Fitness guru Lauren Jenai — who told Page Six that she’s engaged to a jailed murder suspect who she believes is innocent — can’t even video chat with her love anymore because she got too frisky during their video chats. And now he’s in solitary confinement.
“I have to agree with certain terms and conditions,” Jenai told us of her video chats with Franklin Tyrone Tucker — a close high school friend who’s been in jail since December 2017 over a Florida Keys murder he says he did not commit. “You’re not supposed to expose yourself or wear racy clothes. But we have a very close connection,” Oregon-based Jenai told us. “Our love transcends concrete walls. We’ve never been together, we’ve never touched in that way. Obviously those feelings come up.”
During one of the video sessions with “Ty,” “I got a little risque. I was touching my boobs,” she admitted. “I got a warning — the warning came up. I stopped.” But her account to chat with the inmate was then suspended for three years.
Undeterred, Jenai contacted Tucker via her mom’s account. But “The heat of the moment sometimes gets the best of you. I want to be as good a fiancée to him … my boobs popped out at some point, it happens.” She said she received no warning at the time.
Jenai then traveled to Florida last month to a bail hearing for Tucker — for which she and power lawyer Robert Hantman had been fighting. Tucker’s accused with two other men of first-degree murder and other charges — including robbery with a deadly weapon — in a heist gone wrong that’s referred to locally as “the tree house murder.”
But at the Jan. 29 hearing, Tucker’s bail was denied, leaving Jenai “a little bit devastated,” she said. “It was pretty dramatic. This hearing was what I’d been fighting for from the beginning. There was a lot of anticipation and buildup and I put in a lot of work. [We were] trying not to get our hopes up.”
She said, “I thought for sure the judge was going to rule for him … even up until the last second.”
But later, Jenai received a notice that her mother’s video visitation account was suspended for “100 years.” And “orders came down to take [Tucker] to solitary [confinement]. They didn’t even tell him why,” she claimed. “After the bond hearing, apparently they went back and looked at a bunch of our videos over time,” she told us. “Appointments have been canceled, and suspended for 100 years.” But, she said, “I did something wrong … I violated the conditions of the video visitation and I accept that. He didn’t do anything wrong — he wasn’t doing anything explicit, he wasn’t touching himself.”
She believes that there’s a campaign to “deter my involvement” in the case. “I keep him sane. They get you in jail and they leave you there, and you get so frustrated that you make deals and plea to things you haven’t done.” She said she feels that “they’re trying to break him down and to scare me away.”
We previously reported that Jenai and Tucker were once close high school pals who were later reunited on Facebook as adults after their respective marriages broke up. Tucker wound up indigent and was arrested in late 2017, and Jenai came to her old friend’s aid. She looked into his case, brought in investigators and Hantman, and believes authorities have the wrong man. She’s willing to put up a $1 million bond to get him out while he awaits trial.
She said that in addition to the video visits, the two used to talk on the phone every night. “We laugh.”
Tucker’s lawyers have argued that there is no physical evidence tying him to the murder. The prosecution is relying on testimony from another suspect in the case, as well as a fellow inmate. Hantman told us: “I am working with local counsel to pursue all remedies to vindicate Franklin Tyrone Tucker and to get him out on bail.”
Jenai was formerly married to CrossFit whiz Greg Glassman. But the two went through a messy divorce, and she sold off her CrossFit shares as part of the split. She’s since launched her own fitness firm.
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