When Michael Jennelle takes the stand Wednesday, as he said he would, in his defense against charges that he raped and molested his pre-teen granddaughter for years, he will have to overcome the nearly flawless, withering day Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark marshaled against him today, leaving the defense flailing.
The prosecutor on this second day of trial put on a half dozen witnesses and showed two long video interviews–nearly eight hours of testimony that drew the portrait of a groomer, a compulsive and a weakling who if the testimony is true, found sexual gratification in the easy, trusting and pliant proximity of a stepdaughter and granddaughter, both before they turned 12. It will take a lot more than “I didn’t do it” for Jennelle (as he told the judge in December) to convince a jury of six women and two men, including the two alternates, of his innocence. The jury today saw him redden, perceptively shake his head, swing in his chair and look down as often as he looked at the screen or the witness stand through the day.
If he was hoping to send a message to the jury with those head shakes, the message was likely not nearly as clear as his crimson face as Diana (*), the granddaughter he adopted as his daughter, described in person and on video what she said he’d done to her since she was about 7 as she attended elementary school in Palm Coast, then middle school here and in Pennsylvania.
Jennelle’s attorney, James Disinger, tried to look for chinks in Diana’s armor. He tried to trip her up, impeach her, destroy her credibility. Except that she wore no armor. There were no chinks to look for. The best he could do was get Diana to contradict herself about when the abuse at the Hilton Garden Inn took place, that time when he allegedly took less than three minutes to climax as he molested her while her little brother was in the shower. Did it take place before or after they went to Universal a few years ago? Diana may have said before, then said after–this to a jury panel half whose members likely could not possibly remember what they had for lunch two days before.
It’s the defense’s argument that Jennelle never abused Diana. That the whole thing is a story Diana’s mother, who is also her grandmother, concocted when her marriage to Jennelle fell apart. That it’s retribution, and that Diana’s mother/grandmother conspired with Diana, put her up to it, in essence coached her to come up with that whole series of attacks, abuse and –to a child and with a child–depravation not once or twice, but over several years, then kicked off the policing and legal process that she knew would have her daughter paraded before therapists, law enforcement officers and lawyers for years, as she has been: Diana first revealed the alleged abuse in March 2023. (See: “Jennelle’s Defense, Implying a Monstrous Conspiracy, Terms Charges of Child Rape the Fabrications of a Jilted Wife.”)
It’s possible. But even in a case lacking DNA, the likelihood is closer to those outlandish DNA matches between two unrelated sources than not. Still: it only takes a smear of doubt and one juror to deny the unanimity necessary for a conviction. Alternately, a conviction will mean life in prison for Jennelle, who faces two capital felonies–the death penalty is not on the table–and three life felonies.
Diana is now 12. She was on the stand for 90 minutes this morning. Her video recorded interviews with Dwayne Sturgill, the licensed therapist who conducted both her Child Protection Team interviews, took up 150 minutes. There were more repetitions than inconsistencies between the three segments–repetitions of the way Jennelle had a compulsion for masturbating in front of his granddaughter, at home, in a hotel, in the car, and a habit of using her, touching her, positioning her this way and that, to his ends (“he did that a lot”), profiting from her lack of understanding, buying her with a $50 “bribe,” in her words, she found just as incomprehensible, with make-up, and with those incessant pleas never to tell. He showed her porn to make it seem like it was all normal. She bought it, until she didn’t, though she also started watching porn herself and was caught and disciplined.
She swung in her witness chair almost the whole time, fiddled with her hands, her hair, her eyes, put her hand to her mouth a few times. She was acting almost exactly the way she acted two years ago when she revealed the alleged abuse to her aunt.
Six hours later the jury heard her aunt describe how Diana first came to her in March 2023 to tell her “something important.” The aunt, who is now in her early 20s, had herself been molested by Jennelle when she was around 9, she told the jury in a testimony that echoed some of Diana’s. In March 2022, when she was pregnant with her child, she decided she didn’t want “Mike,” as she and Diana now derisively refer to Jennelle (he used to be “Poppy” to Diana), to ever know her child. It’s when she first told her mother of the abuse she allegedly endured.
But she was describing Diana that day when the 10-year-old girl told her what her grandfather had been doing to her: “She was very scared, fidgety, playing with her hands, trying to be brave.” Just as she had been on the stand. (The aunt had not seen or known what had taken place that morning in the courtroom.)
In the Child Protection Team interviews, Diana was often drawing on the table, eating a snack, drinking from a straw, leaning back, putting her chin on the table, speaking in a small voice in elliptical ways that, as an expert witness for the prosecution who had also not seen the testimony would say later that afternoon, would defy the sort of coaching the defense implies took place. Diana used her own childish words, spoke in varied details and never sounded like she was reciting a script, even though she had written two sets of notes. The defense wants the jury to look at those notes with suspicion, to see them as some kind of tell that Diana was coached, that they were written by two different hands.
But the notes were almost the entire time in the interviewer’s hands, not in Diana’s. She referred to them a couple of times, one time to remind the interviewer that she hadn’t spoken about a particular instance. But she did not speak to him like someone who was scripted, or someone who knew what a script is. Again, there was no armor.
All along, in the courtroom or in the video interviews, she was telling, in the sort of details few adults can make up and fewer children could or possibly know, how Jennelle had allegedly positioned her, naked, on a printer-scanner to take an image of her “privates,” how he’d made her do the equivalent of a headstand as he sat in a recliner so he could wrap her legs around him for easier access to his pleasures, how he had a habit of ejaculating on the floor–the “white stuff,” as she called it–and make his dog eat it. She tried to keep the dog away. But she could only go so far. She did not want to anger Jennelle.
At the end of her first CPT interview, Diana tells the therapist, “All this time I’m like, this is my fault. My fault. My fault.”
It’s what Jennelle had told her. If she ever told, he told her, it would be her fault. She believed him. She trusted him.
(*) The name is a pseudonym.
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