Without a Doubt

Fever

There were times I could have drowned Suzanne Childs in a gunnysack. This was usually when the D.A.‘s media relations adviser ignored the signs on my door reading “Leave Me Alone!” and “Go See Patti Jo” and bustled in with her handful of message slips.

“Well, CBS wants…”

“Suzanne!” I cut her off. “I don’t have time for this.”

I didn’t mean to give her a hard time. It wasn’t her fault that she was the bearer of unwelcome tidings.

Actually, I depended on Suzanne a lot, and considered her a great friend. She’s a beauty-tall, thin, and laced with nervous energy. During the seventies she had been a weekend anchorwoman on the local CBS affiliate. She’d also been married to Michael Crichton. That was before he was such a big deal. Their marriage ended in a rather public divorce. As a result, Suzanne knew what it was like to be a much-stared-at single woman in L.A. I think that’s why she took pity on me.

I had no personal life to speak of. Except for the nights when there were other arrangements at home, I usually left the office in time for dinner. Then, after the house was quiet and the toys all put away, I’d burrow in to the makeshift office in my bedroom. We’d started this case off-balance, and because of the defendant’s insistence upon a speedy trial, we never really had a chance to take a breather. We were like greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.

Beaten down though I was by my workload, I felt I should take at least a baby step toward an actual life. I’d spread the word among my friends and associates that I wouldn’t mind going out on a date, if anyone knew of a moderately intelligent, heterosexual male. In other words, I was available.

One day, when I came back from court feeling whipped, Suzanne met me in the hall and gave me the once-over. (After two months, the “makeover” she had supervised was already beginning to fade.)

“You should get out a little,” she told me.

“Great idea, Suzanne. Could you get me a life, maybe a few extra hours in a day?”

“I could get you invited to a party,” she told me. It was at the home of some director-I didn’t recognize the name. “It’s a little get-together. About ten people. You could go right from work.”

Suzanne gave me the address, which was in Beverly Hills. I found myself driving north of Sunset, deeper and deeper into the heart of mansion country. I was about to run into some serious glitter. Me, in my believe-me suit, driving a Nissan. The window on the driver’s side still wouldn’t work and it looked like it was going to rain. I pulled my little Maxima into a huge open drive and parked it next to a Mercedes. The only other car as crappy as mine was a county-issue Ford Taurus. I knew that Suzanne had arrived.

My God, what a place! A white-pillared entryway framed a pair of huge double oak doors. I’d barely rung the bell when it was answered by a butler in full livery. Behind him stood the host, who pumped my hand warmly and introduced himself as Ray Stark. Over the course of the evening, I came to realize that he was a big-deal producer, something I probably would have known right away if I hadn’t had my head stuck inside of law books and autopsy reports for the past ten years. This little dinner party was also a private screening of Legends of the Fall.

Suzanne took me by the elbow for a quick turn around the place, past a wall of windows that looked out onto a yard of marble statues and topiary. Then, into the screening room. At the rear was a wet bar with all kinds of fancy chocolates set out in silver serving dishes. As we moved, Suzanne made easy introductions to some celebs and semicelebs. God, I couldn’t believe it-there was Kirk Douglas. To my amazement, Kirk (May I call you Kirk?) turned to me and said, “I’m such a big fan of yours.” And I’m like, “I’ve been watching your movies since I was a kid.”

The irony did not escape me. Suppose I’d stuck to acting. About now I’d be an aging bit player, who would have given up what was left of her virtue to be invited to a party like this. But here I was. And Kirk Douglas was angling to meet me! I felt like I’d been dropped onto another planet. There was David Geffen on my left, Kirk D. on my right, Ron Meyer on one end of the table, and Betsy Bloomingdale on the other.

The best part of it was that someone, probably Suzanne, had spread the word that the Case was off-limits for cocktail chat. An O.J.-free zone! Everyone was very cool about it. I’ve discovered since that the one advantage of mingling with the glitterati is that they’ve all had to wage their own battles against tabloid headlines. They observe a sort of gentlemen’s agreement with respect to one another’s privacy.

