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

EPILOGUE: “NOW I CAN TELL YOU”

Larry Schiller, literary entrepreneur, had laid careful plans to cash in quickly on an acquittal. Within an hour of the verdict, Simpson was driven in a white van from downtown to his home in Brentwood. He was accompanied by Robert Kardashian, Schiller, and Schiller’s camera.

Schiller and his girlfriend, Kathy Amermann, had both worked as photographers over the years, and Schiller knew that exclusive photographs of the victory party would command a hefty price. In the weeks before the verdict, Schiller arranged to sell first rights to the photos to the supermarket tabloid Star for a six-figure sum. (Simpson and Schiller split the proceeds, and the photographs bore the copyright marks of both of their companies-Orenthal Productions and Polaris Communications.)

The verdict came on a Tuesday, which was the Star’s weekly deadline, but the resourceful Schiller had made contingency plans so the pictures could make it into the next issue. While the jury was deliberating, Schiller had converted the garage at Simpson’s home into a photo developing lab and turned the maid’s room into a satellite transmission center. All during the evening after the verdict, as friends and family joined Simpson to toast his freedom, Schiller and Amermann snapped dozens of photos, hurriedly developed them in the garage, then transmitted them to the Star from Gigi Guarin’s old quarters. The following morning, Schiller sent a CD-ROM full of party photographs on a plane to Germany. The Schiller-Simpson joint venture had sold those for an additional fee to the weekly Stern.

It was a rather quiet celebration at Rockingham that evening. The small, dedicated group who had stood by Simpson throughout the long trial all paid their respects. There was his family, of course, presided over by his mother and two sisters, as well as his older children, Jason and Arnelle. A. C. Cowlings was there, as was Skip Taft, Simpson’s business manager. Most striking were the absences-the golfing buddies, Nicole’s friends, the dozens of pals who used to attend Simpson’s annual Fourth of July bash at the house. They had all chosen the other side in this case. Those guests who did come gathered around a piano and sang hymns. Simpson mostly stayed in his bedroom, receiving guests in small groups. Only one person stayed by Simpson’s side the entire evening. That was Peter Burt, a reporter for the Star, whose presence was part of Schiller’s deal with the magazine.

After the party, it was Schiller who did not leave Simpson’s side. With his camera at the ready, Schiller followed O.J. for the next several days, documenting his life for the resale market. On October 6, three days after the verdict, Schiller’s literary agent, Ike Williams, faxed a letter to book publishers offering a sequel to I Want to Tell You. Williams said this next book, to be entitled Now I Can Tell You, would be “O.J. Simpson’s first person account of the trial from his arrest to the not-guilty verdict and his reunion with his family.” Like the first book, this one would be “organized and edited by Larry Schiller,” but there would be an additional bonus: The Schiller-Simpson joint venture was also offering Schiller’s “original and unique” photographs of Simpson’s reunion with Sydney and Justin Simpson, which took place on October 4.

However, these literary ventures paled in comparison to the top priority of Simpson’s financial team in the wake of the verdict. All through the summer of 1995, Skip Taft and Larry King had engaged in detailed negotiations about a pay-per-view special following the verdict. The two-hour program was to feature King interviewing Simpson live, as well as phone calls from viewers. (It was to take place whether Simpson was acquitted or convicted, but not if the trial ended in a hung jury.) Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of Cable News Network, would buy the rights from Simpson for $25 million. In lieu of a fee for himself, King would arrange for about $1 million of the money to go to his favorite charity, the Cardiac Foundation. Simpson would receive about $4 million personally. According to King and Taft’s arrangement, the balance of the money-more than $15 million, after expenses-would go to establish a network of “O.J. Simpson Boys Clubs” in cities across America.

The photographs of the victory party ran as scheduled in the Star and Stern, but none of the other schemes came to fruition. There has been no sequel to I Want to Tell You. As soon as word leaked out to the public that Larry King was even considering participating in a pay-per-view interview with Simpson, executives at CNN’s parent company announced that no such project would take place. Simpson’s prospects for any pay-per-view appearance vanished completely when cable-system operators across the country said they would refuse to distribute any broadcast that would enrich the former defendant. The darkly comic notion of “O.J. Simpson Boys Clubs” never materialized.

All of these projects fell victim to the enormous backlash against the verdict in mainstream-that is, white-America. Because of television, the announcement of the verdict became a nationally shared experience-one on par, incredibly, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In the days immediately after the end of the case in court, televised images of the verdict itself yielded to images of people watching the verdict. The pictures revealed many scenes of African-Americans cheering the verdict, from college campuses to battered women’s shelters. White viewers, by contrast, watched in stunned, generally appalled, silence. Reaction to the verdict was promptly replaced by reaction to the reaction, and then reaction to that reaction and so on, which is to say, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., observed, “black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson’s acquittal.” The passing months did not so much heal the wounds in race relations as witness the growth of an ugly scar.

