Latest news with #Karen:ABrotherRemembers
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The View': Kelsey Grammer Fights Tears Recalling the Night He Had to Identify His Sister's Body
Kelsey Grammer is opening up about his sister's murder in his new book, and on Thursday's episode of 'The View,' the actor nearly broke down in tears discussing it. The book is called 'Karen' and it tells the story of Grammer's sister's life, but also her tragic death. Karen Grammer was kidnapped as a teenager, raped and stabbed 42 times, leading to her death. It's a painful thing to relive, and as Kelsey explained to the ABC hosts, that's why he didn't write the book sooner. 'It was really that I wasn't ready, I think, until I got older,' he said. Kelsey Grammer wrestled for decades with a deeply personal pain over the tragic murder of his beloved sister at 18 years old and now he opens up about the struggle to find healing with his new memoir named in her honor, 'Karen: A Brother Remembers.' — The View (@TheView) May 15, 2025 In writing the book, Grammer looked at the police report in full for the first time, noting that 'it was important to know the details.' He also explained that he wanted to tell his sister's story in order to help other people cope with grief and encourage them to remember more than just the devastating parts of someone's life and death. 'That's what I didn't have,' Grammer said. 'I spent my whole life putting Karen in that horrible night. In that place where I –' At that, the actor got visibly choked up and had to pause to regain his composure. As he did, Grammer's eyes remained glassy and his voice wobbly, but he steadily got stronger. 'Where I saw her, and identified her body, and I couldn't let that image go,' he recalled. 'The book helped me do that. And so, now she lives again. And she's vibrant and alive, and that's what I want to give to other people, that they can bring those people back to life, because they are with you always.' 'The View' airs weekdays at 11 a.m. ET on ABC. The post 'The View': Kelsey Grammer Fights Tears Recalling the Night He Had to Identify His Sister's Body | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kelsey Grammer Reveals Former Girlfriend Aborted Their Son When He Was in College
Kelsey Grammer is opening up like never before. The 70-year-old Frasier star reveals in his new memoir, Karen: A Brother Remembers, out now, that he and a former girlfriend named Jill aborted a son they conceived 'the September or October the year before I was dismissed from Juilliard.' 'We aborted him,' he writes in the book. 'I know that many people do not have a problem with abortion, and though I have supported it in the past, it eats away at my soul.' 🎬 SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox 🎬 In an exclusive interview with Parade for the recent May 2 cover story, the actor admitted, 'It's a lingering regret. Yeah, it lingers. I don't know what else to say about it except I wonder what he might have done in life and how much potential existed.' In Karen: A Brother Remembers, Grammer recalls that he and Jill decided to meet in New York before the end of Christmas break 'to keep it a secret and to kill him.' He writes, 'I was not happy about it and told Jill that I was willing to keep him. I never wanted her to accuse me of being unwilling to have the child, but I also did not plead with her to save his life. I supported the idea that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body. I still do. But it was hard for me. Still is.' Grammer, who previously made headlines for his stance against abortion, details his conflicting feelings. 'A woman's right to choose? Of course,' he writes. 'A child's right to exist? Of course. Life. We wrestle with it to this day. Or rather . . . some do.' Related: He adds in the memoir that he regrets volunteering to have his unborn 'son's body vacuumed out of his mother,' pleading: 'God, forgive me.' In recalling the experience, Grammer writes, 'I want to apologize to my son,' adding: 'I do not wish to harm Jill's family by this admission.' In Karen: A Brother Remembers, Grammer looks back on the brutal murder of his beloved sister Karen Grammer, who was kidnapped, raped and stabbed to death in 1975. Grammer opens up about the tragedy in detail in Parade's recent cover story. 'I want people to read the book. I want them to love the book. I love Karen. I want them to meet my sister," he exclusively told Parade. "She was a terrific girl. And that's the consensus with all the old friends that I've been able to speak to — how lovely she was and how fond people were of her. That's been a great discovery."