Ray Stark made sure I was introduced to Alan Greisman, who, I learned, had been head of Savoy Pictures and was the former husband of Sally Field. He was also handsome, and apparently available. He asked me out, which probably took some guts considering all this bullshit mystique that now surrounded me. Now, I still thought I could date like any other soon-to-be-divorced mother of two. Obviously clueless. The following item appeared a few weeks down the line in a New York tabloid:

Transformed by her new hair-do, Marcia Clark at 41 has finally emerged outside the O.J. courtroom as a veritable siren, and with her new softer, prettier looks, the prosecutor in the Trial of the Century has even managed to find romance amid her grinding schedule.

According to sources, Clark has recently linked up with actress Sally Field’s ex-hubby, Alan Greisman, through mutual friends… “They have been lovey-dovey all over Los Angeles,” says a source. “I don’t think they even attempt to keep their relationship a secret; they are dining out most nights.”

In fact, Alan and I had only one date. I met him for dinner at a little Italian place in Beverly Hills. We talked for most of the evening about divorce. And by the dessert course I knew that nothing could come of it. Alan was intelligent and charming, but he ran with a flashier crowd than I thought I could handle, at least with the Simpson case on my hands. We parted amiably, without having managed to see any part of Los Angeles together beyond the inside of a restaurant.

I made a couple of other stabs at dating. A friend of a friend introduced me to a single guy she knew. He turned out to know Fred Goldman, but he seemed to enjoy no other claim to fame. Hmmm, I’m thinking. This one’s a good bet, not a fast-laner, not wired to the media. I think I saw him twice; it was barely a friendship. But then one of the tabs found out that we knew each other and asked him if there was a romantic relationship there. He didn’t confirm it; but he didn’t deny it, which seemed dishonest to me.

After that I pulled in my antennae. I was safer with my own kind. From November until the verdict came in twelve months later, I limited my social life to late nights with my co-workers.

CAR TAPE. November 17. I don’t feel like I ever get more than four hours’ sleep, constantly fighting this cough and this cold. I have not a minute to myself. If I’m not working, I’m with the kids. If I’m not with the kids, I’m working…

I don’t really feel very good about our chances in this case, I just don’t think we can get the jury to get over their emotional response to seeing their hero being taken down for this, and the evidence is so compelling. I don’t feel like it’s gonna matter. I feel like I’m going to be standing up there talking to myself, you know?…

But Chris Darden, boy. I pat myself on the back all day long for putting him on the case. What a gem. What a gem! The guy is smart, resourceful, creative, got lots of energy-because he hasn’t been beat up like we have all this time. I’ll give him a little time in front of this twelve-headed monster, and he’ll get tired and beat up too. But he’s wonderful…

Thank God for Chris Darden.

As far as the public and the press knew, Chris Darden joined the team in early November. In fact, he’d been working with us behind the scenes for more than three months.

As I look back on it, I find it amazing that I didn’t think of Chris when I was first drawing up that short list of D.A.s to partner with. He hadn’t even occurred to me. That’s because you tend to think of the people right under your nose. Chris was down on the seventeenth floor in SID.

Eight years earlier, he and I had worked together in calendar court. We had a lot in common. Like me, he was a hard charger, ambitious, tenacious. Back then, after work, Chris and I and a handful of other deputies would all take out the bottles from our respective desk drawers, down a couple of shots, and swap war stories into the night. Then we’d be up early the next morning, ready to charge all over again. During the years since calendar court, Chris and I had gone our separate ways: I to Special Trials; he to the SID, where he handled complaints against cops. We’d see each other from time to time in the courthouse and we’d laugh and joke and talk about the old days.

One summer morning soon after the preliminary hearings, he stuck his head into my office unannounced.

“Hey, Clark,” he hailed me. “Any time for the working class?”

It took me a minute to focus. Cool shaved head. Malcolm X fuzz.

