Geraldo Rivera has apologized to the father of six-year-old murder victim JonBenet Ramsey for his contribution to the family’s suffering over the years.
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The 81-year-old veteran journalist and political commentator appeared Tuesday on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation broadcast to speak about his role in the 1997 mock trial on the now defunct talk show The Geraldo Rivera Show.
“I deeply apologize to you for what you and your family have suffered, how you lost your wife to cancer, one child to that terrible car crash, and of course what happened to JonBenet,” Rivera told John Bennett Ramsey, adding that “mock trials and moot courts … are not that unprecedented, they’re not that extraordinary.”
The apology comes after renewed interest in the unsolved case from the Netflix docuseries Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey? that has gripped the U.S. and the world ever since.
The series looks at police errors and the “media circus” surrounding the case after the child beauty pageant queen was found bludgeoned and strangled in the basement of the family’s Boulder, Colo., home on Dec. 26, 1996, hours after her mother made a frantic 911 call that her daughter was missing and a ransom note was left behind.
During the mock trial, Rivera and other guests made inflammatory remarks before concluding that the Ramseys were partly to blame for their daughter’s murder.
At one point, a child abuse expert said — in reference to a video of the daughter playing a saxophone — that she believed the victim had been “sexually stimulated.”
The mock jury found the parents liable for their daughter’s death. In a previously recorded interview, mother Patsy Ramsey said she was bedridden “for about two days because I was just so mortified” by the fake jurors’ conclusion.
“So when I say I am sorry, I don’t apologize for my reporting,” Rivera said. “I don’t know what happened. I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt that you have endured…. No one deserves to go through what you went through. That’s my bottom line.”
“Let me first say, Geraldo, I accept your apology and thank you,” Ramsey responded.
Late last month, the Boulder Police Department said in a statement shared to social media that they do not have any viable evidence and leads at this time about the killing.
“What I can tell you, though, is we have thoroughly investigated multiple people as suspects throughout the years and we continue to be open-minded about what occurred as we investigate the tips that come into detectives,” Boulder Police Chief Steve Redfearn said in a video statement.