There has been renewed interest in Casey Anthony and the 2008 death of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee Marie Anthony thanks to the premiere of the Peacock docuseries Casey Anthony: Where the Truth Lies. The 3-part series puts Anthony back in the spotlight to answer questions and tell her side of the story about her daughter’s disappearance, death, and the media storm that followed.
Not so surprisingly, there has been an uproar on social media about Peacock giving Anthony a platform to tell what many people believe are lies about what exactly happened to her daughter 14 years ago. While a jury found Anthony not guilty of first-degree murder in 2011, she was found guilty of providing false information to police officers.
One of those lies to law enforcement occurred after Caylee’s disappearance when she told police that an Afro-Latina babysitter named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez – also known as Zanny – was the last person Caylee was with. It turns out there was really a woman with that name, but she never really met Anthony or her daughter.
In 2011, Fernandez-Gonzalez’s lawyer told ABC News that Anthony got his client’s name from the paperwork that she filled out when she and Anthony visited the same apartment complex separately, but on the same day to inquire about rentals.
In the first episode of Casey Anthony: Where the Truth Lies, viewers hear a 9-1-1 call from Anthony’s mother telling the operator that her granddaughter has been missing for a month. When Anthony gets on the phone and is asked who has taken her daughter, she names Fernandez-Gonzalez, and says she has been Caylee’s nanny for nearly two years.
“I did meet someone named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez,” Anthony says in the first episode of the docuseries. “She was a babysitter, was a nanny – all of that’s true. [But she] was not my nanny; was not my babysitter. I lied to everyone because that was my whole life up to that point.”
In 2011, Fernandez-Gonzalez sued Anthony for defamation. She said she lost her job and home and received death threats because of the lies Casey told the police. In her lawsuit, she claimed people believed she had something to do with Caylee’s disappearance. In 2015, a judge ruled in Anthony’s favor and said her lies to the police did not hurt Fernandez-Gonzalez.
It’s difficult to imagine how anyone’s opinion of Anthony will change after watching the Peacock docuseries. If anything, revisiting the tragedy more than a decade after Anthony was acquitted offers a renewed perspective but the series will likely leave viewers feeling as empty as usual since the central question in the case remains unsolved: What exactly happened to Caylee?