Assessing the “meaning” of the Simpson case became, and remains, a cottage industry. But in evaluating that legacy, it is useful, even necessary, to return to the underlying events-that is, to what happened outside Nicole Brown Simpson’s condominium on the night of June 12, 1994. The Simpson case was never some free-floating set of ideas ripe for any number of equally valid interpretations. The case emerged from a set of facts, and those facts matter.

As to the central fact in the case, it is my view that Simpson murdered his ex-wife and her friend on June 12. Any rational analysis of the events and evidence in question leads to that conclusion. This is true whether one considers evidence not presented to the jury-such as the results of Simpson’s polygraph examination and his flight with Al Cowlings on June 17-or just the evidence established in court. Notwithstanding the prosecution’s many errors, the evidence against Simpson at the trial was overwhelming. Simpson had a violent relationship with his ex-wife, and tensions between them were growing in the weeks leading up to the murders. Simpson had no alibi for the time of the murders, nor was his Bronco parked at his home during that time. Simpson had a cut on his left hand on the day after the murders, and DNA tests showed conclusively that it was Simpson’s blood to the left of the shoe prints leaving the scene. Nicole’s blood was found on a sock in his bedroom, and Goldman’s blood-as well as Simpson’s-was found in the Bronco. Hair consistent with Simpson’s was found on the killer’s cap and on Goldman’s shirt. The gloves that Nicole bought for Simpson in 1990 were almost certainly the ones used by her killer.

It is theoretically possible, of course, that Simpson killed the two victims and that the police also planted evidence against him-that he was guilty and framed. But I am convinced that did not happen, and that it could not have happened. In their summations, Cochran and Scheck suggested that the police, in their effort to frame Simpson, planted at least the following items: (1) Simpson’s blood on the rear gate at Bundy; (2) Goldman’s blood in Simpson’s Bronco; (3) Nicole’s blood on the sock found in his bedroom; (4) Simpson’s blood on the same sock; and (5) the infamous glove at Rockingham, which had, as Clark put it in her summation, “all of the evidence on it: Ron Goldman’s fibers from his shirt; Ron Goldman’s hair; Nicole’s hair; the defendant’s blood; Ron Goldman’s blood; Nicole’s blood; and the Bronco fiber.” The defense never spelled out how all this nefarious activity took place, but pulling it off would have required more or less the following. The core of the defense case was, of course, that Fuhrman surreptitiously took that glove from the murder scene to the defendant’s home. Not only would he have had to transport the glove with its residue of the crime scene, but he would also have had to find some of Simpson’s blood (from sources unknown) to deposit upon it and then wipe the glove on the inside of Simpson’s locked car (by means unknown)-all the while not knowing whether Simpson had an ironclad alibi for the time of the murders. To me, this possibility is simply not believable, even taking into consideration Fuhrman’s repugnant racial views.

The other police conspirators (conspicuously unnamed by the defense) would have had to be equally adept and even more determined. Many of the police officers at the crime scene noticed the blood on the back gate at Bundy; someone would have had to wipe that off and apply Simpson’s. The autopsies, where blood samples were taken from the victims, were not performed until June 14, more than a full day after the murders. Someone would have had to take some of Goldman’s blood and put it in the Bronco, which was then in police custody. And someone (the same person? another?) would have had to take some of Nicole’s blood and dab it on the sock, which was then in a police evidence lab. (When Vannatter took his notorious trip to Brentwood with the blood vial, he only had Simpson’s sample, not Nicole’s, with him.) All of these illegal actions by the police would have had to take place at a time when everyone involved in the case was under the most relentless media scrutiny in American legal history-and all for the benefit of an unknown killer who, like only 9 percent of the population, happened to share Simpson’s shoe size, twelve.

In their comments after the trial, the jurors gamely tried to defend their verdict, insisting that it was based on the evidence, not mere racial solidarity. Brenda Moran and Yolanda Crawford believed that the glove demonstration doomed the government’s case. “In plain English, the glove didn’t fit,” Moran said. Gina Rosborough said, “I believed from the beginning that he was innocent,” and the course of the trial confirmed her view. Sheila Woods decried the sloppy lab procedures of the LAPD. Lon Cryer was concerned about evidence contamination and rejected Allan Park’s testimony because he was mistaken about the number of cars in the driveway. As for why he gave Simpson a raised-fist salute at the end of the trial, Cryer said, “It was like a ‘Right on to you, Mr. Simpson. Get on with your life. Get your kids. Be happy. Get some closure in your life.’ ” The three jurors who wrote a joint book about the case-Armanda Cooley, Carrie Bess, and Marsha Rubin-Jackson-attributed the decision to a combination of these factors. Anise Aschenbach, the white juror who initially voted for a conviction, asserted with some sadness that she might have fought on if she had felt any possibility of support from her colleagues. In any event, Aschenbach was deeply troubled by the testimony of Mark Fuhrman and the evidence of his racial views.