“Chris! C’mon in, man!”

He seemed relieved that I’d recognized him. By the time he took the chair he was having trouble making eye contact. Chris always did have trouble making eye contact. Not just with me, but with judges and juries. Down deep, he is a very shy guy.

Chris gave a detailed account of our reunion in his excellent memoir, In Contempt. He recalled me in a dense cloud of my own cigarette smoke, at a desk fit for a CEO. “She leaned back in her huge brown leather executive chair with the diamond tuck in the back, a chair twice her size, clearly not standard county-issue.”

When I read this, I nearly doubled over laughing. You’d think he was talking about some spike-heeled dame from a film noir. That “brown leather executive chair,” as a matter of fact, was just a ratty old armchair that I’d found some years earlier sitting in a hallway. Some departing Grade 3 had apparently discarded it. It was huge. It was so huge, in fact, that I could actually curl up in it and catch a few winks. Unfortunately, it was infested with termites, and every time I shifted my weight, it emitted a cloud of sawdust-which probably accounts for the haze Chris saw hanging over me that morning in July.

Finally he looked at me.

“I thought you should know the L.A. Times has filed a public records request on Fuhrman.” He slid a file across my desk.

The case was old, 1987. It involved a robbery suspect named Joseph Britton who was fleeing an automated teller machine when he was shot by a couple of police officers. One of them was Mark Fuhrman. Britton sued the city, claiming that one of the two officers had called him a “nigger” and then planted evidence on him.

The problems with Fuhrman just kept on coming. I’d gotten the documents from that disability case Mark had filed against the city in August 1983. It appeared to me that he’d put on quite a show for his psychiatrists. He’d claimed to be suffering from stress growing out of his service in Vietnam (though he hadn’t seen any action), as well as his years going head-to-head with gang bangers. All of this, it appeared, was exacerbated by the strains of his divorce. Yet his job ratings were generally high. No way, I thought, was any judge going to let a cop’s psychiatric reports into the record. But we’d surely have to litigate it. I knew the defense would pull out all the stops trying to get them in.

Now a lawsuit?

“We checked it out,” Chris reassured me. “Rejected for prosecution.”

That was acceptable damage. Every officer has complaints in his file. If he’s out there in the neighborhood making arrests, somebody’s going to try and sue to get the city to fork over a few bucks in a settlement. If SID had investigated and rejected the complaint, that was good enough for me.

“And the public records request?” I asked him.

“The L.A. Times has a right to get the file in ten days. I’ll probably give it to them on day nine and a half.”

Totally on top of things. I really liked this guy.

I knew that Chris had solid ties to the ‘hood. He also knew Downtown juries. I wanted his opinion on Fuhrman.

“Everybody’s going nuts on this planting thing,” I told him. “What do you think?”

Chris was silent for a moment.

“Well, people in the ‘hood think he [Simpson] was framed,” he said finally.

“Well, what do you think?”

“I doubt it,” came his reply.

Chris knew cops. He investigated them on a regular basis. He could tell a legitimate complaint from a fairy tale. The kind of elaborate evidence-planting and conspiracy that the defense was suggesting just didn’t ring true.

“Black people won’t want to convict Simpson,” Chris warned me. “But if you’ve got the evidence, you can overcome that. You’ll make it.”

I found that reassuring.

After he’d left my office, it dawned on me. “My God… Chris! Why didn’t I think of it before? He’d be perfect to handle Cowlings.”

Since the day after the Bronco chase, we’d had A. C. Cowlings under charges for aiding and abetting a fugitive. Gil and the brass had talked it over and decided the best way to investigate him would be through a separate grand jury. This would have to be handled with great sensitivity because the law strictly prohibits the district attorney from using evidence gathered from one grand jury to assist in the investigation of a case already filed. It’s called “commingling.”

There were other complications. Whoever took the assignment would have to be prepared to subpoena Simpson’s own attorneys, at least two of whom had been present in the house from which he’d escaped. It meant we had to give Cowlings to someone who was strong enough to push through an investigation in the face of monumental stonewalling.

