“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, I’ve prepared this rap song as my final argument. *ahem* …”

Metta World Peace [formerly Ron Artest] is starring in a Lifetime Movie written by Nancy Grace. Yes, you read that correctly. World Peace– oh f*ck it, he’s not Muhammad Ali — Artest told Dave and Jeff on XX Sports Radio in San Diego yesterday:

“I met Nancy Grace on the set of ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ and … she really liked the way that I was acting on the show, which is acting kind of silly. But I’m a pretty decent actor and she just picked me for the part. I was like, ‘Wow.’ There was no way I was turning it down.” [SportsRadioInterviews via Deadspin]

Well sure, you might expect a guy named “Metta World Peace” to babble about something like this, just as you might expect him to wear a cheeseburger on his head and complain to a mailbox that his underwear keeps telling him to kill the president, but the surprising part is, it’s all basically true. Nancy Grace is producing a Lifetime film that airs next month, which, sadly, isn’t called Too Fat To Kill or Crock Pot Wife Killer. It’s called The Eleventh Victim, and though it’s actually not being written by Nancy Grace, it is based on a novel by Nancy Grace. Oh yes, Nancy Grace wrote a novel.

As a young psychology student, Hailey Dean’s world explodes when Will, her fianc, [sic] is murdered just weeks before their wedding. Reeling, she fights back the only way she knows how: In court, prosecuting violent crime…putting away the bad guys one rapist, doper, and killer at a time.

Welcome to the retarded circus mirror that is Nancy Grace’s life refracted through the mind of Nancy Grace. Playing the part of “Hailey?” Jennie Garth from 90210, of course. “Hailey Dean was the best prosecutor in town, and so pretty, everyone said, farting rose petals and prancing through the snow like a pony….”

But dedicating her life to justice takes a toll after years of courtroom battles and the endless tide of victims calling out from crime scene photos and autopsy tables. Just as she grows truly weary, a serial killer unlike any other she’s encountered begins to stalk the city of Atlanta, targeting young prostitutes, each horrific murder bearing his own unique mark. This courtroom battle will be her last.

Hailey heads for Manhattan to pick up the pieces of the life she had before Will’s murder, training as a therapist. In a vibrant new world, she finally leaves her ghosts behind. But then her own clients are brutally murdered one by one by a copycat using the same M.O. as the Atlanta killer she hunted down years before. As the body count rises across Manhattan, Hailey is forced to match wits not only against a killer, but the famed NYPD.

Unless she returns to her former life and solves the case, still more innocent people will die at the hands of a killer who plans to get her, before she can get him! [Amazon]

Wow, you couldn’t write that. I mean, you couldn’t write the part where Nancy Grace wrote a self-flattering supermarket mcnovel and got Ron Artest to star in it because they were both on Dancing with the Stars, that is. Not the actual novel, you could definitely write that. A one-eyed lemur with Down Syndrome could write that novel, if it lacked the self-awareness.

[I couldn't not include Danger's brilliant Nancy Grace banner image.]

[Artest picture source: WallStreetJournal]