Nancy Grace says her decision to leave “Swift Justice,” which is moving production from Atlanta to Los Angeles, boiled down to one thing: her family, specifically her three-and-a-half-year-old twins, Lucy and John David.
“I love ‘Swift Justice’ and think it’s a great show and I enjoyed being part of it,” Grace told me. “It was a matter of being away [in LA] from John David and Lucy even more than I’m away from them already.
“I don’t ever get to put them to bed — I bathe them and feed them and put them in their PJs before I go to work, but I’m not there to read them lullabyes and bedtime stories and I just couldn’t take that.
“I tried it,” she says. “We went to shoot the show in LA [this past season] and I would just cry at night. I was so sad being away from them, and Lucy and John David did not take it well at all. I was gone four straight days and, to this day, since I got back, Lucy comes into my bed at night and says, ‘Mommy, please don’t go. Stay with me.’ She never did that before we shot the show in LA.
“And John David didn’t even want me to walk out of the room at playschool when I got back from the shoot in LA,” she says. “It really broke my heart.
“The show’s schedule was three-to-four days every other week and I didn’t want to relocate from Atlanta,” Grace says. “My parents are in Macon and my husband’s parents are in Fayetville, close to Atlanta. My family is down here.”
Grace, who’s married to investment banker David Linch, says that CBS Television Distribution, which produces “Swift Justice,” wanted to shoot the show in LA from the get-go.
“From the very beginning it was a sticking point,” she says. “They finally agreed to shoot the show out of Atlanta, and several times [they] re-approached me about moving the show to LA. It was a huge expense for them to be in Atlanta — they had to send a whole staff and had to build a whole set in Atlanta when they already had [a set] in LA.
“When they told me that they absolutely had to move the production to LA, I was very distraught,” she says. “I love LA and I’m already looking at some other projects — some of them in LA. But with the time requirements . . . it really came down to the twins.”
“Swift Justice” was the top-rated new syndicated show this past season, averaging over 2 million viewers. The show also nabbed a Daytime Emmy nomination — and Grace says she expects to attend the Daytime Emmy Awards June 19 in Las Vegas.
“I’m so proud of the Emmy nomination,” she says. “I never thought a girl who grew up on a dirt road, drinking well water, would ever be associated with something like the Emmy Award.
“But it’s really a team effort. I was thrilled with the numbers and thrilled that the country liked [the show], liked the concept and liked my rulings, I think.
“But I don’t think it was so much me as it was the litigants and their stories — I could listen to them all day long.”
Grace will be replaced by Las Vegas Judge Jackie Glass, notable for putting OJ Simpson behind bars.
Grace will continue hosting her HLN show, “Nancy Grace” (weeknights at 8) — which pulled in 1.2 million viewers Tuesday night, its biggest audience in a year-and-a-half, for the start of the Casey Anthony murder trial in Ocala, Florida (Grace is there covering the trial). Tuesday night, “Nancy Grace” averaged a robust 1 million viewers.
“Those numbers have nothing to do with me,” Grace says. “It has to do with people having a natural curiosity about court cases, about what happened, and what I believe is the underlying desire to see something set right that has been wronged.
“People want good to prevail — they want to see justice, and so do I.”
Last, but not least:
* Ch. 4’s “LX New York” is now called “New York Live.” It airs at 5 p.m. and is hosted by Jane Hanson and Sara Gore . . . Schieffer! “Face the Nation” (Bob Schieffer) had its best May sweeps, in households, since 2007 and averaged nearly 2.7 million viewers this month, up 10 percent from May 2010 . . . “National Memorial Concert,” co-hosted by Gary Sinise and Joe Mantegna, airs Sunday (8 p.m.) on PBS. This year features a special commemoration of 9/11 live from the US Capitol . . . Will Ferrell appears on Golf Channel’s “Golf Central” this Sunday (6 p.m.) pegged to his “Will Powered” Golf Classic, which raises money for Cancer for College . . . Happy birthday to Jocelyn Kalsmith (Mind Over Media PR). She turns 30 — again . . . Congrats to Megan Alexander (“Inside Edition”) and husband Brian Cournoyer on the arrival of Chace Devan.
Contact The Starr Report: mstarr@nypost.com.