Watch the Video an OnlyFans Model Says Proves She’s Innocent of Murder
In the police body cam video, three officers walked out of the Miami night and into the sleek, cream-colored lobby of One Paraiso. As the officers strode into the building, Courtney Clenney, a 26-year-old Instagram influencer and OnlyFans model, appeared framed by recessed lighting and floor-to-ceiling windows. She paced near the front desk in brightly-colored leggings and a bikini top, talking on her cell phone. It was her dad on the call, and she kept him on speaker throughout her interaction with police.
The officers in the video were arriving because a building employee had called 911 on Clenney and her boyfriend — or perhaps ex-boyfriend — Christian Obumseli, who were having a dispute. According to Clenney in the video, the issue had begun earlier the same day, when she came downstairs to walk her dogs and found Obumseli waiting for her. She claimed he had tried to follow her into the elevator, but she’d blocked him from coming upstairs. He then stayed in the lobby, a building employee told police in the video, until Clenney came back down. At that point, the employee said Obumseli had “charged” in Clenney’s direction, and the employee had called the police.
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It wasn’t the first time. Police had been called to the building on several prior occasions because of the couple, who had moved there in Jan. 2022. This was, however, the last time authorities responded to such complaints; two days later, on April 3, Clenney stabbed Obumseli to death. Clenney claims the stabbing was a desperate act of self-defense, while prosecutors say she was the aggressor in a “toxic” relationship. The video, produced last week during discovery in the murder case against Clenney, is time-stamped April 2, seemingly just after midnight. It is reportedly a response to an April 1 call, placed the Friday before the Sunday killing. Additional reporting by Rolling Stone offers a fuller look at the final police visit to the couple’s building before Obumseli’s death.
In the video, taken just days before the stabbing, Clenney told police Obumseli was stalking her and she wanted a restraining order. In a TV interview with local news station WSVN, Clenney’s lawyers said the body cam footage proved Clenney’s defense. “Mr. Obumseli was the abuser,” Clenney’s attorney Frank Prieto said, and reiterated the claim that she was forced to kill him to save herself. “I have photographs of her injuries. She was in a struggle for her life. He came at her and unfortunately he’s deceased. But she defended herself with every ounce of energy she had left.” Clenney’s counsel did not provide further comment on the video. A lawyer for Obumseli’s family did not respond to a request for comment, but other outlets have reported he described the video as “self-serving,” and said Clenney’s team is trying to rewrite history. (Prosecutors have said there were no signs of injury on Clenney the night of the stabbing.)
Brief clips of the video circulated last week on WSVN and other outlets, but the full 20-minute recording from case discovery, as well as an interview with an employee who was there that night provide more context as to what happened. (There are technically three videos, all of the same incident, taken from the three different body cams of the officers who responded to the call.) This reporting helps reveal more details of a night that has become deeply relevant to the case. It also offers insight regarding points in the case that keep coming up, like the status of Clenney and Obumseli’s relationship, their eviction status in the building, and whether Obumseli physically abused Clenney. The footage also shows Clenney’s demeanor two days before the stabbing. She is by turns fearful, rageful, pleading, and defensive, giving a closer look at her experience than has previously been reported, since she has not spoken publicly since Obumseli’s death.
The Alleged Shove
Elevator surveillance footage — from months before the killing, released after the stabbing — showed Clenney physically attacking Obumseli; her lawyer, Prieto, responded at the time that the video did not capture the whole story. Friends and former neighbors of the couple have previously told Rolling Stone that Clenney was the aggressor in their relationship; Clenney’s lawyer acknowledged to Rolling Stone that violence in their relationship could have gone “both ways.” Speaking about the couple’s time in One Paraiso, Rolling Stone’s source says they had on multiple occasions seen Obumseli “stand there and take it” when Clenney got physical with him in public spaces, including in the elevator, the lobby, and by the pool.
In the April body cam footage, however, Clenney insisted she was the one who needed help that night. “I have not always been the victim but right now I’m the friggin’ victim in this situation,” Clenney said in the body cam video, visibly shaking.
“As soon as I clocked in [on April 1] I heard them yelling and fussing,” says the source, who spoke with Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity. “I looked on camera, and she’s shoving him out of the elevator.” In the body cam video, the alleged shove was a huge point of contention between Clenney and building staff. In the video, she told police she’d merely held her hands out to keep Obumseli from coming into the elevator after he followed her inside. “He followed me into the elevator and I said don’t follow me,” Clenney told officers, and gestured with her hand as though she were stopping someone. “And then this guy says I fucking shoved him,” she said, referring to a building employee in a blazer. “I said show me the fucking video. Like, I really got angry.” Rolling Stone’s source says Obumseli also pleaded his case before police arrived, asking them to pull up surveillance video to show he had not gotten physical with Clenney in the elevator. Obumseli does not appear in the body cam video revealed in discovery, although the employee who spoke with RS says he arrived back in the lobby while Clenney was still speaking with police.