All the black jurors denied that race played any role at all in their deliberations or their decision. To me, this is implausible. The perfunctory review of nine months’ worth of evidence; the focus on tangential, if not actually irrelevant, parts of that evidence; the simply incorrect view of other evidence; and the constant focus on racial issues both inside and outside the courtroom-all these factors lead me to conclude that race played a far larger role in the verdict than the jurors conceded. As Carrie Bess indicated in her unguarded words after the verdict, they were protecting their own. This is not especially unusual. For better or worse, American jurors have a long and still-flourishing tradition of both taking race into account in making their decisions and denying that they are doing any such thing. The ten whites, one Asian, and one Latino in Simi Valley who in 1992 acquitted the LAPD officers in the Rodney King case denied that race factored into their decisions; so did the ten black and two white jurors who in 1990 acquitted Washington mayor Marion Barry of all but one of the fourteen narcotics charges against him. In 1955, the two white men charged with murdering Emmett Till were acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury after about an hour of deliberations. A spokesman for the jurors attributed their decision to “the belief that there had been no identification of the dead body as that of Emmett Till.” Nor is this phenomenon limited to celebrated cases. In the borough of the Bronx in New York City, where juries are more than 80 percent black and Hispanic, black defendants are acquitted in felony cases 47.6 percent of the time, which is about three times the national acquittal rate of 17 percent for defendants of all races. In these cases, among these jurors, race mattered-and so it was with the Simpson jurors, too.

That race continues to count for so much with African-American jurors should come as no great surprise. Racism in law enforcement has persisted through many decades of American life, and black citizens, and thus black jurors, have stored too many insults for too long. The police in general, and the LAPD in particular, reap what they sow. But the genuine grievances that have led to a tradition of black hostility to officialdom have, in turn, fostered a mode of conspiratorial thinking that outstrips reality. An Emory University study of 1,000 black churchgoers in five major cities in 1990 found that more than a third believed that HIV was a form of genocide propagated by white scientists, a theory shared by 40 percent of African-American college students in Washington, D.C. Understanding the roots of these beliefs should not mean endorsing them. To do so is merely patronizing, a condescending pat on the head to those incapable of recognizing reality. Better, rather, to hold everyone to the same standards, and better, likewise, to speak the truth: Whites didn’t concoct HIV-and O.J. Simpson wasn’t innocent.

The backlash against both the jury and Simpson himself was accelerated by Robert Shapiro, who, as was his custom, put his interests ahead of his client’s in the immediate aftermath of the verdict. Shapiro left the courthouse on October 3 and traveled to an ABC studio, where he gave a long-promised interview to Barbara Walters. In their conversation, an obviously bitter and angry Shapiro said of the defense effort in the case, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.” He remarked further that henceforth, he would neither speak to Bailey nor work with Cochran. Shapiro’s remark about the race card was featured prominently in the following day’s news stories about the verdict.

Shapiro’s conduct was shameful on several levels. His disgust about the “race card” was, first, intellectually dishonest, because it was Shapiro himself who had constructed Simpson’s race-based courtroom and media defense in the first place. Second, his statement helped cement the public impression that his client was acquitted because of the jurors’ racial sympathies, not because of his innocence, thus virtually guaranteeing that Simpson would have no chance to reestablish anything like his normal life. In my view, Shapiro’s analysis of the case was more or less correct, but Simpson had a right to expect that his own lawyer would not portray the case, in substance, as the story of a murderer who got away with it. Finally, Shapiro trivialized the work of his colleagues Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who had constructed a serious forensic and nonracial defense in the case.

None of this mattered more to Shapiro than the opportunity to reingratiate himself with the West Los Angeles world that meant everything to him. After the Walters interview, Shapiro called his old friend Larry Feldman, the lawyer who had defended him in Mark Fuhrman’s libel suit. Shapiro boasted that he had just told Walters that the defense team had played the race card from the bottom of the deck. “You’re kidding,” an appalled Feldman told him. “No, really,” said Shapiro, who then broke into self-satisfied laughter.

