The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson

18. THE BEST TRIAL LAWYER

Barry Scheck looked different and sounded different. His entire wardrobe of ill-fitting double-breasted suits probably cost less than just one of Cochran’s or Shapiro’s buttery ensembles. In more ways than one, Scheck spoke in a language that few in the courtroom understood. There was his accent for starters-a New York honk that never blended into the beige California soundscape-but there was also his vocabulary: the language of forensic DNA technology, with its “alleles,” “autorads” and “daughter ions.” When Scheck first turned up in the case at a handful of hearings during the summer of 1994, he and his partner, Peter Neufeld, seemed rarely even to talk to their colleagues at the defense table.

But the courtroom camera never caught the most important difference between Scheck and the other defense lawyers.

Scheck worked. Cochran left the detail work to Carl Douglas. Shapiro enjoyed a nap after a day in court. When Scheck left Ito’s courtroom, he would bend his pudgy frame over a table in Cochran’s office suite and examine the scientific evidence against O.J. Simpson the way no criminal prosecution case had been scrutinized before. When Shapiro had hired him the week after the murders, it wasn’t even clear what Scheck’s role would be. The vague idea was that Scheck and Neufeld would brief Shapiro for the hearing on the admissibility of DNA evidence. At that point, the idea that Barry Scheck would deliver one of the closing jury arguments in the case would have been laughable. But by dint of the sheer quality and quantity of his effort, Scheck emerged, after Cochran, as the most important trial lawyer in the case-and, in terms of courtroom skills, the single best trial lawyer as well.

What Scheck did in those endless sessions at the table in Cochran’s office was construct a brilliant defense. The genius of it was that it merged perfectly with the cruder race-based strategy Shapiro and Cochran had orchestrated from the beginning. As with the race defense, Scheck’s efforts had little to do with establishing that someone other than Simpson had murdered Ron and Nicole. Far from it. Scheck’s work had everything to do with undermining the integrity and competence of the LAPD. The results of the LAPD’s work, Scheck told the jury, could not be trusted. Cochran attacked the hearts of the policemen; Scheck, their minds. Scheck’s goal epitomized the nihilistic function of a defense lawyer-to establish that the mountain of forensic evidence against his client means nothing.

The most remarkable thing was that Scheck actually accomplished this goal. By the end of the case, he had a plausible scientific basis for arguing away every piece of physical evidence against Simpson. To be sure, many of these explanations were fanciful, and some were silly. They were, in part, contradictory to one another, positing a police department that was both totally inept and brilliantly sinister. Scheck’s arguments presupposed a conspiracy so immense within the LAPD that, analyzed objectively, it seemed a practical impossibility. But Scheck’s passion and skill made his theories real for the jury. And for that reason, he as much as any other person in that courtroom was responsible for the verdict that came out of it.

With a shift of about a half dozen years, Barry Scheck might have been Marcia Clark (and she, him). Both came from upwardly mobile middle-class Jewish families that stressed education and liberal politics. Both were smart, verbal kids who did well in school. Both seemed destined to be lawyers. But Scheck, born in 1949, came of age at a time when the highest goal for a liberal lawyer was to fight the system-as a criminal defense lawyer at least and a Legal Aid lawyer at best. A few years later, kids like him would become prosecutors.

Besides, Barry couldn’t dance. His father, George Scheck, had been born into a poor family of eight children on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. George dropped out of elementary school and started hanging around a bank, where the janitor taught him to tap-dance. George became so skilled that he was one of the few white men of his generation to play the Apollo in Harlem. During World War II, George started a local radio revue called Swing Shift Follies, which aimed to discover musical talent among the Rosie-the-Riveters on the assembly lines. After the war, George became a musical-talent manager, and he nurtured the early careers of such stars as Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, and Hazel Scott. Thriving, the Schecks and their two children moved from Queens to a big house on Long Island.

In 1959, when Barry was ten, the big house burned down. His sister, then seven, died in the fire. The family moved to an apartment in Manhattan. The ordeal may have quite literally broken his father’s heart: George couldn’t work full-time because of ill health, and he ultimately suffered twelve heart attacks before he died in 1987. Barry’s mother was forced into work at an office-supply business. They focused their hopes on their one precocious surviving child.

