The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (41 page)

Hearing this, O.J. nearly vaulted out of his chair. “I did not!” he told Cochran, who patted him on the shoulder and urged him to calm down. Both in conversations with friends and in several interviews
following his criminal trial, Simpson had a precise, and narrow, view of his misdeeds in that New Year’s Day fight. In a deposition in the civil case against him, he said, “Never once did I ever hit her with my fist, ever.… Never once have I ever slapped Nicole.” As for what happened on that January day, he said, “I rassled her.… That means I had my hands on her, and I was trying to force her out of my bedroom. [A curious choice of pronoun, since she lived there, too.] She fell when she was outside.” Uelman’s description of the event—that O.J. “slapped and punched” Nicole—thus conflicted with Simpson’s own interpretation of it.

The prosecution had alleged that O.J. also beat Nicole after a gay man kissed their son, Justin. In his memo on O.J.’s responses, Shapiro wrote, “O.J. says this took place in Hawaii with the entire Brown family. Nicole said to O.J., ‘Lots of people think your daddy’s gay.’ O.J. got mad. Words were said, but there were no physical actions taken.”

The list of incidents went on. In 1993, after the divorce, Simpson hid in the bushes outside Nicole’s front window on Gretna Green and watched her have oral sex with Keith Zlomsowitch. O.J. to Cochran: “It was the sidewalk.”—i.e., he watched from a public place, not from among the bushes.

After that incident, Simpson stared Nicole and Zlomsowitch down at a restaurant in Brentwood. O.J.: “I just said hello to her.”

He stalked Nicole and sometimes wore disguises. O.J.: “Where does that come from?”

In the middle of the afternoon, during the course of the argument, a lawyer representing the Sojourn battered women’s shelter in Santa Monica appeared in Ito’s court and handed a thin envelope to the prosecutors. At the end of a long day in court, Lydia Bodin, one of the deputy district attorneys, disclosed the envelope’s contents. “We have received information from Sojourn shelter that on the date of June the 7th, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson made a contact with Sojourn. She complained that she was being stalked. She was afraid. She felt confused. She didn’t know what to do, and she named the defendant as the person who was stalking her.”

Again, many in the courtroom gasped: The date was just five days before the murder. On hearing the words “June the 7th,” Cochran and Shapiro looked stricken.

It was a sad moment. By any measure, Nicole Brown Simpson was a wealthy woman, even after her divorce. Yet at her time of greatest fear, with her life literally on the line, she apparently felt unable to turn to the police, to her friends, or even to her family. She had nowhere to go except a public battered women’s shelter—the very charity that her husband was forced to contribute to after he beat her in 1989. And even Nicole’s final appeal to Sojourn, the courtroom recognized at once, did not manage to save her life. For once, not even O.J. Simpson had anything to say.

Uelman’s opposite number on the prosecution team was Hank Goldberg, and he seemed, in some respects, a miniature version of the professor. Soft-spoken, with a paleness of skin and hair that seemed to render him nearly invisible at times, Goldberg gave the nearly perfect legal argument on the domestic-violence evidence—especially for a judge like Ito, who had a predisposition toward the truth school.

Goldberg began with a hypothetical question for Ito. “Let’s imagine that we tried the case, Your Honor, without telling the jury that Nicole Brown Simpson was ever married to the defendant—was just a woman who was murdered,” Goldberg said. “Ronald Goldman was just a man that was murdered, and we did not tell them of the existence of any relationship at all.”

The proposal, Goldberg said, was self-evidently absurd. “It’s almost unimaginable, because the jury would have to call into question all of our evidence, no matter how strong it was, pointing to the defendant as the murderer, because why on earth would Orenthal Simpson kill an entire stranger, just this woman named Nicole.… Why would he have killed them so brutally? It wouldn’t make any sense, and it would undermine the prosecution’s case, clearly.

“It is only when you understand the relationship, and you understand the jealousy, the possessiveness, that the killing and the brutality of the killing of Nicole makes sense.”

Ultimately, in a scholarly ten-page single-spaced opinion issued on January 18, 1995, Ito allowed the prosecution to prove most, but not all, of the domestic-violence incidents it wanted to introduce.
The prosecution would be permitted to use the most powerful evidence—the 1989 beating, the 1993 call to 911—but not all of it. With some apparent regret, Ito excluded Nicole’s call to Sojourn on June 7 (this was the part of the ruling the judge had shared with Larry King several days earlier). “To the man or woman on the street,” Ito wrote, “the relevance and probative value of such evidence is both obvious and compelling, especially those statements made just before the homicide.” But Ito correctly excluded Nicole’s statement as inadmissible hearsay—as are all “statements by a homicide victim expressing fear of the defendant, even on the very day of the homicide.”

Over all, Ito’s domestic-violence ruling amounted to a paradigmatic, and admirable, example of his truth-oriented judicial philosophy in action—as well as a buoyant send-off to the prosecution for opening statements. The judge’s preference for truth in packaging extended even to nomenclature. As Ito stated in his opinion, Simpson’s defense team had asked him to prohibit the prosecution “from using such terms as ‘battered wife,’ ‘battered spouse,’ ‘spousal abuse,’ ‘stalker,’ and ‘stalking’ because they are unduly prejudicial, inflammatory, and not supported by the evidence.” Ito dealt with this argument quickly. On the basis of what he had seen of the prosecution’s evidence, he noted dryly—and chillingly—“such restriction is not warranted.”

13. BLAMING FAYE

C
hristopher Darden paced in front of the jury box. As he walked, he kept his eyes on the floor, and his double-breasted jacket flopped open in front of him.

