A Texas congresswoman used her podcast to defend a teenager convicted of first-degree murder, and suggested she would have done the same thing to the victim. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) made the remarks on Tuesday's episode of "Clock It with Crockett," the New York Post reported, while getting basic facts of the case wrong and downplaying the weapon that left a 17-year-old track star dead on a high school field.
The case in question has consumed her home state for more than a year. Karmelo Anthony, now 19, was convicted of first-degree murder by a Collin County jury that deliberated roughly three hours before returning its verdict. Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison for stabbing Austin Metcalf at a track meet at Memorial High School in Frisco, Texas, last April.
Metcalf, a 17-year-old track star who stood 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds, bled to death after Anthony's knife penetrated his sternum and entered his heart. The Collin County district attorney, Bill Wirskye, called the stabbing a "sneak attack." Witnesses testified that Metcalf had been trying to remove Anthony from the track team's tent when the confrontation turned fatal.
Eddie Parra, an 18-year-old witness, testified that Anthony became aggressive when confronted. Parra said Anthony told those around him, "touch me" and "you're going to have to move me." Metcalf then shoved Anthony, and Anthony pulled out a knife and stabbed Metcalf in the chest.
The weapon was a semi-serrated, 5-inch pocket knife with one-handed opening and a sharp point. It left a gaping 2-inch stab wound. Anthony was listed at 5 feet 11 and 162 pounds, smaller than Metcalf, but not by the margin Crockett described on her podcast.
Crockett, an attorney by training, painted a dramatically different picture. She gestured with her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart to suggest the size of the knife, then asked her guest whether it was "a multi-tool."
"Yeah, like with the little scissors and everything and whatever. So it was small."
It was not small. It was a 5-inch blade that pierced bone and reached a teenage boy's heart.
Crockett went further, arguing that the weapon's size alone should have precluded a murder conviction. She told listeners:
"Well, I would argue the size of it alone, you wouldn't even think it's a deadly weapon."
Then came the remark that drew the sharpest reaction. Crockett framed the encounter as a self-defense scenario, despite witness testimony and a jury verdict that said otherwise, and declared that she, too, would have resorted to a weapon under similar circumstances.
"If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I'm not limited to fists."
Metcalf weighed 200 pounds, not 300. Witnesses described a shove, not a beating. And the jury heard the evidence and returned a first-degree murder conviction in three hours.
The Post reported that Crockett made multiple inaccurate statements about the case during the podcast episode. She appeared surprised when shown the knife, asking "Wait a minute, it was this?", then proceeded to minimize it. She described a 300-pound attacker beating Anthony down. The actual victim was a 200-pound teenager who shoved Anthony before being fatally stabbed.
Crockett did not respond to the Post's request for comment.
This is not the first time the lame-duck representative and failed Texas Senate candidate has drawn scrutiny for her commentary on crime and criminal justice. On a previous appearance on Jonathan Van Ness' "Getting Better" podcast, Crockett offered a remark that drew widespread ridicule:
"Just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn't make them a criminal."
That line stands on its own. A sitting congresswoman and licensed attorney told a national audience that committing a crime does not make someone a criminal. It is the kind of statement that makes voters question whether their elected officials live in the same country they do.
What makes Crockett's podcast performance so striking is not just the factual errors, it is the confidence with which she delivered them. She is a lawyer. She represents a Texas district. The case happened in her state, drew intense public attention, and went to trial with witness testimony, physical evidence, and a jury verdict. The facts were available to anyone willing to look.
Instead, Crockett appeared on her own podcast and constructed a version of events that bore little resemblance to the trial record. She shrank the knife. She inflated the victim's size by a hundred pounds. She recast a shove as a beating. She turned a convicted murderer into a sympathetic figure acting in self-defense.
Crockett is far from the only Democratic officeholder whose public statements on crime have raised questions about judgment and priorities. A Democratic congressional candidate in Hawaii was recently arrested after allegedly threatening county workers with a gun, a reminder that the gap between political rhetoric and responsible conduct crosses geographic lines.
Users on X responded sharply to clips of Crockett's podcast. One wrote: "Why does it matter what he used to kill him? A rope isn't a deadly weapon until it's used to strangle someone." Another noted: "Pretty sure Metcalf is dead, so it sounds like a deadly weapon to me."
A third user was more blunt, writing that Crockett "has twisted this story into something that did not happen" and should have "at least googled what happened" before commenting publicly.
The Collin County jury heard the evidence. It heard from witnesses like Eddie Parra. It saw the knife, the actual semi-serrated, 5-inch pocket knife, not the inch-long multi-tool Crockett imagined on camera. It heard DA Wirskye describe the stabbing as a sneak attack. And it took roughly three hours to convict Karmelo Anthony of first-degree murder.
Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He has since been transferred to a Texas state prison and has appealed his conviction.
Crockett, meanwhile, used her platform to second-guess that verdict with a version of events untethered from the record. She suggested she would have done the same thing Anthony did, stabbed a teenager who shoved her. She said this as an attorney, as a congresswoman, and as someone whose own association with controversial security figures has already drawn scrutiny.
There is a broader pattern among some Democratic leaders who treat criminal convictions as suggestions rather than conclusions, who reflexively side with the defendant over the victim, the narrative over the evidence, the talking point over the trial record. It is the same instinct that drives aggressive political maneuvers in Congress built more on ideology than on facts.
Austin Metcalf was 17. He went to a track meet. He tried to get someone out of his team's tent. He was stabbed in the chest with a 5-inch blade that reached his heart. He bled to death.
A jury heard the case and delivered its verdict. A congresswoman heard none of it, and delivered hers anyway.
When an elected official and attorney tells the public she would have done what a convicted killer did, and gets every material fact wrong in the process, the problem is not a difference of opinion. It is a failure of seriousness from someone the public trusted to be serious.