Earlier reports had suggested that Clenney had dumped Obumseli sometime prior to that incident, kicked him out of her apartment, and that he’d been sleeping in common areas of the building for some time before the stabbing. While the building staffer who spoke with Rolling Stone says Obumseli would not have been allowed to sleep somewhere like the lobby, in the video, Clenney claimed that Obumseli had been sleeping on her spare couch in what she called her “elevator room.” Later in the video, officers escorted Clenney up to her unit, and there appeared to be a foyer where the elevator opened outside her apartment door.
Still Together?
Whether Clenney and Obumseli were still a couple at the time of the killing has been a point of debate. Prosecutors claim Obumseli arrived at the apartment with sandwiches for Clenney and himself late in the afternoon of April 3, minutes before Clenney is accused of murdering him. Friends of Obumseli who previously spoke to Rolling Stone recalled Obumseli the day before his death sending them a video of Clenney dancing, which led them to believe they were still together. The blazer-wearing employee in the video told police that when he’d asked Clenney if she wanted Obumseli to leave the property, she had said no, then yes, then no. “I told her I’m going to call the police because he’s causing a nuisance in the lobby area,” he said in the video.
In the recording, the building staffer in a blazer told police that after Clenney blocked Obumseli from getting in the elevator that evening, Obumseli sat in the lobby “for a long period of time.” Then, the employee said, Clenney had locked herself out of her unit. When she came down to get a key, the man said, Obumseli came “charging towards her and we actually tried to get in the middle of it.” He said that’s when he called the police, despite Clenney’s protestations. Rolling Stone’s source says that same day, they’d suggested the couple spend some time apart. “I tried to tell Courtney and him that Friday that maybe space and time is needed,” they say.
The source also says Clenney was changing her mind that evening over what she wanted to happen with Obumseli. “She was back and [forth] all night,” they tell Rolling Stone. “She confused the police.” In the interaction captured on video, however, Clenney is clear: she wants Obumseli out of her life. She tells police she had broken up with Obumseli but he refused to leave her alone.
At one point in the video, she spoke to the officers in a panicked whisper. “Can you guys please listen to me?” she said. She said she’d broken up with Obumseli about a week before, and that she’d asked her mom to fly out and stay with her until earlier that day. “I said OK Mom, it’s cool for you to go home today,” she told officers in the recording. “I literally took her to the airport this morning.” She stayed in her apartment all day, she said, not taking her dogs out for eight hours because she was afraid that when she came downstairs, he would be there. “When I did come down, I walked my dogs and he was following me. He wouldn’t leave me alone,” she said.
An officer interrupted Clenney to ask if Obumseli had property in her apartment, and she said he did. She added that she paid $10,000 a month for her apartment “and he pays zero,” but police told her if he’d lived with her for more than 30 days, they couldn’t kick him out unless there was “something physical going on.” Later in the video, the employee in the blazer told police Clenney and Obumseli owed about four month’s rent and were in the process of being evicted.
In the video, Clenney’s communications to the police didn’t always make sense. At one point, she asked the officers if Obumseli was already on his way to the courthouse to file a restraining order against her. “How would we know that?” an officer said to Clenney, then asked if she’d been drinking or taking any medications. Rolling Stone’s source also said Clenney appeared to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol that evening. “She was all over the place,” the source says. Clenney’s lawyer Prieto previously acknowledged her struggles with substance abuse to Rolling Stone and told media Clenney was in rehab for substance abuse and PTSD at the time of her arrest in August.
The video has also raised some confusion. In April, the Miami Herald reported that law enforcement sources had said police noticed “bruises on Clenney’s arms and legs” when they responded to the building on April 1; but in the video, she’s wearing long pants. Although the building staffer in the blazer repeated to cops that Obumseli “charged” at Clenney, they said they couldn’t do anything about it unless he’d been physically violent toward her. In the recording, the officers asked Clenney if there had been any physical violence towards her. “Yes,” she said, “but that’s not really my concern….It’s just he’s stalking me.”
More than anything, she seemed to be worried about being blamed for allegedly “shoving” Obumseli out of the elevator. “I feel like I’m not being heard,” she said at one point in the video. When an officer asked her what she wanted to happen that night, she said, “I want to be exonerated, I guess,” before adding, “And I want a restraining order against Christian Obumseli.”
The source Rolling Stone says they had the day off on Sunday — the day of the stabbing — and when we spoke, they were still reeling thinking about what changed after that Friday. “She was yelling at my boss: ‘Why did you use the word ‘shove’? They’re gonna take me to jail,’’ they say. “She was like, ‘I’m going to jail, I’m going to jail.’ She started falling on the lobby floor. That Friday, I was touching her, telling her, ‘You good, you’re not going to jail, you fine.’”
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