-up, and subtle threats, imploring her to keep their secret. If she told, it’d be her fault anyway, he told her.




She described his habits with her, which had few bounds as long as he could pleasure himself, using her as a stimulant. She described his habits, the physical positions he put her in so he could have access to her “privates,” his compulsion (not her word) to masturbate in the car in front of her, where he used a blue rag to clean himself up (she refused to be his maid in that regard), or at home, where he used the family dog Louie to lap it up.

All lies, James Disinger, Jennelle’s attorney, told the jury in his closing argument. Nonsensical lies. He cast doubt on the authenticity of the notes–not that Diana couldn’t have written them, but that she couldn’t have written them without help, without coaching, just as the oddly non-child-like words she used the beginning of her first interview echoed with the vocal cords of a coach. The implication was that V.J. had coached her daughter to say all those reprehensible things Jennelle supposedly did. As for the details, Diana learned them all from watching porn, in which she’d shown some interest.

That anyway, was the defense’s claim. So when the jury asked to see the notes, it signaled the only thing it could signal: the defense had sowed some doubt as to their authenticity, and the jurors wanted to have a look for themselves. The question was whether the jury’s doubt would become reasonable–the standard necessary to acquit.

It did not.




“I know the defense wants you to believe, Oh, [V.J.], she’s just masterminded all this, she’s a vindictive ex wife” Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark told the jury. “I need you guys to use your common sense, and your common sense would tell you that this grandmother learns from her own daughter that this man had been harming her child years ago, and so her fear is, oh, my god, he could do it to Diana. That’s why we’re here. And ultimately, we do find out from Diana, as of March of ’23, that, in fact, [V.J.] was too late, it had already happened unbeknownst to her. And that’s why we’re here.”

Early in his testimony today Jinnelle was talking about when he claimed Diana and her brother from their biological mother, who had drug-abuse issues and whose house had burned, when he blurted out the beginning of a sentence suggesting that Diana had been sexually abused as a much younger child. It looked like the clever ploy of a defendant adept as passing himself off as a simple Everyman. The judge immediately sent the jury out.

To get clarity on where Disinger and Jennelle were going, the judge allowed Disinger to continue his questions out of hearing of the jury. Jennelle referred to a time when Diana was 4 or 5, taking a bath, when a teen-age boy touched her. Jennelle said since then, he had instructed all counselors to question Diana about proper and improper touching.

Clark renewed her objection. “Don’t know where this is coming from, there’s nothing in the record to support what he’s saying,” she said.

The judge agreed: “This is too far out there and too inflammatory,” she told Disinger.

“I didn’t think there’s an underhanded way to get into this. I believe there was a lack of investigation in this case,” Disinger said. Had there been sufficient investigating, the mater would have been revealed, he said.




The claim was nearly identical to a line of defense in the case of Monserrate Teron, who was found guilty by a jury of raping his 7-year-old niece and sentenced to life in prison after two trials in Flagler County, the last in February 2023. The defense in that case tried to introduce claims that the girl had been the victim of sexual abuse–not by the accused, but by someone else in her family whom she did not want to get in trouble. Then, too, the defense claimed the matter was not thoroughly investigated. Then, too, the defendant claimed he could not get aroused, had no sexual interest, as Jennele did (because Jennelle had been diagnosed with leprosy, which is not transmittable sexually).

The judge did not allow that line of speculative questioning at Teron’s trials. (The first trial ended in a deadlocked jury. The second ended with a conviction.) Nor was it allowed in this one.

And Clark, as is her habit, had saved that one piece of evidence she knew would seal the case in her favor: a text exchange between Jennelle and V.J. that amounted to a confession of Jennelle’s molestation of his now-older daughter. He wasn’t on trial for that abuse. But he might well be. Life sentences don’t discriminate between charges, or lack of charges.