Notwithstanding the fame and, in some instances, fortune that the case brought them, most of the major participants now regard their experience with considerable bitterness. The most bizarre postscript to the case concerns F. Lee Bailey. In 1994, Shapiro and Bailey shared another client besides O.J. Simpson: Claude Duboc, one of the biggest marijuana dealers in the world. As part of a plea bargain in northern Florida, arranged the month before the murders on Bundy Drive, Duboc agreed to turn over virtually all of his assets to the United States government. Among them were shares in a Canadian company called BioChem Pharma, worth about $6 million at the time of the plea bargain. Also at that time, Duboc believed those shares were likely to appreciate greatly in value, so the prosecutors agreed that Bailey would hold on to the stock for the months until Duboc was formally sentenced.

Two years later, after the verdict in the Simpson case, the value of Duboc’s stock had risen by more than $20 million, and Bailey told the prosecutors in Florida that he believed the appreciated portion of the stock assets belonged to him, not the federal government. The deal was never put in writing, so the judge held a hearing in February 1996 to determine the terms of the stock arrangements. The lead witness for the government was Robert Shapiro. He testified that he understood the agreement to hold that the United States, not Bailey, was entitled to the appreciated portion of the stock assets. When Bailey did not produce the stock certificates or the equivalent in cash, the judge threw the sixty-two-year-old lawyer in jail.

Bailey served forty-four days in the federal detention center in Tallahassee. He was released on April 19, only after pledging virtually all of his assets in collateral. However, after a month of living with this nearly impossible financial bind, Bailey gave up his claim to the stock. This financial imbroglio, of course, only intensified the enmity between Shapiro and Bailey. Bailey rages with little prompting at what he regards as Shapiro’s betrayal. The cooler Shapiro merely notes that he plans never again to speak with Bailey. He has told friends with a smile, however, that he paid his own way to Florida to testify against Bailey.

Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld returned to New York after the Simpson trial. They found that their celebrity from the case had not translated into financial support for their Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to free wrongfully convicted prisoners. When they mentioned to Shapiro the possibility of a Los Angeles fund-raiser for the project, he told them glumly, and probably accurately, “No Jew will give you a dime in this town.” The two New Yorkers have also developed the informal specialty of vetting the books on the case written by members of Simpson’s defense team. In early 1996, they reacted with shock to a draft of Shapiro’s volume, The Search for Justice, for it repeatedly violated the attorney-client privilege by quoting conversations with Simpson without his consent. When they passed along their concerns to the author, Shapiro didn’t change the substance of the book-but he did add Scheck and Neufeld to the list of former colleagues with whom he no longer speaks.

Alone among the defense lawyers, Johnnie Cochran thrives. The week after the verdict, Cochran appeared as a national spokesman on civil rights on Meet the Press, and in subsequent months he traveled the nation and the world giving speeches. His legal practice is booming. He is completing a book that is more an autobiography than an account of the Simpson trial. The working title comes from a phrase he used in his summation to describe the Simpson trial: Journey to Justice.

Lance Ito conducted his next criminal trial the week after the Simpson case ended. He has never commented publicly on the verdict, but friends report that he knows the Simpson trial did not enhance his reputation. His second most noteworthy trial had a sour postscript as well. On April 4, 1996, a federal judge in Los Angeles overturned the state conviction of financier Charles Keating on the ground that Ito had erroneously instructed the jury.

After the verdict, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden both took leaves of absence from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. Neither is expected to return. Darden wrote a successful book on the trial and will shortly begin a new job as a professor at the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. He will teach courtroom skills. His brother Michael died of AIDS on November 29, 1995.

Clark’s career plans are uncertain. Since the trial, she has given a series of speeches around the United States and Canada and has worked on her own book, for which she received an advance of more than $4 million. It is believed to be the third largest advance in the history of nonfiction publishing, surpassed only by those received by Colin Powell and H. Norman Schwarzkopf. On November 12, 1995, her father left a message on Marcia’s answering machine that her ninety-five-year-old grandfather, Pinchas Kleks, had died in Israel. She did not return the call.

O.J. Simpson still lives at 360 North Rockingham in Brentwood. Every other weekend, he sees his children Sydney and Justin, who reside with Nicole’s parents, but he has not sought primary custody of them. He spends much of his time preparing for the civil suit filed against him by Nicole’s and Goldman’s heirs, a case that is expected to go to trial in the fall of 1996. His principal commercial venture since the trial, a two-hour videotaped interview with him about the murders, was a commercial failure. At $19.95 each, it sold fewer than 40,000 copies, netting Simpson about $100,000. His contracts with Hertz and NBC were not renewed. He plays golf occasionally, but never at his former home course, the Riviera Country Club. (Though he was never formally evicted from the club, members of its governing board informed Skip Taft that Simpson was no longer welcome there.) Simpson sees few of his friends from before the murders, but he does socialize with several of the sheriff’s deputies who guarded him in jail. Simpson tells them he remains confident that, in time, he will be able to resume his former career of being O.J.