I've always admired Kelsey Grammer for being an outspoken Republican in Hollywood. To this day, he's still a proponent of conservative values and a small government, and he has been a big Donald Trump supporter over the years. Just recently, he said of the president, "It’s great to have somebody who actually means what they say."
I'm also a big fan of his work. I grew up with parents who loved "Cheers" and "Frasier," and that led to me watching these shows as well — my dad and I still watch "Frasier" reruns to this day. Without a doubt, I'd say it's one of the most well-written and acted sitcoms to ever grace a television screen.
While it's true that he's had a bit of a sordid personal history — something he's been very open about — I had a feeling that some of it stemmed from dealing with some incredibly horrific events at a young age. Grammer was born in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. His mom was a dancer, and his father was a musician. His father also ran a coffee shop and a local magazine that he edited himself. Grammer had a sister, Karen, who was just a couple of years younger than him. They were very close.
Grammer's parents divorced when he was young, and his mother moved him back to the mainland to New Jersey and then Florida, where her parents played a major role in raising him. His father remarried and started a second family that included four half-siblings. When Grammer was 12, his maternal grandfather died from cancer, and when he was 13, his own father was murdered in St. Thomas due to an "anti-white" racial crime wave. When he was 25, two of his half-brothers died in a scuba diving accident. But the tragedy that seemingly had the biggest impact on his life was the rape and murder of his baby sister when she was just 18 years old.
It's something Grammer hasn't spoken much about throughout his very public life, but now, he's ready to share the details. And he's done so by writing a book about her called "Karen: A Brother Remembers."
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At the time of Karen's murder, Grammer was 20, a student at Juilliard. His younger sister had moved to Colorado after graduating from high school, and she was working as a waitress at a local Red Lobster. A group of men had plans to rob the restaurant one day, but instead, they kidnapped the young waitress and tortured her. They raped her, punched her repeatedly, and stabbed her 42 times. It was so bad that she was nearly decapitated — the coroner said there was such a wide hole in her neck that he could see her lung.
And then they left her to die. Karen must have been some young lady because despite her wounds, she managed to crawl to a nearby trailer to ask for help. The person on the other side of the door called the police but made no efforts to help the battered girl. In 2022, Grammer and his wife, Kayte Walsh, visited Colorado Springs, the city where his sister lived. They stopped by her old apartment and the Red Lobster, as well as the home where she died on the front stoop.
In the book, Grammer writes:
I stand corrected and disappointed that that man did not attempt to help her but simply called the police after leaving her body as it lay … eyes vacant, staring at the sky, her legs still on the steps, her head on the ground and a clenched fist above her head with a single finger pointing — somewhere or nowhere — just pointing.
She had fallen backward from the trailer door after knocking for help. It was her last hope and disappointment after crawling 400 feet from the place where she had been stabbed. Bloody fingerprints mark the trail of her final moments at exactly 3’6” along the office and walls of the trailer park. She had been on her knees, crawling her way … What I had hoped were a final, few moments of kindness from some stranger, were nothing of the sort.
After she died, detectives came to their family home in Florida and said they had a body but not an identity. They suspected it might be Karen. Grammer, who, again, was just 20 at the time, flew to Colorado to identify his sister's body. He writes that it killed a corner of his heart. Afterwards, he turned to cocaine and alcohol to cope.
When Karen's murderer sought parole in 2009, Grammer wrote a letter to the court that read, in part, "She was my best friend and the best person I knew. She had so much to live for. I loved my sister, Karen. I miss her. I miss her in my bones." He added, "I was her big brother. I was supposed to protect her — I could not. I have never gotten over it... It very nearly destroyed me."
Grammer has appeared on several talk shows recently promoting his book. For what it's worth, the gruesome details of Karen's death are only one small part of the memoir. Much more of it revolves around what Karen was like when she was alive — he calls her "an Oreo cookie dipped in an ice-cold Coca-Cola" and "lightning in a bottle" — and the impact her death had on him and his family. He also shares some other heartbreaking stuff that's happened to him since, which I may write about later in the week.
One particular talk show appearance that stood out to me was his sit-down with Tamron Hall. Hall said she'd been trying to get the actor on her show for years to talk about his sister, but his team kept telling her that he wasn't ready to talk about it. She asked him why now?
I'll let you watch Grammer's response—which caused him to break down into tears—for yourself in the video below.
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