Scheck had a Doonesbury-esque experience at Yale in the 1960s, which was not entirely surprising, because his room was across the hall from Garry Trudeau’s. When Scheck arrived as a freshman, he wore ties and cast his lot with Yale’s Young Democrats; by the time he graduated, he could only enter the Yale Club in New York through a side door, because his political convictions demanded that he wear work shirts. Along the way, Scheck presented his draft card to the famous Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin for delivery to the Pentagon, in protest of the Vietnam War. Scheck campaigned for Norman Mailer when he ran for mayor of New York City. Still, he did go to law school, at Boalt Hall in Berkeley, and after graduating went to work for Legal Aid in the Bronx.

Scheck spent about five years in that combative, unionized, highly political office (where Neufeld also worked), until he took a job as a clinical law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in lower Manhattan. The position allowed Scheck both to teach and to defend criminal cases, and in 1987 a fellow lawyer called him with a plea for help. The lawyer’s client, Joseph Castro, had been charged with murder, and the case against him was based principally on the infant science known as DNA fingerprinting. Scheck and Neufeld agreed to help out.

What struck the two lawyers was the hypnotizing power of DNA technology. As they steeped themselves in this new science, they realized that the best way to attack it was from the ground up-that is, through the evidence collection and preservation techniques of the police. The tests themselves were close to unassailable, but they were sensitive, too, geared more to laboratory conditions than to the chaos of crime scenes. Garbage in; garbage out-that was the theory. After protracted hearings in the Castro case, Scheck and Neufeld persuaded the judge to exclude the DNA evidence as unreliable. (It wasn’t wrong, though-Castro himself ultimately pleaded guilty in the case.)

The power of the technology pricked the two men’s social consciences as well. Scheck and Neufeld realized that DNA testing on blood or semen could free the unjustly convicted, and they began representing prisoners they believed were innocent. They recruited Scheck’s students at Cardozo to help, and called their efforts the Innocence Project. Tracking down forgotten evidence-sometimes many years after the trials that sent their clients to jail-Scheck’s team subjected it to DNA testing. In just a few years, they helped more than fifteen convicted prison inmates go free.

At one level, though, Scheck and Neufeld weren’t so different from their more cynical colleagues on the Simpson defense team. There was a conflict in Scheck and Neufeld’s two approaches to DNA: They trashed it when it implicated their clients and embraced it when it excluded them. The pair dealt with this state of affairs by resolutely refusing to acknowledge it, asserting instead that DNA “matches” were simply less reliable than exclusions. But even Scheck’s and Neufeld’s admirers in the scientific community-and there are many of them-found this position difficult to swallow. According to Richard Lewontin, a professor of population genetics at Harvard, “Unlike most lawyers, Barry and Peter really know what they’re talking about when it comes to the technology. When they’ve defended clients, they’ve done brilliant work in showing the problems with the DNA labs. On the other hand, I have to say, they have no compunction about supporting the technology when it’s useful for the defense. They are defense attorneys-and they’re not always consistent, because they’re defense attorneys.”

The forensic-evidence portion of the Simpson case began with the testimony of Dennis Fung, the diminutive, soft-spoken thirty-four-year-old criminalist who had collected evidence from both Bundy and Rockingham on the morning after the murders. The prosecutor was Hank Goldberg, a skilled appellate advocate, but a trial lawyer with the stage presence of a voice-mail attendant. Prodded gently by Goldberg, Fung told the story of how he had collected the various tiny drops and hairs into plastic bags for transportation back to police headquarters.

Scheck began cross-examination on the afternoon of April 4. A junior colleague of Fung’s, Andrea Mazzola, had actually assisted the criminalist in processing both crime scenes. It was only Mazzola’s third crime scene, and her inexperience proved a matter of some embarrassment to the prosecution. Scheck began exploring whether, in earlier testimony, Fung had exaggerated his own activities in order to play down the role of his novice accomplice. In a pattern that would recur throughout this long cross-examination, Fung at first denied that he had ever before given misleading testimony, but then, pummeled by Scheck, he admitted defeat.

“So you didn’t tell the grand jury that Andrea Mazzola was actually the one that swatched that red stain off the handle of the Bronco, right?”

“At the time-” Fung stumbled.

“Did you tell them that?”

“No.”

“You said you did it.”

“Yes,” said Fung.

“And you said the same thing about stain four [at Rockingham]?”

“Yes.”

“Five?”

“Yes.”

“Six?”

“I don’t recall,” Fung said, sighing, “but yes.”

