Was Nancy Grace's George Zimmerman comment racist?

LOS ANGELES – Nancy Grace has come under fire for a seemingly racist comment during her coverage of the George Zimmerman trial on HLN.

“Give Zimmerman back his life? He’s out on bond driving through Taco Bell every night, having a churro,” Grace said in response to lead defense attorney Mark O'Mara's closing argument on Friday night. “You know, long story short, he’s got his life. Who is going to give life back to Trayvon Martin? I find that, at the very least,a very poor choice of words.”

A rep for HLN insisted that Grace was only referencing an interview she conducted on July 9 with Zimmerman friend, Frank Taaffe, in which they discussed the defendant’s apparent weight gain.

“What I'm asking is, he is consciously eating, gobbling down ring dings behind bars so he can then effectively argue to the jury that he's too obese?” she asked, to which Taaffe responded: “Sure he is. Then he's going to Taco Bell at midnight, eating Churros and he's eating Taco Bell at midnight, you know, run for the border.”

But not everyone is buying Grace’s defense.

“Quoting someone's non-fact based attack hardly changes the equation,” media critic and political filmmaker John Ziegler told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column.

Grace did not say she was repeating Taaffe’s own words during the segment, and the issue of whether or not she insulted Hispanics has since become a hot topic in social media.

“Racist Nancy Grace said Zimmerman goes to Taco Bell 4 churros, when will she lose her ad sponsors like Paula Deen?” tweeted one, while others claimed “she should be fired.” Another weighed in: “I’ve never find Nancy Grace more detestable than I do now.”