Economic Times
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Economic Times
Kelsey Grammer opens up on family tragedy, personal regrets, and lifelong pain in powerful new memoir
A Hollywood legend's grief beyond the spotlight Painful choices and lasting regret Live Events From family trauma to addiction spiral A vulnerable voice in Hollywood's memoir boom (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our Economic Times WhatsApp channel In his emotional new memoir Karen: A Brother Remembers , Kelsey Grammer—best known for his iconic role in Frasier—offers an unfiltered glimpse into the Hollywood star's private heartbreaks. While the book centers on the brutal 1975 murder of his 18-year-old sister, Karen Grammer, Grammer also explores other personal tragedies that shaped his on May 6, the memoir reveals painful reflections on abortion, addiction, and loss, showing a different side of the Emmy-winning actor. The actor, now 70, confesses how these private battles left an emotional scar, even as he found fame in read: Kelsey Grammer sees Hollywood 'Softening' to conservatism: How Trump's influence is shaping the industry? 'I know that many people do not have a problem with abortion, and though I have supported it in the past, it eats away at my soul,' Grammer writes, opening up about two instances in his life where he experienced abortion shares that he and his wife, Kayte Walsh, made the devastating decision to abort one of their unborn twins at 13 weeks after doctors warned that the ruptured sac of their son could threaten the life of his sister. The surviving twin, Faith, is now 12 years old.'We killed him. Our son. We killed our son so Faith might live,' Grammer painfully recalls. 'We wept as we watched his heart stop. Saw it. It is the greatest pain I have known.'He also writes about a college girlfriend's abortion, explaining his inner conflict during the read: Hollywood feud: Martha Stewart and Barbra Streisand wage war of words over 'boring' memoir 'I supported the idea that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body. I still do. But it was hard for me. Still is.'He adds, 'I volunteered to have my son's body vacuumed out of his mother's. I regret it.'Grammer does not take a political stance, noting, 'I offer no controversy,' but the emotional gravity of his words underscores the complexity of his six months after the college abortion, Grammer's world was shattered by the murder of his sister, who was raped and stabbed over 40 times by a serial killer in Colorado Springs. That traumatic loss sent the young actor down a dark path.'I always had something in the back of my head saying, 'Okay. That's enough now. Cut it out. You know why you're doing this,'' Grammer shared in a recent interview. 'But there was the other part of me that wanted to surrender to it and go, 'Let it mess you up a little bit. Let it hurt.''The grief led to decades of substance abuse, multiple DUIs, and a near-fatal car crash, all of which Grammer chronicles in his memoir. It was only after a 30-day rehab program that he began to reclaim control of his read: Robert De Niro and Whitney Houston: The untold story of a love that never was. Memoir by Whitney's bodyguard reveals In an era where Hollywood memoirs are increasingly revealing, Grammer's stands out for its emotional rawness and refusal to sugarcoat painful truths. From grappling with family trauma to acknowledging his regrets around abortion and addiction, Grammer's story is one of survival, complexity, and a search for celebrities continue to open up about their mental health and personal struggles, Karen: A Brother Remembers is a powerful contribution to the growing genre of celebrity memoirs with emotional depth—a reminder that even the most successful stars often carry lifelong pain behind the fame.
Time of India
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Kelsey Grammer opens up on family tragedy, personal regrets, and lifelong pain in powerful new memoir
Hollywood icon Kelsey Grammer lays bare his lifelong emotional struggles in his new memoir Karen: A Brother Remembers. Alongside heartbreaking details of his sister's murder, the Frasier star reveals raw memories of past abortions, addiction battles, and grief. Grammer's candid storytelling sheds light on the darker chapters of his celebrated career A Hollywood legend's grief beyond the spotlight Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Painful choices and lasting regret Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads From family trauma to addiction spiral Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads A vulnerable voice in Hollywood's memoir boom In his emotional new memoir Karen: A Brother Remembers , Kelsey Grammer—best known for his iconic role in Frasier—offers an unfiltered glimpse into the Hollywood star's private heartbreaks. While the book centers on the brutal 1975 murder of his 18-year-old sister, Karen Grammer, Grammer also explores other personal tragedies that shaped his on May 6, the memoir reveals painful reflections on abortion, addiction, and loss, showing a different side of the Emmy-winning actor. The actor, now 70, confesses how these private battles left an emotional scar, even as he found fame in read: Kelsey Grammer sees Hollywood 'Softening' to conservatism: How Trump's influence is shaping the industry? 