Scheck thus began by establishing that Fung had made repeated misstatements about the evidence during previous sworn testimony. In Fung’s direct testimony, Goldberg could have previewed these problems-fronted them, as lawyers say-but he left Fung to fend for himself against Scheck’s meticulously prepared onslaught.

Having decimated Fung’s credibility, Scheck then went after his competence. Using both police and news media photographs of the crime scene to make his point, Scheck established that Fung had neglected to pick up a piece of paper near Goldman’s feet; that a blanket covering Nicole’s body could have transferred evidence fibers from inside the house; that the glove and the envelope holding Juditha Brown’s glasses had been collected after Ron Goldman’s body was dragged over them by the coroner.

This went on for days-a medley of Fung’s mistakes, some trivial, some not. Large purple blotches that looked like bruises began to appear under Fung’s eyes. First Fung said he was sure that he never collected evidence with his bare hands; then he wasn’t sure. First he was positive that he hadn’t collected any evidence until the coroner’s representatives had left the scene; then, after seeing a video, Fung conceded that he had. No, he probably didn’t change his rubber gloves as often as he should have. No, he hadn’t seen any soil inside Simpson’s home at Rockingham. Yes, he should have taken larger samples of blood from O.J.’s Bronco. No, he hadn’t noticed any blood on Simpson’s socks when he first picked them up at the foot of O.J.’s bed at Rockingham. At least some of these flaws could be attributed to the LAPD’s underfunding of its Scientific Investigative Division (and undertraining of its personnel), but whatever the reasons, the failures reflected on the prosecution’s case against O.J. Simpson. It was a brilliant-and devastating-cross-examination.

These efforts served a larger goal than merely embarrassing Dennis Fung; Scheck used them to offer a comprehensive view of the evidence. His dissection of the blood evidence on the back gate at Bundy was a classic demonstration of the Scheck method. Through sheer intellectual calisthenics, Scheck not only neutralized some of the most powerful evidence in the case against Simpson but turned it into arguable proof of a police conspiracy against him.

On first blush, it was devastating evidence. Many of the first cops on the scene noticed the bloody smudge on the back gate; the blood was located just where an intruder might put his left hand to open the gate and leave the pathway that ran along the side of Nicole’s house. Fuhrman referred to the blood on the back gate in three separate entries in his contemporaneous notes from the crime scene. The DNA tests on the bloody smudge came back as virtually conclusive. There was only a 1 in 57 billion chance that the blood belonged to someone other than O.J. Simpson-who, of course, had a cut on his left hand on the morning after the murders. There are men on death row with far less persuasive evidence against them.

So Scheck went to work. He noticed first that Fung had not collected the blood on the gate until July 3, 1994-three weeks after the killings. Fung had explained in his direct examination that he had simply missed this blood when he took samples at the scene on the morning after the murders. Revisiting the scene with Detective Lange later, Fung realized he had to check to see if the blood was still on the back gate. It was, and Fung took it in for testing.

Scheck then noticed something curious in the test results. For many of the stains that Fung collected from the walkway outside Nicole’s home, the DNA had substantially degraded. As a result, these stains could only be subjected to the PCR type of DNA testing, which yields less precise results than the RFLP method. But the blood on the back gate was scarcely degraded at all. It was so rich in DNA that the police could, and did, do RFLP testing on it. Scheck found this paradoxical. Why would blood that had sat outside for three weeks be less degraded than blood that was collected within a few hours of the crime? Scheck saw conspiracy. If the blood had been planted on the rear gate after that first day-and, of course, after Simpson had given his reference sample to the police-that would explain why it was so rich in DNA.

Scheck didn’t stop there. He examined photographs of the crime scene. On the morning after the murders, Fung had worked closely with the photographer at the crime scene, but because Fung didn’t focus on the rear gate, neither did the photographer. There was no clear photograph of the back gate from those taken on the morning of June 13. The only head-on pictures of that stain were taken when Fung finally did remove a sample, on July 3. But Scheck did find one photo from June 13 that revealed a distant view of the back gate. He had it blown up many times. Though the photo was blurry and somewhat ambiguous, Scheck could argue that the blood was simply not there on June 13. In a dramatic moment in his cross-examination of Fung, Scheck showed Fung the July 3 photo, where the blood is clearly visible, and then the earlier photo, where it is not.

