The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (34 page)

The lawyers had their chance to meet the jurors face-to-face on October 12, when individual questioning of prospective jurors—that is, voir dire—began in Judge Ito’s courtroom. According to Proposition 115, the law-and-order voter initiative passed in 1990, voir dire in criminal trials was supposed to be conducted principally by the judge, not the lawyers. This is the custom in American federal courts, and it not only speeds the process considerably, it also prevents the lawyers from using their questions to advertise the arguments they will be making during the trial. But in another disturbing preview of what was to come, Ito caved in and let the lawyers do the asking—and the puffing. Clark, for example, asked many jurors whether “the celebrity of the defendant would affect your ability to render a verdict.”

One theme of the defense lawyers’ stood out. In question after question, Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran made sure that the jurors knew this was a case about race.

“Now, with regard to other aspects of answers that you gave us,” Cochran said to a white candidate on the first day, “on the question of whether or not you felt the issue of discrimination against African-Americans, you said you felt it was a serious one, is that correct?”

“Yeah …” the man said.

“All right,” Cochran went on. “Now, with regard to the whole question of race, interracial marriage, you felt you had no problems with that, is that correct?”

And so it went … day after day. Again, to Ito’s surprise, many jurors seemed to be auditioning, rather than shrinking from the prospect of service on the case. Many seemed to be lying, too. In
Vinson’s telephone survey about 60 percent of the respondents had said they had more or less made up their minds about whether O.J. Simpson was guilty of the two murders. But among those who answered the questionnaires, only 23 percent said they had. Either the prospective jurors were an usually impartial group, or—more likely—they were playing coy in order to slip through the process.

Injury selection, as in the rest of the case, Simpson’s lawyers coordinated their courtroom and public relations strategies. On October 27, for example, Hodgman sharply questioned an elderly black man whose answers demonstrated that he had a lengthy catalogue of grievances against the LAPD. Any responsible prosecutor would have used this juror’s voir dire to lay the groundwork for a request to have him excused for cause. And that is what Hodgman did, although the process clearly irritated the juror, who said to the even-keeled prosecutor, “You are sort of riling me.” The defense, however, launched a coordinated media attack on Hodgman. Immediately after the day’s session, Cochran ventured from Ito’s ninth-floor courtroom up to the media headquarters on the twelfth floor, where he held an impromptu news conference. “We’re really concerned about the tenor of the questions and the way they go after certain jurors,” Cochran said. As if the point could be missed, while Cochran was discoursing upstairs, Shapiro addressed the reporters who were assembled in the courthouse lobby. Of Hodgman’s questioning, Shapiro said, “It implies an insidious effort to try to get black jurors removed for cause because they are black, because they have black heroes, and because O.J. Simpson is one of them. There’s no other reason.” The lawyers’ salvos led the local news that evening, and they paid off as well in the front-page headline on the next day’s
Los Angeles Times:
PROSECUTORS TARGETING BLACK JURORS, SIMPSON TEAM SAYS
.

Still, the case was making progress of sorts, as the parties had a chance to question a few jurors each day. Then forward momentum came to an abrupt halt—and the case nearly collapsed altogether—thanks to the literary labors of one diminutive woman.

There is surely no single appropriate way to mourn the loss of a friend. It is fair to say that Faye Resnick coped with the death of
Nicole Brown Simpson in a way that reflected Resnick’s bizarre and chaotic life. She chose to grieve with a psychic, who came up with some useful career advice as well as spiritual succor. Talking with me shortly before Simpson’s trial began, Resnick said, “When I went to see a psychic after Nicole was murdered, the woman gave me a message from Nicole.… The psychic said, ‘You will be writing a book. Nicole wants you to be faithful to your heart. She wants you to call it as you see it.’ ”

At the time of the trial, Faye Resnick was thirty-seven years old, a native Californian with a trim build and orange hair. When we met, she was wearing bangles on both arms and three rings on her left hand, including one on her thumb. As the ex-wife of Paul Resnick, a wealthy Los Angeles businessman, she dabbled in charity projects and worked hard on her appearance. Nicole’s advice from beyond the grave actually fit well with Resnick’s needs. Faced with a dwindling divorce settlement and an expensive lifestyle, Faye needed the money a book deal could provide. The milieu in which she and Nicole lived is neatly summarized in a brief sentence in the book she eventually did write: “Almost every woman I know has had breast implants.”

Resnick and Nicole met in 1990. They became close friends after Faye separated from Paul Resnick in early 1991. Resnick became friendly with O.J., too, as he and Nicole pursued their on-again, off-again relationship in 1993 and 1994. After the murder, however, she became convinced that O.J. had killed Nicole, and she was scathing on the subject. According to Resnick, “You would go to his house, and the children were not able to play in the house.” She added that the kids were not even allowed in the kitchen at certain times, because O.J. and his housekeeper couldn’t stand the mess they would make. “O.J.’s a double Cancer, I’m a double Cancer,” she said. “I get it—I don’t like messes—but kids are kids.” Resnick implicitly blamed the stress of mediating between O.J. and Nicole for the recurrence of her own drug problem. In the decade before the murders, she did two stints at the Betty Ford rehabilitation center, and in June 1994, the week before Nicole’s murder, she checked into the Exodus Recovery Center, in Marina del Rey. Shortly after the murders, Resnick said, she began to fear that she would be killed by O.J.’s loyalists.

