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- The case had all the ingredients to become what it was: the first 'reality' in history. In our last summer story, we describe how OJ Simpson, the sportsman who became a national hero of the United States, descended into hell when he was accused of the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. After a trial that paralyzed the country, he was declared innocent thanks to the efforts of the Dream Team of lawyers who defended him. But nothing was the same for him again.
Orenthal James Simpson had a charming and immense smile like a Canadian meadow, like that of someone receiving an electric shock. His teeth were so bright that you had better look at them with sunglasses, his pecs seemed sculpted by an ancient Greek sculptor and his forehead lacked wrinkles, like that of the newly embalmed ones. Total, that his appearance was that of a guy who knows his coach's phone number by heart. He had filled the stadiums of the National League of American Football in the 70s, the crowds cheered him, he was America's boyfriend and despite his color he did not arouse racial prejudices among whites. Everyone loved him, he had charisma. It was neither black nor white, it was simply OJ and if you didn't like it that said nothing about him, but everything about you. But in the summer of 25 years ago , overnight, its popularity slipped through the sump of the abjection when after the luminosity of the hero they thought they saw a cavernous dimension, just as after the intellectual disability of Forrest Gump hid a Shrimp business genius.
That summer of 1994, Forrest Gump taught the importance of running a lot and catching shrimp, the Knicks and Rangers played hard to win the Stanley Ice Hockey Cup and the United States hosted the Football World Cup. The iPhone, iPad or iNiteimaginas did not exist yet, but Aerosmith became the first major band to upload a song to the World Wide Web and, although with another name, Amazon debuted at the time. All that, and everything else, was overshadowed when one night, at the entrance of an apartment building in Los Angeles, the bodies of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown, the former wife of OJ Simpson, were found .
Nicole , 35, and her boyfriend Ronald , 25, had been stabbed almost 20 times while Brown and Simpson's two common children slept in the house . At the crime scene the police found a bloody glove . Investigators went to Simpson's house, four kilometers from the place of cars, to inform him of the murder of his ex-wife. As no one answered the telephone, agent Mark Fuhrman jumped the gate and unlocked the gate to allow three other policemen to enter the property. Simpson was not at home, he had taken a flight to Chicago late last night to attend a golf tournament. Fuhrman noticed a white Ford Bronco parked and stained with blood on the driver's door, then found a second bloodied glove that turned out to be the couple found at the crime scene. A search and seizure order was issued against Simpson , but his lawyers announced that it would be delivered in a couple of days and the police accepted the deal because OJ was famous and had donated to his union.
More than a thousand journalists waited for him at the police station, but the suspect did not appear and his lawyers read a note in which Simpson proclaimed his innocence and suggested he was going to commit suicide . The police started looking for him and they found him aboard his Ford Bronco . Trying to go unnoticed behind the wheel of that white car was like entering a church naked and trusting anyone to notice you. He was like a float drifting and a movie chase began: dozens of cars and police helicopters after Simpson, who was aiming at his head with a gun as if death seemed to him to be the final escape mechanism. The police thought they saw a goodbye look in their eyes, the goodbye look. The one that Detective Lew Archer had seen so many times in the war and in the last moments of the suicides.
The big chains interrupted the program to broadcast a live fighter that became a media circus. The NBC continued coverage of the NBA final between the New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets at Madison Square Garden , but the game was in a small box in the corner, while the rest of the screen was reserved for persecution. It was seen by almost one hundred million viewers , more than those who saw the Super Bowl at the beginning of the year. Domino's Pizza distribution sales skyrocketed and thousands of curious collapsed overpasses along the highway. In a festive atmosphere, they fled the fugitive and like those who watched TV they had the feeling of being inside one of those reality shows that in the following years would flood the channels of the world. Everything would be everywhere. What happened in reality, transmitted at the time, began to interest more than fiction content.
Simpson ended up giving up , in addition to the weapon he had $ 8,000 and a false mustache and goatee. Throughout the summer, OJ monopolized the media ecosystem , the case seemed made for television: an old glory of the nation accused of killing his ex-wife and her boyfriend in cold blood. It had all the elements to be the biggest show in the world . The team of defense lawyers was called the Dream Team, it cost between three and six million dollars and was led by Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran, who had defended Michael Jackson; but it included several other lawyers, including Robert Kardashian , who had been Simpson's close friend and was the husband of Kris Jenner , the matriarch of today's celebrated Kardashian clan.
