Casey Anthony, the Florida mother controversially acquitted of killing her only child in one of the state’s most notorious murder cases more than a decade ago, has launched a new career as a legal advocate.
Anthony, who failed to report the disappearance of her two-year-old daughter Caylee for months in 2008, appeared on TikTok over the weekend advertising her new role, in which she said she would be “a proponent for the LGBTQ community [and] women’s rights”.
In the video, which was recorded in her car, Anthony redirects viewers to a Substack account that describes her as an advocate and researcher – and where she said she would be posting regularly on legal issues.
“I’ve been in the legal field since 2011, and in this capacity I feel that it’s necessary, if I’m going to continue to operate appropriately as a legal advocate, that I start to advocate for myself and also advocate for my daughter,” she said, inviting people with problems to email her.
“My goal is to continue to help give a voice to people, to give people tools and resources that they can utilize.”
Anthony was found not guilty of murder in 2011 in a verdict many considered a miscarriage on the same scale of OJ Simpson’s acquittal on charges that he killed his ex-wife and a friend. She was, however, convicted of lying to police and sentenced to four years in prison.
Prosecutors painted her as a neglectful mother who saw her daughter as an obstacle to her hedonistic lifestyle, and they alleged that Anthony murdered the child using chloroform before burying the body in woodland behind her family’s Orlando home.
Caylee’s remains, found in a laundry bag and with duct tape wrapping the girl’s skull, were not discovered for six months, during which time Casey Anthony, then 22, insisted to her family that she was busy with work – and that her daughter was in the care of a non-existent nanny.
Anthony’s mother, Cindy eventually became suspicious at not seeing her granddaughter and reported her missing to police after discovering her daughter’s car at a junkyard with a strong odor she later testified was similar to a decomposing body.
The defense asserted that Caylee drowned accidentally in a swimming pool and her grandfather, a former police officer, decided to make the death look like a murder, a claim prosecutors said was “absurd”.
Ultimately, the jury did not believe either story, and acquitted Anthony because they did not believe the state had sufficiently proven its case, according to an interview one juror gave after the trial. Anthony’s lawyers, meanwhile, said she was a victim of “media assassination” while others said the publicity had caused her to become “one of the most hated women in America”.
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Anthony has re-emerged at various intervals in the years since to tell her version of the story, most recently in 2022 when she was featured in the Peacock documentary Casey Anthony: Where the Truth Lies.
The Guardian’s review of the three-and-a-half hour program at the time called it “a soft-focus vanity project from a world-class narcissist”. A worker on the show told BuzzFeed News that Anthony “had gone through 10 years of intensive therapy” since the trial and had struggled to find work.
On Monday, Parade reported that Anthony had been living in Tennessee.
