The Simpson Acquittal, 20 Years On: 6 Keys to Understanding the Case

“Where was the joy of the defense team at the announcement of the not-guilty verdict? [Johnnie] Cochran smiled his cat-that-ate-the-canary smile, F. Lee Bailey wore the smirk of victory on his face, and Robert Shapiro, who had already distanced himself from the winning team, made a halfhearted gesture toward Simpson, but the others, particularly Robert Kardashian, looked momentarily dazed, as if the verdict were more than they had expected. The exhilaration that is part and parcel of an acquittal for a wrongly accused person was eerily missing. Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld had already returned to New York. At the lackluster press conference in the courtroom following the verdict, there was an absence of euphoria. When Jason Simpson read a message from his about-to-be-set-free father, in which the former defendant said that a priority of his life would be to find the real ‘killer or killers,’ he sat awkwardly, almost hiding his face from us, as if he were ashamed of the message he was reading. In the opinion of many, the lawyers who fought so hard for Simpson’s acquittal have become diminished by their association with him. As someone close to the defense team said to me, it was a victory without honor.” —Dominick Dunne, “O.J.’s Life Sentence,” Vanity Fair, December 1995

Twenty years ago this month, virtually all America stopped to witness the verdict on O.J. Simpson in his trial for the first-degree murder of ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. Viewers had had time to prepare for this outcome, certainly more so than they had more than a year before, when, out of nowhere, amid the NBA playoffs, they were astonished to see the retired football Hall of Famer flee arrest in his white Ford Bronco.

The office where I work, in midtown Manhattan, was no different from the rest of the nation in watching the denouement of this astonishing spectacle. It being lunchtime on the East Coast, many staffers could simply go into the conference room and turn on the TV showing the proceedings occurring at 10 am in Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom in California. They quickly filled up all the chairs around the long conference room table, a mass hubbub rising as they awaited the announcement from Los Angeles. They then leaned forward, hoping this would finally put a period to a saga that had compulsively, crazily transfixed everyone.

At the words “Not Guilty,” some in the audience gasped. Others groaned. In short order, everyone filed out of the room, with many shaking their hands, bewildered by what had transpired. They could not understand how it could conclude like this.

I have written a prior post on the Simpson case, but that dealt with an essay by John Gregory Dunne, Dominick’s brother, honing in on the three principals: the defendant and the two victims. But Dominick was more consumed by the trial, not only reporting on it as a ringside observer for Vanity Fair Magazine but also using it as the centerpiece of his roman a clef, Another City, Not My Own.

Two decades later, we can see, as Dunne predicted, that any initial euphoria that Simpson and his legal “Dream Team” may have felt soon dissipated, as the former gridiron great and commercial pitchman became an outcast in his Brentwood community and his attorneys experienced various degrees of misfortune. (Simpson, having lost a wrongful-death civil suit brought by Goldman’s father Fred in 1997, lost his freedom 11 years later when he was sentenced to 33 years in prison for robbery and kidnapping, the result of a dispute over memorabilia he claims was stolen from him. His most famous attorney at the time of the case, F. Lee Bailey, ended up disbarred on another matter several years later.)

We also know, in a way that Dunne may only have dimly suspected, that the trial marked not an ending but a beginning. The consequences for our common culture run deep, in ways that are, more often than not, understood piecemeal, not in any comprehensive fashion. I’d like to outline here six keys—surely, some of you can think of more—to understanding how the Simpson case remains the property even of a second generation:

