Wealth & Money Quote by Catherine Crier

Crier’s sentence performs a tightrope walk that’s instantly familiar in true-crime culture: signal fairness while keeping suspicion alive. “I don’t think” is the key softener. It reads like restraint, but it also grants permission to speculate. By denying the most mercenary motive (“for money”), she positions herself as sober and ethical, then immediately reintroduces the taint with “but the opportunity certainly presented itself.” The subtext is less about what Amber did than what the public is primed to imagine women in scandal do: convert chaos into leverage.

The discomfort she names (“It makes me a bit uncomfortable”) is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s an admission of bias and a nod to due process. Underneath, it’s a calibration of outrage: yes, there’s something potentially ugly here, but not ugly enough to condemn outright. That “at least” is the moral trapdoor. It lowers the bar of virtue to a single behavior - not selling to tabloids before trial - and frames it as a redeeming act in a marketplace where narrative control is currency.

Context matters: as a journalist, Crier is speaking from inside the media ecosystem that profits from these cases while policing the optics of that profit. She’s drawing a bright line between “tabloid” monetization (crass, suspect) and the more respectable forms of career-making that surround high-profile trials (books, TV analysis, reputational capital). The intent isn’t to acquit or convict Amber so much as to manage the reader’s stance: skeptical, but not cynical; judgment-ready, but still able to feel principled.