Judge denies request to curb public statements in OnlyFans model’s Miami murder case
The judge overseeing OnlyFans model Courtney Clenney’s murder case shot down the state’s attempt to curtail public comments by defense attorneys until after a celebrity website airs a story on the high-profile case next week.
In a brief order issued Wednesday night, MiamiDade Circuit Court Judge Laura Shearon Cruz denied a request from Miami-Dade state prosecutors to block statements from Clenney’s attorneys until the documentary airs on Monday.
State prosecutors were incensed that Clenney’s family and attorneys had co-operated with the celebrity website TMZ and that defense attorney Frank Prieto appeared on Court TV late last year and spoke about how Christian “Toby” Obumseli had been sexually assaulted by his father as a child. Clenney killed Obumseli in 2022.
Prosecutors argued the alleged abuse had nothing to do with Clenney’s murder trial. The social-media star, who had more than 2 million followers, is charged in the April 2022 stabbing death of Obumseli in their Miami bayside condominium.
State prosecutors and Clenney’s defense attorneys wouldn’t comment on the judge’s latest ruling Wednesday.
Clenney has been jailed since August 2022 for the stabbing death of Obumseli
— her boyfriend and a cryptocurrency trader — four months earlier. She was taken into custody in Hawaii and extradited to Miami.
The spat between defense attorneys and state prosecutors — in a case that has garnered worldwide attention — reached a fever pitch last week. That’s when prosecutors came just short of requesting a gag order, instead asking Judge Cruz to find a remedy to limit what the Clenney family and their attorneys can say in public.
Defense attorneys Sabrina Puglisi and Prieto argued prosecutors opened a genie bottle when they began admitting volumes of information into discovery, thus making it available to the public.