*The arrival of a multimedia tabloid culture. In its impact on the public consciousness, the case can best understood by comparing it to famous murder trials of the 1920s. The musical Chicago and the film noir classic The Postman Always Rings Twice sprang from cases that burst on the United States in that decade. Tabloids breathlessly covered seedy murder cases reeking of crime, class and sex, and featuring flamboyant defense attorney predecessors of the "Dream Team" such as Bill “The Great Mouthpiece” Fallon—and, on a more positive note, promoted a golden age of sports heroes (e.g., Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Bobby Jones). The commercial possibilities of a recently developed broadcast medium, radio, were also being explored. By the mid-1990s, another journalistic juggernaut, cable TV, had developed. More than three out of five Americans had cable television by this point. Two channels in particular fed off the Simpson case: Court TV and CNN. In the case of the latter, guests commenting on the Simpson case so dominated Larry King’s schedule that even the talk-show host worried that it was too much. The fight for viewers fostered a 24/7 news cycle that would, before the decade was out, plunge to new depths with the establishment of Fox News and the development of the World Wide Web.

*Justice as legal farce. Jackie Chiles, Kramer’s attorney on Seinfeld, was a note-for-note parody of Johnnie Cochran. During the trial, Jay Leno’s Tonight Show featured “The Dancing Itos,” a series of choreographed numbers featuring Judge Lance Ito (along with a female dancer resembling lead prosecutor Marcia Clark). But many felt that nothing on TV could surpass in absurdity what was occurring in Judge Ito’s courtroom. This included assistant prosecutor Christopher Darden, inducing Simpson to try on blood-stained brown leather gloves—only to have the smug-looking defendant demonstrating they did not fit, and making Darden a legal laughingstock. This included a case so hideously long that jurors were sequestered a record 265 days, stuck in their hotel rooms, under the eyes of sheriff’s deputies, not allowed to watch television or listen to radio or even read newspapers—and scaring off thousands of future potential jurors nationwide terrified about serving on other long cases. This included a conspiracy theory so immense, involving so many officers, forensic personnel, and prosecutors that it would enable jurors to overlook a mountain of evidence tying Simpson to the crime, not to mention a history of spousal abuse.

*Domestic violence. Forensic evidence was not the only tie of Simpson to the death of his ex-wife; there were also the 17 violent years that preceded it. Jurors heard—then, in the end, ignored—two 911 phone calls Nicole made in 1993. Were her most horrifying words that Simpson was “going to beat the [expletive] out of me”? No, believe it or not—it was “I think you know his record.” “His record” included a 1989 no-contest plea to domestic violence. That might not have been the most horrifying aspect of the situation, nor even that, after nonstop coverage of the case, 31 votes could still be mustered in the Senate against the initial 1994 Violence Against Women Act. No, topping this is that last year, when reports trickled out that running back Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice had struck his then-fiance Janay in a hotel elevator, some still defended him—until a video of the event surfaced. OJ’s sister-in-law Tanya Brown made the logical connection between the two events: “You’re gonna raise a hand to a woman of that stature, that height and that weight, you can knock her out like what we saw, and end up like Nicole.”

*Reality-show America. The real-time low-speed chase involving the police and Simpson’s Bronco (driven by longtime teammate and friend Al Cowlings), followed by seemingly never-ending courtroom proceedings, signaled the rise of reality-show America. Although a number of the courtroom figures held important positions in the legal community (Ito, Clark, Simpson team member F. Lee Bailey), the trial also involved people with no accomplishment and no claim on the public attention save for their connection to the case (Simpson semi-permanent houseguest Kato Kaelin, Nicole Simpson confidante Faye Resnick), given their 15 moments of fame and, in some cases, wanting a whole lot more. The obsession with these people was intense, total even, and so in-the-moment that a few years later, viewers had completely lost track of some of these supporting players.There was even a connection to the most famous reality-show cast of all on Simpson's "Dream Team": Robert Kardashian, before his divorce from wife Kris, had sired children who, together with his ex, would still keep a nation transfixed with their doings two decades later.