Within a week or so of the murders, Resnick reported her gathering fears to Arthur Barens, a lawyer she knew through fund-raising efforts for the Beverly Hills school system. Barens helped Resnick through her first meetings with the prosecutors in the case, and as they talked further at other meetings, the idea of a book came to the surface. “The book idea got started because she wanted to do something to be of service to the Simpson children and battered women,” Barens said. “She told me at the same time that she had maintained a diary about what was going on between O.J. and Nicole. She was afraid for her well-being. I told her, for her safety, to record on tape what she remembered.” Resnick made some recordings and gave them to the lawyer. Barens might have protected Resnick’s safety merely by placing her tapes in a safe-deposit box; instead, he turned to Warren Cowan, a public relations executive, for advice on how to make use of them.

Cowan put Barens in touch with his client Michael Viner, a former record company executive, who had founded Dove, a company devoted principally to audiobooks, a decade earlier with his wife, the actress Deborah Raffin.

Viner quickly signed Resnick to a six-figure advance and then looked for a collaborator for her. “I knew Mike Walker in passing, and I had seen him on
Nightline
and
Larry King Live
,” Viner explained. “And I sought him out.” Shortly after the contracts were signed, Viner sent Walker and Resnick to a ski chalet he owns in Stowe, Vermont, where he gave them three and a half weeks to produce a manuscript, in secrecy. The partnership had its strains. According to Walker, “At one point, I telephoned Viner and said, ‘Look, this woman is driving me nuts. She wants cappuccino.’ The next day, a cappuccino machine arrived by Federal Express.”

Ultimately, however, the pair produced the manuscript of what became the book
Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted
. Resnick and Walker’s portrait presented Nicole as a brainless, sex-obsessed young woman whose banality was exceeded only by that of her ex-husband. For example, Nicole was portrayed as having an enthusiasm for fellatio with virtual strangers—a practice Resnick called the “Brentwood hello.” More significant as far as the trial was concerned, Resnick depicted Simpson as an insanely jealous former spouse who openly discussed
cussed his thoughts of murdering Nicole. In the book, Resnick quoted Simpson as saying such things as “I can’t take this, Faye, I can’t take this. I mean it.
I’ll kill that bitch
.” (When I asked Resnick if she had any literary influences, she said, “I wasn’t inspired by a book to do this. The movie that inspired me was
The Pelican Brief
.”)

The irony of Resnick’s book is that notwithstanding the accusations against O.J., it amounted to a generous gift to the defendant—and another example of the ill fortune of the prosecutors in this case. With her history of drug abuse, Resnick would have made a dicey prosecution witness in the best of circumstances. Still, if she had simply come forward after the murder and told her story to the police, the prosecutors probably would have called her to the stand. But the book made Resnick anathema to Clark and Hodgman; it represented the cash-for-trash problem writ large. Resnick undoubtedly had close ties to both O.J. and Nicole, and many, if not most, of her accusations had the ring of truth about them. But her conspicuous cashing in on her access to the principals would have given the defense too much ammunition in their cross-examination. Both during and after the trial, Resnick emerged as one of Simpson’s most vocal public accusers. But in fact her greed—and that of her publisher—made her an accomplice to O.J.’s acquittal.

Aiming for maximum publicity, Viner and Resnick decided to release
Private Diary
in the middle of jury selection—on October 17. The news media reacted predictably, hyping Resnick’s accusations against Simpson. On the day it came out, Resnick’s book actually rated rather modestly on the Simpson-news Richter scale—bigger than my Fuhrman story but smaller, certainly, than the release of the tape of Nicole’s plaintive calls to 911. What made this story different was that it broke when Lance Ito was in charge of the case—and his reaction to it revealed much about him and the future course of the trial.

Lance Ito thought a great deal about the news media. In a casual aside in court one day, Judge Ito remarked that he read five newspapers a day. In a later order to potential jurors about their television-watching
habits, he specifically named, apparently off the top of his head, twenty-five different programs that were off limits, including
Marilu
,
Leeza
,
Jenny Jones
,
Sally Jessy Raphaël
,
Oprah
,
Donahue
,
Geraldo
, the news on MTV, and something called
Press Box
on a network called Prime Ticket. During his off hours, the judge wore a
Today
show baseball cap. In the middle of jury selection, Ito even gave a much-hyped interview to Tricia Toyota of KCBS television in Los Angeles. Though the judge said nothing sensational in his conversations with Toyota, Ito definitely complicated jurors’ efforts to avoid news coverage of the trial; he even had to dismiss some potential jurors because they had seen parts of his TV interview. Throughout the trial, Ito would often delay court sessions so that he could usher well-known media figures, like Geraldo Rivera, and the occasional movie star, into his chambers for private chats.

As a result of Ito’s media obsession, the import of the Resnick book eluded him. The sensible course would have been to ignore
Private Diary
and, if the subject came up at all, to remind the jurors that they were to rely only on evidence presented in court. Like every other sensation in the case, Resnick would have faded, too. But Ito couldn’t leave Faye Resnick alone. On Tuesday morning, October 18—without even being asked by the parties—Ito suspended jury selection for forty-eight hours, he told the prospective jurors, because of “the publication of a book that has caused the Court great concerns about the ability of Mr. Simpson to get a fair trial. I need to look into the ramifications.” The judge even wrote to the heads of the major news networks and asked them to cancel interviews they had scheduled with Resnick. (CNN complied, but Connie Chung’s interview with Resnick on CBS went ahead.) Ito’s decision to stop jury selection prompted a predictable reaction. It fueled intense curiosity about the book in the public—and probably in the prospective jurors as well. Thanks to the push from Ito,
Private Diary
rocketed to the number one spot on the
New York Times
best-seller list, passing Pope John Paul II’s
Crossing the Threshold of Hope
. (As for Resnick’s purported desire to help the Simpson children, Dove donated $10,000 to the foundation Nicole’s parents established in her memory. This largesse amounted to about one cent for each of the one million or so copies of
Private Diary
that were sold.)