“Where is it, Mr. Fung?” Scheck asked with a sneer in his voice. Fung couldn’t say. This exchange ended the court day on April 11. When Scheck returned to the defense table, Shapiro told him, “Perfect!”-which it was. (Shapiro’s only other contribution to the Fung cross-examination was to joke, during a break, that he was eating fortune cookies from the “Hang Fung Restaurant.” He later offered an oleaginous public apology to Fung and “all my friends in the Asian-American community” for the remark.)

But Scheck wasn’t finished. He focused on the preliminary-hearing testimony of Thano Peratis, the police nurse who took Simpson’s blood sample on the afternoon of June 13 at Parker Center. Peratis had testified on cross-examination at the preliminary hearing that he had taken about 8 milliliters of blood as a sample-a standard amount. Using this fact, Scheck then did something that had probably never been done before in a criminal case: He reviewed the records to see how much of Simpson’s blood sample had been used up in all the subsequent testing. Again, Scheck found something peculiar. The subsequent tests accounted for only about 6.5 milliliters of blood. Scheck thus concluded that some of Simpson’s blood was “missing.” Scheck also found an expert to say that the blood on the gate contained EDTA, a preservative used in the test tube where Simpson’s blood sample had been stored.

Thus, Scheck had the raw material for his counternarrative of the blood on the back gate. The story went like this: On June 13, Fung did not collect the blood on the back gate because it wasn’t there; the photos were proof of that. Between June 13 and July 3, someone-probably Vannatter-planted O.J.’s blood on the back gate. (After all, Vannatter, curiously, had brought O.J.’s blood sample all the way back to Brentwood from downtown Los Angeles to hand to Fung.) If the photos themselves were not enough proof that the blood was planted after the fact, the DNA tests themselves were. The DNA of the blood left at the actual crime scene had degraded, but because the blood on the gate came from Simpson’s fresh sample, it yielded definitive results. Someone had planted some of Simpson’s “missing” blood on that back gate: Q.E.D.

Now, the prosecution had a response to this story, but it was a complicated one-and it depended, in significant part, on the jurors’ believing in the incompetence of the LAPD, which was not a message the government otherwise wanted the jury to accept. First of all, the prosecutors asserted, Fung did simply miss the blood on that first morning. On that day, he collected dozens of stains at Rockingham and Bundy, and this one just fell through the cracks. The fact that many police officers saw the blood on the back gate established that it was not planted at some later date. As for the good quality of the back-gate blood several weeks later, that too related to a flaw in Fung’s work. After Fung collected the samples on June 13, he placed them in plastic bags and then stored them for several hours in an unair-conditioned truck. In retrospect, it was clear he shouldn’t have done that, because heat and humidity degrade DNA. But the blood on the gate spent three weeks resting on a clean, painted surface in the cool Brentwood air. Naturally, the DNA in it did not degrade. The photographs proved nothing, establishing only that neither Fung nor the photographer had paid attention to the back-gate stains on June 13. A government expert also challenged Scheck’s claim about the presence of the preservative in the blood. In some of the most highly technical evidence in the case, an FBI expert said the blood from the gate contained no EDTA.

As for “missing” blood, that was a figment of Scheck’s imagination. Peratis had testified without thinking at the preliminary hearing; he said he took 8 milliliters, but that was just a standard amount. When it comes to such small differences as 1 or 2 milliliters, nurses generally pay little attention to the amount of blood they take from living people. It doesn’t make any difference; if more blood is needed, the person can simply give more at another time. And Peratis, who was in poor health, gave a videotaped statement at the trial in which he confessed that he had been too categorical when he testified at the preliminary hearing that he took 8 milliliters from Simpson. It might have been as little as 6.5 milliliters. (This important conflict over Peratis’s testimony at the prelim showed just how important it was that Dershowitz had succeeded in stopping the grand jury. If prosecutors had indicted Simpson before a grand jury, Peratis never would have been cross-examined before the trial.) As for Vannatter’s delivery of the blood to Fung in Brentwood, that took place at O.J.’s home on Rockingham. A news video showed Fung placing the vial in his truck outside O.J.’s house. Thus, that blood couldn’t have been planted at Nicole’s condo on Bundy.

More fundamentally, though, the prosecutors wanted the jury to believe that the police did not plant blood on Nicole’s back gate because they would not do such a thing. Vannatter, Lange, Fung-they all gave their word that they did not do it. That, the prosecutors believed, should have counted for something. But with a jury predisposed toward sympathy for the defendant and hostility to the police, Scheck’s counternarrative found a receptive audience.