*Distrust of law enforcement. At least eight times before the 1989 911 calls, police were called to Nicole Simpson’s house on domestic-violence charges against O.J. That statement did not come from the police, or even from Nicole, but from O.J. himself: “The police have been out here eight times before, and now you're going to arrest me for this?" he yelled at two cops there for the 911 call. Given how often he had gotten off, you could understand his disbelief. What might be a bit harder, initially, to grasp is how a police force that had long ignored and enabled O.J.’s violence against his wife could now be considered responsible for framing him. Harder, that is, until one recalls that Rodney King had been beaten to a pulp only a few years before. Or that a 10-member commissioned chaired by future Secretary of State Warren Christopher found that "a significant number" of cops on the Los Angeles Police Department who had been accused of excessive force were seldom punished. Or that, more often than not until recently, African-American civilian complaints about police brutality were not weighed on the same credibility scale as those of cops—until the presence of cameras confirmed, in many cases, what they had been saying all along. The presence at the crime scene of Mark Fuhrman, trailing a history of racist statements, gave the largely African-American jury all the excuse they needed for “reasonable doubt.” If overlooking massive circumstantial evidence tying Simpson to the crime constituted “jury nullification” (not to mention accepting a criminal conspiracy involving not just Fuhrman but everyone at the LAPD connected to the case)—well, that, to those inclined to think this way, was simply payback for white-dominated juries who, for decades, had let their own kind off scot-free.

*The enduring racial divide. In an interview for the PBS news show Frontline, Jeffrey Toobin, who covered the case for The New Yorker, may have said it best: “The only reason we will care about this case 10 years after, 20 years after, is what it told us about race in this country….[T]his case showed that when it came to law enforcement and belief in the police and the judicial system, black people and white people in 1995 lived in different countries, and that was something that the country really didn't want to be reminded of, but this case sure brought it home.” We are now at the 20-year mark after the case that Toobin spoke of, and every word he said rings true. We see this not just in continuing different opinions on the verdict, but also in political discourse in which a significant portion of the electorate opposes President Obama less because of his economic record or views on the culture wars but because of the demonstrable falsities that he is Muslim and not a citizen of the United States. You can understand the frustration that more than a few blacks might feel about being criticized for supporting a verdict so at odds with logic when there is a good chance their white questioner holds views about Barack Obama that are equally, if not more, irrational. And that, of course, is part of the racial baggage of the United States: All questions of logic fly out the door when the color of someone’s skin comes into play.

What the case proved, indisputably, is that the color of justice in the United States is not black or white, but green. Without money in this country, a defendant of any color immediately faces higher odds. With enough financial resources, though, a celebrity defendant can face down virtually any legal problem. Within a decade, Robert Blake would get off on the charge of having his wife killed, while the prosecution had to endure a mistrial before it could earn a conviction against “Wall of Sound” pop producer Phil Spector on charges of second-degree murder against a B-movie actress—the first time in 40 years that a celebrity was found guilty of murder in Los Angeles.

It’s obvious now that America can’t escape from the damage that the Simpson trial inflicted on this country’s cultural, legal and racial landscape. But neither can the defendant—who, after all, rose to fame and fortune by eluding massive linemen on the gridiron and by dashing through an airport in a landmark rental-car commercial—flee the consequences of his actions two decades ago.

The bizarre aborted book deal (If I Did It), the long-delayed civil trial admission that he had indeed struck Nicole in their marriage, the current incarceration, all mean that, even in the interior realm where people can live at their freest, O.J. cannot run away from his conscience. Those autopsy pictures of the mother of his two youngest children—throat lacerated, eyes still almost wide open, as if disbelieving that what she long feared was at last happening to her—tackle him at every turn.

Bonus Quote of the Day (John Gregory Dunne, on the Trio at the Heart of the Simpson Case)

“A black ex-athlete growing older ungracefully, tenuously living a white life on the limited visa of his contract as a television pitchman; his beautiful battered ex-wife trying at age thirty-five to start over after half a lifetime on someone else’s tab; a waiter and unsuccessful male model uncertain whether to become a restaurateur or a paramedic, collecting business cards from the men on whose tables he waited in case one might decide to invest in his dream restaurant: these were characters of considerable and ambiguous particularity. With the events of June 12, however, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were found slashed and stabbed to death, and with the arrest of Orenthal James Simpson for killing them, all three lost whatever identity they had in the frantic search to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime. The story demanded a moral: youth wasted, promise denied, spousal abuse, domestic violence, the race card. Show me a hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald once jotted in his notebook, and I will write you a tragedy.”— John Gregory Dunne, “The Simpsons,” in Regards:The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (2005)