“Now, we’re here today obviously to resolve an issue, to settle a question, a question that has been on the minds of people throughout the country these last seven months. It certainly has been on the minds of my people up in Richmond, California, and friends in Fayetteville, Georgia, and all across the country. Everybody wants to know, and everybody I know often poses a question to me: Did O.J. Simpson really kill Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman?”

The phrase “my people up in Richmond” was not an accidental choice. Both the diction and the reference to the location came fraught with meaning. In general, white Americans do not refer to their relatives as “my people,” nor do they, for the most part, live in Richmond, California. The overwhelmingly black city near Oakland was Darden’s hometown, and his mention of it marked a small effort at solidarity with the African-American jurors who were arrayed before him.

Darden was nervous, as any person would be in his position. On arriving at the courthouse this morning, January 24, the lawyers had run a gauntlet of twenty-six video cameras and perhaps twice as many still photographers. Seven news helicopters had circled overhead. Even the core group of spectators—the reporters and family members who had seen each other almost daily for several months—took on a hushed, almost reverent attitude on this day.
There was an important new face among them, too. Eunice Simpson, the defendant’s mother—tall and regal, even though wracked by arthritis—appeared in her wheelchair in the courtroom’s center aisle. As soon as Eunice Simpson arrived, Juditha Brown—likewise a grandmother to Sydney and Justin Simpson—gave her a hug. Hands fluttering nervously on her lap just before Darden rose to begin his opening statement, Juditha Brown dropped her eyeglasses, and Kim Goldman casually leaned over from her nearby seat to pick them up. Retrieving Juditha’s dropped glasses had cost Kim’s brother his life.

That it was Chris Darden who began the case demonstrated how much the prosecution effort had evolved over the months leading up to the trial. Shortly after Simpson’s arrest, Garcetti had asked Darden to conduct the grand-jury investigation into the Bronco chase. At the time, Darden was at loose ends; he had been named to run the D.A.’s Inglewood branch office, but he had not yet moved. Darden had an excellent reputation in the office as an investigator (less so as a trial lawyer), and Garcetti and Hodgman thought the grand-jury role made sense for him. But as the scale of the trial expanded, particularly in the scientific area, Clark and Hodgman realized they could not handle it all themselves. Clark, an old friend of Darden’s, urged that he be invited to join the trial team. The racial tensions in the case made the logic of adding Darden even more compelling. The case needed a black prosecutor.

Darden’s rise also reflected Don Vinson’s fall. By late January, the results of Vinson’s focus groups were a forgotten memory. The prosecutors had decided to make domestic-violence evidence a linchpin of their case. From an early date, Clark and Hodgman had divided the labor so that Clark would handle testimony about the events of June 12, 1994, and Hodgman would focus on the scientific evidence. That left the ever-expanding number of domestic-violence witnesses still to be assigned. Those went to Darden. And since the prosecution lawyers had decided they would attempt to prove that O.J. and Nicole’s relationship provided the motive for the murders, it made sense for Darden to begin the prosecution presentation to the jury.

In his opening, Darden went right to the heart of the prosecution’s theory. “The answer to the question is, Yes, O.J. Simpson
murdered Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. And I’m sure you will be wondering why as the trial proceeds on, and I’m sure you are wondering why right now.… Why would he do it? Not O.J. Simpson. Not the O.J. Simpson we think we know.… But that is another question.… Do you know O.J. Simpson?…

“We watched him leap turnstiles and chairs and run to airplanes in the Hertz commercials, and we watched him with a fifteen-inch Afro in
Naked Gun 33 1/3
, and we’ve seen him time and time again, and we came to think that we know him.” Here Darden paused.

“What we’ve been seeing, ladies and gentlemen, is the public face, the public persona, the face of the athlete, the face of the actor. It is not the actor who is on trial here today, ladies and gentlemen. It is not that public face. Like many public men … they have a private side, a private life, a private face. And that is the face we will expose to you in this trial, the other side of O.J. Simpson, the side you never met before.…

“When we look upon and look behind that public face … you’ll see a different face. And the evidence will show that the face you will see and the man that you will see will be the face of a batterer, a wife beater, an abuser, a controller … the face of Ron’s and Nicole’s murderer.” Darden recited the litany of abuse in their relationship: “domestic abuse, domestic violence, stalking, intimidation, physical abuse, wife beating, public humiliation.” He said at one point, “Please keep in mind that all of these different kinds of abuse were all different methods to control her.” And yet the list of incidents, on close analysis, was rather thin. In Simpson’s trial, the prosecution could point to only a single example of “wife beating,” the 1989 incident for which Simpson was arrested and then pleaded no contest. There were no other proved examples of physical violence between them. Nicole had referred to several more incidents in the diary she prepared in connection with her divorce proceeding, but Ito had ruled (correctly) that that document was inadmissible hearsay evidence. Here, the Simpson case illustrated one of the larger tragedies of domestic violence—that it usually takes place without witnesses.

Still, with the district attorney having made the Simpson trial into a domestic-violence showcase, Darden pressed on, even lapsing into a kind of California psychobabble at times. “He stripped her of her self-esteem,” Darden said. “He was so controlling that he attempted to define her identity. He attempted to define who
she was.” Darden’s theory even turned what others might call Simpson’s generosity against him. Darden said with disdain that O.J. gave Nicole money. “By the time she was nineteen, she was driving a Porsche. He got it for her.” That, too, according to Darden, was evidence of his desire for control.