Chris would be perfect. He was tough and tenacious and he seemed eager for the action. We knew, even at this point, that the Simpson case was shaping up to be the biggest one ever tried by our office. You couldn’t blame a deputy for wanting to be part of it. The beauty of Cowlings, from Chris’s perspective, was that it was a limited engagement. He could be a member of the team in an important but low-profile part of the case. And as soon as it was over, he’d get his life back.

And so, in late July 1994, Chris took over the Cowlings investigation, which, as I had predicted, turned out to be the ultimate dead end. Cooperative witnesses were almost impossible to find. Simpson’s personal assistant, Cathy Randa, had shredded documents pertaining to domestic violence. She sure as hell wasn’t talkin’. Paula Barbieri appeared before the grand jury wearing a prim, high-buttoned shirt with a cross dangling from her neck, and wouldn’t even own up to being Simpson’s girlfriend. Robert Kardashian, Simpson’s wealthy pal, who hadn’t practiced law for years, ducked each of Chris’s queries about Simpson’s departure from his house with a smug “That’s privileged.” O. J. Simpson’s cadre of loyalists had closed ranks tightly around him.

When it became clear that we weren’t going to have enough evidence to indict, we thanked the jury and sent them home. I was left with a clear conscience. Chris and the D.A. investigators had gone to extraordinary lengths pursuing leads. Later, Chris regaled us with tales of these exploits. His favorite concerned a trip he and two investigators had made to the Bahamas in search of the Miss Turnbury. She was a yacht that supposedly figured in one of the Simpson escape scenarios. What Chris had hoped would be an exotic trek to paradise turned into the junket from hell. Mosquitoes the size of bats, inflated tourist prices, five bucks for a bottle of beer, a hundred bucks for dinner. And, of course, nothing but dead ends on the investigation. Each time he told that story it got funnier: the mosquitoes got larger, the price of beer rose to ten dollars a bottle. Chris made me laugh until the tears ran down my cheeks. I hated the idea of letting him go.

Bill and I had been talking about bringing on another attorney as a special “case manager.” Someone to coordinate the work of the law clerks and junior deputies who were being assigned to do research for us. Even before we dismissed the charges against Cowlings in early November, I called Chris into my office to make him a proposition.

“Bill and I are so balled up arguing these stupid motions that we don’t have any time to do any of the organization,” I told him. “We don’t have the time to do any creative thinking. I guess what I’m saying is that I’d like you to be part of the first string.”

He looked down. Then he looked away. There were a few beats. I knew-or at least I thought I knew-what he was thinking: They need some color at that Clorox-white counsel table.

“I’d be honored,” he told me. It was a strangely formal reply. But Chris had a chivalrous streak, and I found that endearing.

It’s been said that we recruited Chris because he was black. But that isn’t true. At the time he popped his head in my door, we had no scouts out beating the bushes for minority talent. A good lawyer presented himself. I knew him. I trusted him. He happened to be black. Now, did I think his race would help us with a predominantly black jury? Possibly. But there was also a risk that those jurors might reject him as an Uncle Tom. At the very least, the D.A.‘s office would almost certainly be charged with race pandering. Sure enough, a day or so after Chris’s appointment was made public, Johnnie Cochran went around telling reporters that we’d hired ourselves a token black man. Even after the dirty tricks I’d seen him pull during the voir dire, I would still have believed Johnnie had more class than that.

To me, Chris’s race was a wash. My only thought was He’s strong. He’s smart. Can he handle the beating we’re gonna take? And I knew the answer: Yeah, he can.

I found Chris a cubicle in the middle of the Planning and Training Unit. I also handed him a big chunk of the case, a part that needed a lot of catch-up work.

Nicole and O. J. Simpson’s private life was still a mystery to me. We had police reports, but these were encoded in cop-speak, a militaristic argot that imparts no warmth, no human dimension to the events recounted. It seemed that no one could supply the key to the code. That is, until the publication of Faye Resnick’s book. I had let Faye slip through my fingers in the first go-round. Not this time. I told Chris to reel her in. No excuses. The evidence she’d been withholding was motive for murder.