In the summer of 1994, while up at the Stratford Festival in Canada, I chatted with a fellow playgoer during a performance of Othello. I couldn’t help noticing some similarities between the title character and O.J. Simpson, I told him. “Yes,” he answered. “The trouble is, everybody else is noticing it, too. It’s become a cliché.”

I understood perfectly what he meant. Still, with so many people following the events, the number of cultural comparisons already being drawn to what was shaping up as the Crime of the Nineties was already staggering.

In a prior post, I drew parallels to the 17^th century Italian murder case immortalized in Robert Browning’s narrative poem The Ring and the Book and the Simpson case. But today, on the 20^th anniversary of the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, other aspects of this cause celebre remain to be explored.

Older brother Dominick was the one who wrote more, in essays and fiction (Another City, Not My Own), about the Brentwood tragedy, largely fueled by his never-ending rage as a father whose own daughter had been murdered. 

But John Gregory Dunne also wrote incisively about this, whether including elements of it in his final novel, Nothing Lost, or in the piece quoted above, which appeared originally in The New York Review of Books three months after the killings and the infamous Bronco chase watched by 95 million Americans at one point or another.

Dunne had a particular vantage point on the principals in the case: he lived in Brentwood, just like the defendant, Los Angeles DA Gil Garcetti, Mayor Richard Riordan, and Hollywood superagent Michael Ovitz. Thus, he knew about the aspirations and environment of the community examined with so little insight by the rest of the media. 

Before the case had even come to trial, Dunne was already jaundiced about certain aspects, notably the racial angle that Simpson’s defense team would exploit. (“So assiduously had he [Simpson] pursued racial neutrality that he had become estranged from prominent elements of Los Angeles’ black leadership.”)  

And, as the “Bonus Quote of the Day” indicates, he was especially attuned to the quiet desperation, the grasp for the last chance, that animated O.J., Nicole and Ron alike.

Twenty years later, Dunne’s essay still stands up well. He noticed, even then, how some commentators were striving “to find some larger meaning that would explain the crime.” 

Last month, in the same magazine where John Gregory Dunne’s brother vented his moral outrage about what was happening before his eyes, Lili Anolik sought for a similar overarching theme. Terming the case “TV’s first reality show,” Anolik accused Simpson, “regardless of whether the jury got it right or the jury got it wrong,” of murdering popular culture.

This is a way too cute formulation. Above all else is this: two people were murdered in the most brutal fashion that night. O.J.’s defense team, unable to find a plausible explanation for who might have murdered them besides the defendant, simply threw fairy dust in the eyes of the jury. 

Most outrageously, after the not guilty verdict, Simpson announced that he would immediately start searching for her killer—as if the answer couldn’t be found in his home mirror. In Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau  properly mocked this pretense, devoting an entire week’s worth of the strip to “O.J. Simpson, Detective.”

Quote of the Day (Dominick Dunne, on a Major Skill of His)

“I’m simply a very good listener. And listening is an underrated skill. If you really listen—if you’re really interested—someone is bound to talk.”—Dominick Dunne, quoted in Matt Schudel, “Dominick Dunne; Wrote About Crimes of Rich and Famous,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), reprinted from Washington Post News Service, August 28, 2009

Quote of the Day (Dominick Dunne, With the “Ash Wednesday” Joke That Got Him Excommunicated From Hollywood)

"If the history of this movie is ever written, it should be called 'When a fat girl falls in love.'"—Novelist-essayist Dominick Dunne, in the documentary Dominick Dunne: After the Party, recounting his joke about Hollywood ‘70s superagent Sue Mengers that finished his career as a producer.