'I know that many people do not have a problem with abortion, and though I have supported it in the past, it eats away at my soul,' Grammer writes, opening up about two instances in his life where he experienced abortion shares that he and his wife, Kayte Walsh, made the devastating decision to abort one of their unborn twins at 13 weeks after doctors warned that the ruptured sac of their son could threaten the life of his sister. The surviving twin, Faith, is now 12 years old.'We killed him. Our son. We killed our son so Faith might live,' Grammer painfully recalls. 'We wept as we watched his heart stop. Saw it. It is the greatest pain I have known.'He also writes about a college girlfriend's abortion, explaining his inner conflict during the read: Hollywood feud: Martha Stewart and Barbra Streisand wage war of words over 'boring' memoir 'I supported the idea that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her own body. I still do. But it was hard for me. Still is.'He adds, 'I volunteered to have my son's body vacuumed out of his mother's. I regret it.'Grammer does not take a political stance, noting, 'I offer no controversy,' but the emotional gravity of his words underscores the complexity of his six months after the college abortion, Grammer's world was shattered by the murder of his sister, who was raped and stabbed over 40 times by a serial killer in Colorado Springs. That traumatic loss sent the young actor down a dark path.'I always had something in the back of my head saying, 'Okay. That's enough now. Cut it out. You know why you're doing this,'' Grammer shared in a recent interview. 'But there was the other part of me that wanted to surrender to it and go, 'Let it mess you up a little bit. Let it hurt.''The grief led to decades of substance abuse, multiple DUIs, and a near-fatal car crash, all of which Grammer chronicles in his memoir. It was only after a 30-day rehab program that he began to reclaim control of his read: Robert De Niro and Whitney Houston: The untold story of a love that never was. Memoir by Whitney's bodyguard reveals In an era where Hollywood memoirs are increasingly revealing, Grammer's stands out for its emotional rawness and refusal to sugarcoat painful truths. From grappling with family trauma to acknowledging his regrets around abortion and addiction, Grammer's story is one of survival, complexity, and a search for celebrities continue to open up about their mental health and personal struggles, Karen: A Brother Remembers is a powerful contribution to the growing genre of celebrity memoirs with emotional depth—a reminder that even the most successful stars often carry lifelong pain behind the fame.
Los Angeles Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Kelsey Grammer reflects on sister's murder: 'It's not a badge of honor to have suffered grief like that'
Kelsey Grammer has released a memoir about his sister Karen on the 50th anniversary of her death. He writes that it's not so much a grief book as a life book. Karen Grammer liked to dunk Oreos in ice-cold Coca-Cola until the cream filling hardened and the cookie softened. She wore glasses. She didn't have a strong relationship with her dad, but was extremely close to her grandfather. She smoked Marlboro Lights. She once jumped naked on her bed in her college dorm room while listening to Leon Russell music. She, at least according to her high school yearbook, had a hell of a trip to Disney World before graduation. She got really into the movie 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.' If she were alive today, her older brother suspects, she'd be living in Florida. Maybe she'd work with animals or do something artistic. She always liked working with her hands. Karen was kidnapped, raped and murdered on July 1, 1975, just two weeks shy of her 19th birthday. The details of the attacks are more horrific than anything anyone, let alone a loved one, should ever have to know. And especially because Karen was the younger sister of Kelsey Grammer — then a 20-year-old Juilliard flunkie — it is easy to sensationalize her final moments. So the older Grammer did what he wasn't able to do 50 years ago: He protected his sister. In 'Karen: A Brother Remembers,' which came out Tuesday, the 'Frasier' actor sometimes references the atrocities the men committed (the verb 'slaughtered' is invoked a few times and he notes, from the coroner's report, that the gash on her neck was so big that you could see all the way into her lung). But his primary aim is to capture his sister's joyful and vivacious spirit and interview her friends about her final years. He writes that it's not so much a grief book as a life book; a detailed history of his and his sister's childhoods and how she stayed with him 'before and after her human experience.' Told in a free-flowing style that Grammer happily concedes he borrowed from Henry Fielding's 'The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,' it features stories of their teen years along the Florida shore and explores how these events impacted his life and career. If these memories from five decades ago seem particularly sharp, it's because