In the documentary Who killed Nicole ?, Norman Pardo , who was Simpson's representative, revealed that OJ boasted having had sex, in 1991 in a jacuzzi, with Kris Kardashian , his best friend's wife. "We did it until I broke it," says Pardo OJ told him that "his enormous manhood" caused Kris a vaginal tear. Simpson refused to take her to the hospital and the episode had consequences: although Kris denied the affair in In Touch magazine , both the Kardashian and the Simpsons divorced. Just a month after his divorce from Robert Kardashian , Kris married Olympic hero Bruce Jenner who, as everyone knows, is now a woman named Caitlyn.
Three years after Kris's water adventure, Robert Kardashian joined the Dream Team that defended Simpson, Pardo said it was more a matter of professionalism than friendship: "When OJ was declared innocent, Robert Kardashian did not jump for joy." Prosecutor Marcia Clark believed she had the case won without disheveled because, among other things, some blood samples collected at the crime scene coincided with that of OJ, but Johnnie Cochran convinced the jury that there was a reasonable doubt regarding the evidence because the blood samples had been contaminated by malpractice of laboratory technicians or directly manipulated by the police.
The prosecution presented 550 tests : DNA, strands of hair, blood samples, gloves found in Brown and Simpson's homes, and the history of OJ as an abuser. The history of the gloves proved decisive. Who had taken the second glove to Simpson's house? Defense attorneys launched a provocative theory: Fuhrman was a dishonest policeman who fabricated the evidence. Actually, he had found the two gloves at the crime scene, hid one of them and took him to Simpson's house . If the assumption were true, for the defense the gloves would be harmless in the worst case and exculpatory at best.
The theory, although ingenious, was also monstrous. In fact, doubly monstrous, because for the defense Mark Fuhrman's motivation was racism. It was suggested by his police file and some psychiatric reports. It would be an explosive accusation anywhere, but much more in Los Angeles where, after the acquittal of policemen who had brutally beaten the black Rodney King , racial unrest left the city upside down. If a soap opera of jealousy became a racial melodrama, it would be a good idea for defense lawyers to convince the jury that Fuhrman was not clean wheat and that Simpson was his victim.
In his book 'The best defense', Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard and one of Simpson's legal strategists, wrote: "If I decide to accept a case, I only have one agenda: to win. I will try by all means to save my client, regardless of the consequences. " His sense of ethics was comparable to that of the producer of a reality show, but his defense strategy reduced the evidence provided by the prosecution to phosphatin.
Absolution, forgetfulness and jail
The verdict was read by more than 150 million viewers on television. The volume of telephone calls decreased by 58% and that of operations on the New York Stock Exchange by 41%. They also fell productivity and water consumption, because people avoided going to the bathroom. OJ Simpson was acquitted after less than three hours of deliberations by a jury composed of a black man, a Hispanic, two white women and eight black women. Among the whites, there was a feeling that justice had not been done. Prosecutor Marcia Clark published a book about the case in which she accused the judicial system of being biased because of race, fame or wealth.
Simpson lived the following years on a dubious crest of the wave. When he began to fade into oblivion, in need of recognition and liquidity, he wrote a book to be sold in the middle of the 2006 Christmas campaign, but never reached the bookstores, thousands of copies left the printing press and ended up in the incinerator. News Corporation, of tycoon Rupert Murdoch , backed down and withdrew the volume.
When he was America's boyfriend, OJ did not like sleaze, he had no place in a respectable existence, but at the end of 2008 a Las Vegas judge sentenced him to 33 years in jail, with a minimum of nine, for kidnapping and armed robbery. They were other facts; but in the eyes of those who never believed in their innocence, retrospective justice was being done. He was no longer the idol of the crowds, he was like most people who, when he stumbles, have no network. Any. It just falls with the whole team. He left prison in October 2017, had just turned 72 and had lost his statue figure and that movie star smile on the red carpet.
Twenty-five years later, and after hundreds of journalistic investigations, nobody knows very well if the jury was right or the opposite. Did the prosecution's tests fail? Did the laws apply well? Most whites agreed with most blacks to see things filtered by belonging to a race. Where was justice then? Probably in the definition of Ambrose Bierce in his Devil Dictionary: "Article more or less adulterated that the State sells to the citizen in exchange for its taxes." That summer, the American author Dennis Lehane published his first novel, his protagonists Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro were a couple of detective specialists in sinking into the sordid to discover the truth. Of course their capabilities were well above those of the Los Angeles Police Department, although perhaps not as much as those of the Dream Team of defenders, who tried to prove that the murderers were hired assassins hired by drug traffickers who went after a friend of Brown, Faye Resnick, a cocaine consumer who had not paid them the material. Most blacks believed it; Most whites don't . Both did as Forrest Gump: run and not think.
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