In the above headline, “Ash Wednesday” doesn’t refer to the day that begins Lent, nor the T.S. Eliot poem referring to the same, but to something far more unholy—a 1973 Elizabeth Taylor film that few people have seen (and I confess that I’m one of the holdouts), and that many of its principals, from all accounts, wish they hadn’t made.

Dunne, who produced this box-office bomb (and who is with La Liz in the photo accompanying this post), took aim at two people with his remark: the film’s screenwriter, Jean-Claude Tramont, and especially the latter’s fiancée, Sue Mengers, then at the height of her power in Hollywood. (Another 1973 movie, the Anthony Perkins-Stephen Sondheim-penned The Last of Sheila, has Dyan Cannon in a thinly veiled portrait of the agent.) The latter didn’t appreciate the attempt at a witticism, and before Dunne knew it he was listening to studio head Robert Evans telling him, Listen—it’s over for you here.

Some might say that Dunne’s banishment recalls producer Julia Phillips’ You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, or even that of his acquaintance Truman Capote. But I think the writer who understood his plight most deeply would have been John O’Hara, another social-climbing Irish-American novelist who knew intimately the agony of what he called being “cut dead” by old friends.

A prior post of mine, on the 1953 TV adaptation of O’Hara’s best novel, Appointment in Samarra, related how O’Hara invited the then-young TV stage manager Dunne out with the rest of the crew that had worked on that night’s taping of the show.

Dunne absorbed a lot that evening from the veteran writer on how to elicit information and listen, but he would have been well advised to pay equally strong attention to the message of O’Hara’s cautionary tale of a drink-induced faux pas and its disastrous consequences.

O’Hara’s protagonist, Julian English, begins his downfall when, in a bit of drunken pique, he hurls a drink in the face of arriviste Harry Reilly. English’s doom is sealed when the social circuit in his town, Gibbsville, turns their back to him in record time.

Dunne must have felt that his fall—hastened by alcohol and cocaine—happened even more rapidly: One day he was making his little joke in Europe, then before he could take it back, it had traveled halfway around the world, where it appeared verbatim in The Hollywood Reporter.

Two days ago, Leonard Lopate’s WNYC-FM radio show repeated its interview with Griffin Dunne, son of the novelist and nephew of novelist-screenwriter John Gregory Dunne. Griffin, with the sad duty of promoting his father’s posthumous novel Too Much Money, spoke with sympathy but also unblinking honesty about his late parent, as well as with the kind of understanding that his own experience with the entertainment industry (as actor-producer in films such as After Hours) has given him.

One of his father’s most prominent characteristics, he said, was a tendency to say anything, a penchant that got him into legal trouble a couple of years ago when his speculation on the death of Washington intern Chondra Levy sparked a lawsuit from her onetime married lover, former Congressman Gary Condit.

Hollywood will forgive a lot, even embezzlement (was Griffin thinking of the David Begelman-Cliff Robertson controversy?), the novelist’s son noted, but it won’t forgive failure. The dismal box-office results of Ash Wednesday ensured that Dominick Dunne’s assiduous courting of friends—not to mention virtually the only livelihood he’d known in adulthood—was over.

Several weeks from now, Hollywood will engage in its annual smarmy exercise in self-congratulation at the Oscars about its tolerance. Keep in mind their cold-shouldering of Dunne if you insist on watching the ceremonies.

At the same time, remember that this one story, despite the efforts of Mengers, Tramont, Evans, et. al., had a happy ending: Dunne rose from (the thought is inescapable, given the circumstances, the film title and today) the ashes.

Nearly a decade later, at the nadir of his life—career and marriage over, trying to rebound from substance abuse, his beloved daughter murdered by a boyfriend who received a shamefully short prison term—he turned his world around and began a new career, as a writer who acted as a kind of avenging angel for crime victims (e.g., Martha Moxley, the teenager who, a jury found, a quarter century after her death, had been murdered by Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel).