Geraldo Rivera has apologized to the father of slain beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey for airing a mock trial that portrayed him as a sex abuser.
A new Netflix documentary examines the police investigation and media treatment of the case of the little girl who was found strangled in the basement of the family’s Boulder, Colorado home in 1996.
Episode two of the series opens by taking a look at a mock trial Rivera hosted on his now defunct talk show in 1997.
His ‘jury’ found JonBenét’s parents liable for her death after a woman identified as a sexual abuse expert analyzed tapes of the girl.
The ‘expert’ claimed a video of the pageant queen playing the saxophone during a Christmas show proved she was a child who had been ‘sexually stimulated.’
JonBenét’s mother Patsy, who died in 2006, said in a previously recorded interview that the trial made her so depressed she laid in bed ‘for about two days because I was just so mortified.’
Rivera apologized to JonBenét’s father, 80-year-old John Ramsey, during an interview with NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo on Monday.
‘I deeply apologize to you for what you and your family have suffered,’ he said while noting that, ‘Mock trials and moot courts are not that unprecedented.’
‘When I say I am sorry, I don’t apologize for my reporting… but I don’t know what happened. I just want you to know that I lament contributing to the hurt that you have endured.
The former Fox News host back his reporting saying the family was considered viable suspects at the time, but apologized for all the pain they have suffered.
‘I don’t think anyone deserves to go through what you went through. That’s my bottom line,’ Rivera said.
Ramsey accepted the apology and went on to say that believes there is evidence in the case that has never been DNA tested.
‘Let me first say, Geraldo, I accept your apology and thank you… I think the police fed false information, misleading information, to the media before even the evidence had been recovered, looked at,’ he said.
No one has ever caught JonBenét’s killer with the murder haunting investigators and gripping the public’s imagination for nearly three decades.
While initial suspicions centered on her family—father John, mother Patsy, and brother Burke—DNA evidence excluded them as suspects in 1997, and they were formally exonerated in 2008.
The killer of the Young Miss Colorado left her on a heap of clothes with an eight-inch fracture to her skull and a fragmented paint brush stuck into her neck by garrote.
A bombshell admission by a police source has also given investigators fresh hope in finally solving the 28 year mystery.
‘We f****d the case up from the start, and now with new blood, we can finally fix it,’ a police source told the New York Post.
This stunning statement comes as Boulder’s newly appointed police chief, Stephen Redfearn, doubles down on efforts to crack the case.
Redfearn, who assumed his role in early 2024, has made solving the murder a top priority.
‘He wants it solved and off the books,’ said a department insider claimed. ‘He’s assigning officers and resources to solve the murder, which has been a black mark on the Boulder PD.