JANUARY 25--Television host Nancy Grace, who has made a career of berating people live on the air, is worried that her videotaped deposition this week in a wrongful death lawsuit might be leaked to the media, which could then "cut and splice" and "manipulate" her words into sound bites that would appear "wholly out of context."

In an emergency motion filed today in U.S. District Court in Ocala, Florida, Grace's lawyers asked a judge to either bar the filming of her deposition this Thursday or issue a protective order prohibiting dissemination of the video. Grace, 50, is being sued by the parents of Melinda Duckett, a 21-year-old Florida woman who committed suicide in 2006, one day after she was cross-examined by the CNN Headline News host about the whereabouts of her missing two-year-old son. Police have described Duckett as the prime suspect in the disappearnce of her son Trenton, who has not been found.

In the motion, a copy of which you'll find here, Grace's attorneys noted that "there already have been threats to Ms. Grace during the pendency of this lawsuit," adding that if the videotape were to surface pre-trial, such a leak would "serve no purpose but to further harass, embarrass, and intimidate Ms. Grace and corrupt the jury pool."

In a response filed this afternoon, Duckett's relatives called Grace's legal maneuvering a "frivolous, untruthful motion," since they had previously agreed to keep her videotaped testimony confidential. Grace's deposition is scheduled for 9 AM Thursday in the Atlanta offices of Holland & Knight, her lawyers. (7 pages)