Arrest of OnlyFans model’s parents for computer hacking ‘wholly inappropriate,’ attorney says

A day after the parents of OnlyFans star model and accused murderer Courtney Clenney were booked into jail for allegedly hacking into the computer of their daughter’s dead boyfriend, they gathered at their attorney’s Coconut Grove office and called the charges far-fetched.

Kim DeWayne Clenney and Deborah Lyn Clenney didn’t speak during the 20-minute press conference Wednesday morning. But they stood firmly beside attorney Jude Faccidomo when he said the couple were authorized to use the computer that state prosecutors allege was owned by Christian “Toby” Obumseli, who was stabbed in the heart and killed almost two years ago.

Faccidomo said the social media star’s parents had committed no crime.

“You have two parents who love and support their daughter, who is in a very serious situation and in a fight for her life,” said the attorney. “They are not going to be bullied.”

Courtney Clenney’s attorney Sabrina Puglisi went a step further, placing the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office on notice for “reviewing privileged communications” and threatening to litigate for the office’s recusal in a case that has grabbed worldwide attention.

Courtney Clenney, a social media darling who at one point boasted more than two million followers, has been jailed since August 2022, accused of second-degree murder of Obumseli, her boyfriend and a former crypto-currency trader. She was taken into custody in Hawaii and extradited back to Miami.

The alleged murder was committed four months earlier in April in their bayside Miami condominium, One Paraiso. Courtney Clenney’s 911 call, in which she is alleged to have apologized to Obumseli before he died, alerted police. She claims the murder was in self-defense.

Arrest on computer hacking charge

Last week, sheriff’s deputies in Austin, Texas took Kim and Deborah Clenney into custody on a warrant out of Miami that accused the couple — along with their daughter — of single counts of unauthorized access of a computer. The warrant explained how investigators were able to recover a text chat chain between the Clenneys and their attorneys Puglisi and Frank Prieto, in which they discuss, and finally figure out, the password to get into Obumseli’s computer.

Though Puglisi and Prieto were not charged with a crime, they are implicated in the warrant as taking part in the alleged scheme. The attorneys have claimed the implication is absurd, unfair and just an attempt to influence the public opinion in a case that’s been aired on entertainment shows around the world and has been highighted on Court TV.

The spat between defense attorneys and state prosecutors reached a fever pitch last week, when during a hearing before Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Laura Shearon Cruz, prosecutors came just short of requesting a gag order in the case, instead asking the judge to find some sort of remedy to limit what the Clenney family and their attorneys can say in public.

Judge to rule over media leaks

They were particularly incensed at the family’s and the attorneys’ cooperation with the online celebrity website TMZ, which has a special planned on the murder and Courtney Clenney’s travails, for some time next week. Puglisi and Prieto argued the state began the dissemination of information by admitting so much information into discovery, which makes it available to the public.

Judge Shearon Cruz is expected to issue some type of decision in writing on Thursday.

But Wednesday at Faccidomo’s Tigertail Avenue office in the Grove, attorneys mostly stuck to how Courtney Clenney’s parents’ arrest was unjust. Besides the content of Obumseli’s computer being “entirely useless,” Faccidomo contends that Clenney was a co-owner of the computer and who, after more than a year in jail, simply forgot the password.

“It’s wholly unnecessary and wholly inappropriate,” the attorney said of the Clenney parents’ arrest. “The statute is something they [the state attorney’s office] pulled out of thin air.”

The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, while not commenting directly on the meeting at the law office, referred the Miami Herald to the Clenneys’ arrest warrant. In the warrant, the state argues that the computer belonged to Obumseli and that under Florida statute, the Clenneys had no right to enter it without permission.

The warrant does not list Courtney Clenney as a co-owner of the computer or as having any right to it.