I’m not sure what kind of tactics Chris used to flush Faye out of hiding in Vermont or wherever the hell she was holed up. I know he talked to her lawyer, who claimed that she was spooked over the sensation the book had caused. If we wanted her to come in to see us, he said, we’d have to assign her a security detail. I found this a little dramatic, particularly in light of the fact she’d invited her former boyfriend-an O.J. loyalist who was probably in contact with the Simpson camp-to her hotel room for a visit. What was the point of telling the enemy where you were and then asking for security?

Chris finally prevailed personally upon her publisher, Michael Viner, to bring Resnick in out of the cold. Viner’s motives, I suspected, were not solely to advance the interests of justice. Every time a witness marched out of the Criminal Courts Building, it was a big news day. That meant publicity for the book, the author, and the publisher. But I was willing to play this game if it would advance our cause.

They made quite a pair, Resnick and Viner. He was a pale, almost rabbinical-looking man. Faye, to my surprise, had metamorphosed from the trembling, fetal creature who’d visited my office three months earlier into a burnished vamp whose months in New England seemed actually to have enhanced her tan. She bore right down on me, all hugs and kisses, far more expansive and relaxed than during our first meeting. Maybe it was because she felt having her book out there before the public was, as I had suggested, a sort of insurance policy. If Faye got knocked off, I guess we’d pretty much know where to start looking.

The first time we’d met, we’d both been relatively anonymous. Now, for the moment at least, we were two of the most visible women in America. Maybe in Faye’s peculiar worldview, this created some kind of bond between us. Whatever the reason, this time around, she was full of stories. She told how she and Nicole had met in 1990 but did not hit it off until one day at a sunbathing party where they discovered that they had both banged the same guy, Joseph Perulli. Joseph had apparently broken off his relationship with Nicole, and Faye was trying to give her tips on how to win him back.

“I liked her immediately once… once she wasn’t seeing him anymore,” Faye whispered, in her sultry contralto. “But now I want to help her, right?”

“Go figure,” I interjected dryly.

Faye claimed she did not know about O.J.‘s New Year’s Eve attack until she and Nicole went into group therapy in February 1993. The therapist asked Nicole to tell the story, and she ran from the room crying. Afterward, Faye engaged in a little Tough Love; she told Nicole, “If you can’t confront any questions at all, you’re never going to make headway.” “Nicole wanted to get rid of all that bad stuff but she was afraid to,” Faye told us. “O.J. would get so mad at her that she would be frightened to do it.”

Nicole made so much “progress” in her therapy that she decided to beg O.J. to come back so that they could mend their marriage. In retrospect, a terrible mistake. In early May 1994, Nicole was supposedly still talking about reconciliation with O.J., but she also told Faye that she was having an affair with Marcus Allen (which Allen later denied).

Faye looked at me solemnly and said, “I believe that Nicole thought she was going to die, and I think she was doing some really wild things. I think she was out of control. Nicole had done some strange things in the last month of her life.”

“Like?”

“Telling our friend Cora Fischman about her and I being together. I thought that was strange, which she promised me she wouldn’t tell anybody. Because I’m not bisexual, neither is she. And it was something that just happened one night and she promised me she would never tell anybody about it. And for her to tell, I couldn’t imagine Nicole doing that. For her to see Marcus, I couldn’t imagine Nicole doing that. Those two things, I-I can’t-I can only see that they’re desperate, they’re an act of a desperate woman thinking she’s going to die.”

Faye also confirmed one of my earlier hunches: that the IRS letter had made Nicole furious enough to walk out for good. “She realized that he didn’t care about the kids,” Faye told me. “The children meant nothing to him. [Nicole] said, ‘If he’s going to kill me, let him get it over with.’ “

Faye herself had apparently fallen upon hard times and was living at Nicole’s condo. She told me how she’d gotten increasingly freaked by O.J.‘s behavior. He’d called Faye one day in April demanding to know why Nicole wasn’t returning his calls. “If you don’t tell me why she’s not calling,” he said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She believed his words were a death threat to Nicole.