Scheck’s theories covered far more than just the bloody smudge on the back gate. He argued that the blood drops to the left of the shoe prints at Bundy had been cross-contaminated with Simpson’s reference sample; he contended that some nefarious police officer-never named-splashed some of Nicole Brown Simpson’s blood on O.J. Simpson’s socks, which were recovered from the foot of his bed. Scheck asserted that Mark Fuhrman had planted Ron Goldman’s blood in O.J.’s Bronco-though not the way Bailey had contended. Unlike Bailey, who had asserted Fuhrman used the second glove like a paintbrush in the car, Scheck suggested that Goldman’s blood simply rubbed off as Fuhrman was illegally rooting around inside Simpson’s car while it was parked outside Rockingham in the early morning hours of June 13. As with the blood on the rear gate at Bundy, Scheck was able to tease some evidentiary support for each of these hypotheses. With the exception of Fuhrman, Scheck never named the perpetrators of these misdeeds, nor did he explain how or why so many disparate people-which would include, at a minimum, Fuhrman, Vannatter, Lange, Fung, Mazzola, and two other LAPD criminalists, Collin Yamauchi and Michele Kestler-undertook this massive conspiracy. Still, Scheck’s arguments amounted to more than mere conjecture, and he made them earnestly and with zeal.

Fung ultimately spent nine days on the witness stand, and his departure from it prompted one of the more bizarre scenes of the trial. By the end of his ordeal, Fung’s pitiful appearance served as the best argument that he was no conspirator. Even if Fung had wanted to frame Simpson, he was clearly so hapless that he didn’t seem up to the task. As Fung was ready to step down, Scheck thanked him twice. Fung walked by the prosecution table, where Darden gave him a halfhearted handshake. When he reached the defense table, Fung was greeted like a hero. Johnnie Cochran grasped his hand. Shapiro enveloped Fung in a bear hug. Then O.J. Simpson reached out and gave Fung a big smile and a handshake-all this for a man who, Scheck contended, had lied to cover up his involvement in a scheme to frame a man for murder. (Courtroom-security rules prohibit defendants from making such gestures, but the bailiffs, like everyone else, were too stunned to intervene.)

In its way, the defense team’s hearty farewell to Fung displayed a kind of sportsmanship to a vanquished adversary. It is possible to read something more sinister, however. At a minimum, Shapiro, Cochran, and Simpson himself knew how absurd the idea was that Simpson had been framed for this crime. But because of Fung’s abysmal performance (and Goldberg’s inferior preparation of him), that idea had achieved some currency in front of the jury. No wonder the defense wanted to thank him.

Andrea Mazzola followed her boss to the stand, and endured a similar-though not so disastrous-ordeal. A shy and ingenuous young woman with an apparently sincere passion for forensics, Mazzola did admit making a few minor errors in handling the evidence-not changing gloves frequently enough and things like that. But Peter Neufeld’s sneering cross-examination made no progress in portraying her as a member of some grand conspiracy. Mazzola lingered on the stand for more than a week, which meant that the prosecution presented only two witnesses-Fung and Mazzola-in the entire month of April.

What followed should have been the highlight of the prosecution’s case-the presentation of the results of the DNA testing. Garcetti had recruited two of the top DNA prosecutors in the state to present this portion of the evidence, Rockne Harmon from Oakland, and Woody Clarke from San Diego. Earlier in the case, these two had offered to step aside and let one of the local prosecutors handle the evidence in front of the jury. But, facing too many witnesses in too little time and also wanting to share the limelight, Marcia Clark had let Rockne and Woody handle it. The result, probably inevitably, was that this part of the case expanded. When Woody Clarke put on Robin Cotton, the laboratory director at Cellmark, the private DNA operation in Maryland that did much of the testing in the case, Clarke spent a full day and a half just on introducing the technology to the jury. (In a subsequent trial, shortly after Simpson’s, Cotton began giving DNA results after just one hour of preliminaries.) Attempting to be thorough, Woody Clarke made the subject boring and incomprehensible, especially to an uneducated jury.

Still, the results of the more precise RFLP type of DNA testing were striking. For one of the blood drops on the path at Bundy, the odds were 1 in 170 million that it came from anyone other than Simpson. For the blood on the socks found in Simpson’s bedroom, the odds were 1 in 6.8 billion that they came from anyone other than Nicole Brown Simpson. (There are about 5 billion people on earth.) The results from the less exact PCR tests were less impressive only because of the overwhelming numbers from the RFLP testing. (The PCR odds in the blood evidence mostly came back as one in several thousand.)