Grammer says his sister appeared to him a few years ago and told him what to write. Grammer regularly works with mediums — he was even an executive producer on the Patricia Arquette procedural 'Medium' — and says during a recent Zoom, 'I think all this stuff is immediately available to us as long as we drop the filters and just believe it.' It's not that grief, and coping mechanisms, don't appear in this book; one of the ways Grammer passed the time as a newbie actor at San Diego's Old Globe theater was to grab a crab sandwich from Point Loma Seafoods with some wine or beer, and head to the neighborhood's military cemetery to sit at the grave of a Vietnam soldier who was around Grammer's age at the time of his death. The actor says now, 'An old friend of mine said that the cause for addiction is usually unresolved grief, and that holds up for me' because '[I] had a pretty big basket load of grief that I had to deal with.' 'I was coming into a phase in my life where everything should have been wonderful,' Grammer says of his younger self, known as much for his multiple Emmy wins as the tabloid headlines about his myriad relationships and marriages, and substance abuse issues. Now happily married to his fourth wife, Kayte, with whom he shares three children, Grammer says that back then, 'I was wealthy and famous and successful and doing the thing I love more than anything in the world, and yet I couldn't forgive myself. So I had to find some way to do that. And this book actually helped kind of put the final bow on the package.' This means accepting that there are things he will never be able to answer, like how Karen, a waitress, came to be sitting in the Red Lobster parking lot when she wasn't scheduled to work that night (he theorizes she was lonely and wanted to wait for her friends to finish their shifts). Or if she knew what was coming when spree killer Freddie Glenn and two others approached her as she sat by a red Volkswagen Beetle, showed her a gun and told her to come with them. He does think her reported response — 'for what?' — sounds just like his brassy little sister. Working on the book also means reliving, and sometimes re-questioning, his own life choices. Grammer writes that Karen's spirit told him to forgive himself for the regret he felt about his college girlfriend's abortion. He says he no longer believes that Karen's death was some kind of eye-for-an-eye 'Old Testament nonsense.' In the book, he describes his 'limping faith' toward Christianity. During our interview, he talks of the 'reawakening' he experienced while promoting his 2023 film 'Jesus Revolution.' 'I don't go out proselytizing, but I am not going to deny my faith; I'm not going to deny Jesus Christ,' Grammer says. This, inevitably, brings up Grammer's complicated thoughts about the death penalty. Glenn was sentenced to the gas chamber for Karen's murder, but two years later Colorado abolished the death penalty. 'I've always had mixed feelings about the death penalty because I hate to be the society that puts to death the guy who is innocent,' Grammer says, before adding, 'This guy's not innocent.' In his book, Grammer writes that it eats at him that Glenn's petitions to the parole board are never about remorse but rather that he used to be a 'good kid.' 'Sometimes it was really overwhelming; it can still stop me in my tracks,' Kelsey Grammer says about the grief of losing his sister. 'I can love the young man,' Grammer writes. 'The young man whose hopes grew so dim, he could think of no way to empower himself other than to kill an innocent girl. And I am giving him a lot of credit in this characterization. It takes every fiber of my being, but my heart goes out to him. To that boy. To him only. Not the killer he became. The killer he remains. I leave him to God.' Grammer knows that revisiting the case gives it more publicity and he is also aware that there have been TV specials about it (although he stresses that these have not always been accurate). His family suffered other tragedies, such as his father's shooting death from a hate crime and the drowning deaths of two of his half brothers. He writes in the book that his paternal grandfather's response when Grammer told him of Karen's murder was, 'This family is cursed.' It's an odd thing to not only be famous, but to also know that the worst things that have happened to you and your family can be reduced to whispered gossip and Wikipedia entries. Grammer says he hasn't given much thought to the public perception of these events. Plus, he says, 'It's not a badge of honor to have suffered grief like that. That's just my constant companion.' He adds, 'It's never really letting [Karen] go, but it's letting some of the charge on the grief go.' 'Sometimes it was really overwhelming; it can still stop me in my tracks,' Grammer says. 'What's funny is now it's as though something has been lifted from me … when I think of Karen, I don't think of her death as much as I do of her life. That was the bargain; that was the payoff. And that's actually been great. I have remembered her and she walks with me now in a way that I wasn't so in touch with until I wrote the book.' Sign up for our Book Club newsletter Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