It turns out that Faye was doing a lot of coke and Valium about then. Nicole organized an intervention to get her into a rehab clinic in Marina del Rey. Faye checked in on June 9. Three days later, at nine o’clock on June 12, she called Nicole from a pay phone at the clinic, asking her how the recital had gone.

“That was the best mood I have ever heard her in. She sounded so resolved and so clear and so strong, felt so good about what she had done. She felt good about the fact that her family was behind her at this time.”

Her parents’ support meant a lot to Nicole, Faye said. Nicole confided in her that “the only reason she stayed with O.J. after that [the New Year’s Eve incident] was because of her family. They needed his support financially. And when she told them that she wanted to leave him, they made her feel so-so bad about it, and they basically did not accept her leaving him. And to me that was one of the biggest secrets of all. I mean, I was devastated by that. It’s like their daughter is a throwaway daughter.”

Chris and I both believed that Faye was telling the truth about Simpson’s abuse of Nicole. He hit the trail and checked out various sources, all of whom ended up confirming her accounts. A nurse at the rehab clinic confirmed that Faye really had called Nicole the night of the murders. Various members of the Brentwood crowd-Candace Garvey, Bruce and Kris Jenner-also verified Faye’s account of O. J. Simpson’s obsessive, abusive relationship with his wife.

Chris had several follow-up interviews with Faye. She flirted outrageously with him. Her pet name for him was “D’Artagnan.” A Musketeer? Go figure. She would leave throaty messages on his answering machine: “D’Artagnan, I need to speak with you.” He’d play them for me when he got to work.

Anyway, Chris liked her. He was all for putting her on the witness stand. But I held back. As I’ve said before, Faye had a very serious downside. There was her drug problem, for starters. On top of that we’d heard that Robert Shapiro professed to have witnesses to an ongoing lesbian relationship between Faye and Nicole. These “witnesses” could supposedly describe the lovemaking positions both women had assumed during these encounters. Moreover, while on her book tour, Faye had drawn fire from black women in the audience of a national talk show. To them, she was just one more white bitch trying to bring down O. J. Simpson. If the jury had it in for me, you can imagine how’d they’d respond to her.

In the end, I prevailed. We didn’t call Faye, and I’m sure that it didn’t break her heart. Faye’s information supplied the connective material to turn our collection of isolated police reports about Nicole’s deeply troubled marriage into a coherent history. It gave us a badly needed boost.

And now, I thought, if we could just reach the Browns.

This is the part that gets weird for me. It wasn’t for lack of desire, but I was never able to get as close to the victims’ families in this case as I would have liked. I felt enormous sympathy for the Browns and the Goldmans. And I felt a special rapport with Kim Goldman. Her grief, never far from the surface, simply broke my heart. A brother murdered! I thought of my own brother, Jon, the person closest in the world to me. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose him.

Whenever I called the Goldmans’ home, whoever answered the phone, usually Fred or Patti, would tell the other to pick up the extension and we’d all talk. I’d fill them in on the latest news and check to see how they were holding up. Patti never failed to ask about my health and my children. Same for Fred. I found that remarkable, especially in light of the loss of their own child. Such incredibly wonderful people.

But the awkward fact remained, the victims’ families and I enjoyed nothing approaching the close, comfortable relationship I’d had with Rebecca Schaeffer’s mother. Danna and I had exchanged notes and phone calls during a whole year of pretrial motions. But once Simpson had invoked his right to a speedy trial, the accelerated schedule, along with the unbelievable pressures of TFC, made the kind of relationships that mature and deepen with time close to impossible.