In every one of several dozen tests, the DNA results matched the prosecution’s theory of the case: O.J.’s blood to the left of the bloody shoe prints at Bundy; Ron Goldman’s blood in the Bronco and on the bloody glove found at Rockingham; O.J.’s blood again in the foyer of his home on Rockingham. In the case on which Marcia Clark and Phil Vannatter had first worked together, they had won a conviction based on a single fingernail-size drop of blood found in a car truck. The Simpson case, in contrast, probably featured more DNA evidence than any criminal trial in American history.

But the possibility of evidence planting cast a pall over all of these prosecution numbers, impressive as they were. If police had swabbed Simpson’s and the victims’ blood at the crime scenes, then of course the numbers would be overwhelming. It was Barry Scheck who succeeded in undermining the significance of this evidence for the jury.

Whatever the jury may have thought, the DNA testimony had a shattering impact among O.J. Simpson’s wealthy friends in West Los Angeles. At this stage of the trial, his most prized supporters melted away-among them Allen Schwartz, a clothing wholesaler and probably O.J.’s closest friend in Brentwood, and Alan Austin, a boutique owner and O.J.’s most frequent golfing partner. Now they finally knew what they didn’t want to know-that O.J. had killed Nicole, whom many of these men had grown to care for over the years. The DNA testimony shrank Simpson’s coterie of white friends to a lonely pair: Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC’s West Coast operations, and Craig Baumgarten, a movie producer.

It was perhaps because of this abandonment that O.J. Simpson, seemingly the only person in the courtroom to do so, took the DNA evidence so hard. As Robin Cotton or Gary Sims, the California Department of Justice DNA expert, gave their reports, Simpson greeted them with nervous monologues to Cochran or Shapiro or whoever happened to be seated next to him at the defense table. Usually impassive, Simpson greeted the enormous DNA numbers with scowls of derision. Though the jury had yet to speak, at this point Simpson knew with certainty that his former life was over. The friends, the hangers-on, the world of “being O.J.,” was now, clearly, gone forever.

The length and complexity of the DNA testimony pushed the trial toward a kind of giddy exhaustion. Though Ito had originally told jurors the case might end in February, the marathon now appeared headed well into the summer. The principals coped. During Fung’s testimony, Marcia Clark changed her perm to a more natural hairstyle-a much-admired transformation that landed her hairdresser on Oprah. Darden meanwhile seethed in quiet frustration, his distress compounded because his beloved older brother, Michael, a former drug addict, lay dying of AIDS near their hometown of Richmond. Every hour in court was time that could have been spent with him. Cochran, cheerful as always, read his office mail as the other lawyers droned.

Ito floundered. Courtroom discipline fluctuated according to the judge’s press clippings. When, as happened periodically, a big story in the Los Angeles Times or on one of the networks chided him for letting the case drag on, the judge would snap to attention for a day or two, refusing to hold sidebars and generally pushing things along. His resolve would then fade until the next critical story. After Newsweek put Ito’s picture on the cover under the headline WHAT A MESS, the judge lashed back at the press by permanently evicting two reporters from the courtroom, ostensibly for talking. Gale Holland of USA Today and Kristin Jeannette-Meyers of Court TV paid the price for Ito’s pique. When The New York Times published a hostile editorial entitled “Bankers’ Hours for the O.J. Case?” Ito lengthened the court day. Fundamentally, though, nothing much changed.

The families of the victims dealt with the stress in strikingly different manners. For many months, the Goldman family simply bore witness at the trial and said little in public. Denise Brown used the occasion of the trial to embrace the cause of domestic violence. She and her family created the Nicole Brown Simpson Charitable Foundation, devoted to the issue of spousal abuse. It was launched at a press conference at the Rainbow Room in New York, sponsored by No Excuses sportswear, best known previously for some scandal-scarred spokeswomen, among them Donna Rice, Marla Maples, and Paula Jones. As the first president of the foundation, the Brown family named Jeff C. Noebel, a forty-year-old Dallas businessman who was awaiting sentencing for lying to federal authorities in a savings-and-loan scam and who had been named in a domestic-violence restraining order for posing a “clear and present danger” to his estranged wife and two children. (Noebel stepped down when these facts about his past became public.)