Whenever we seemed to be on the point of establishing a closer rapport, the media pulled the families in another direction. As a practical matter, I couldn’t order them not to talk to reporters. But in the past, I had found that victims’ families were usually willing to be guided by me. After all, the articles and television segments could affect the prosecution, and our shared goal was presumably to see justice done. Danna Schaeffer had been conscientious about consulting me each time she was called by a reporter. Her cooperation helped me exert some kind of damage control over publicity the defense would claim was prejudicial to their client. In the Simpson case, all bets were off.

I liked Fred Goldman a lot, and I know he did his best to help us. But he really felt he had to be out there, making statements and expressing his outrage, to make sure that a media obsessed with the melodrama of Nicole and O.J. didn’t neglect his own son’s memory. (Privately I applauded him. Fred and his family, I felt, served as the very conscience of this case.) Fred, at least, would give me a heads-up before he gave an interview to Geraldo. Not so, the Browns. I wouldn’t hear of their forays until I picked up the paper or passed a television set.

Early on, Denise and Dominique Brown had appeared on Good Morning America, where they’d seemed to me neutral, almost supportive of their brother-in-law. This was especially strange, I remember thinking, in light of Denise’s comment to Tom Lange the morning he called to tell her of her sister’s murder: “I knew the son of a bitch was going to do it,” she’d told him. Nothing equivocal about that. And then, in November, for reasons unknown to me (she certainly didn’t consult me about it), Denise Brown came out swinging. She announced publicly that she’d known O.J, was the killer from the moment she heard about Nicole’s death. She also claimed that Nicole had predicted Simpson would kill her and get away with it.

The defense team went absolutely crazy over this. Johnnie Cochran got up in court and fulminated about how awful it was for the Browns and Goldmans to be doing this to the defendant before trial. Denise’s television appearances also prompted a sanctimonious announcement from Shapiro that he “forgives” the family. When I heard that, I just thought, Fuck you, you patronizing asshole.

The absurd thing about it all was that the defense, the press, and perhaps the public all assumed that the District Attorney’s office had sent the victims’ families out on a campaign to spin public opinion. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The Goldmans and the Browns were simply beyond our control.

Of all the families of victims I’ve had contact with over the years, the Browns were by far the strangest. I’d known families who were indifferent and others who were overinvolved. This was something else.

On the surface they appeared warm enough. Lou Brown would come into court saying, “Where’s my hug?” and then hug me. I let him hug me because I couldn’t think of any tactful way to deflect it. But I wasn’t comfortable with it, in part because of something I saw during one of my visits to the Browns’ home at Dana Point. Lou had shown me into his study. On a table covered with photos-almost none of Nicole-there was a picture of Dominique-the family called her Mini-dressed in a teensy-weensy bikini, in what struck me as a provocative pose. There was also a shot of some magazine pinup, totally nude.

It was also clear to me early on that Lou Brown was a patriarch of the old order. According to Tanya, Lou had been delighted with his famous son-in-law and he’d been completely opposed to his daughter’s divorce. When Nicole first walked out on O. J. Simpson, her father would not speak to her or even help her move.

Juditha was a handsome, middle-aged woman of German birth; to me, she seemed sweet and well-meaning but utterly passive. She was well aware of Nicole’s domestic problems. Every time Nicole and O.J. fought, she told us, O.J. would take Juditha’s picture off the wall and throw it out a window. It became a running joke: “Oh, am I on the front lawn again?” Juditha seemed to have downplayed in her own mind what should have been a red flag, not-I believe-because she didn’t care about Nicole, but because she just couldn’t bring herself to deal with the trauma that would have resulted from confronting her own husband and her own emotions. Juditha was mildly supportive when Nicole left O.J., but was all too willing to let her go back on the occasions when she tried to reconcile. It must have been difficult for Juditha to look back on those events and reckon with them. But she never talked to me about that.

The Brown sisters all seemed clued into O. J. Simpson’s true nature. Denise had taken photos to document Nicole’s injuries after the New Year’s Eve incident. Dominique, who seemed to me the coolest of the lot and a real straight shooter, also seemed to have the most pent-up rage. She told me how, when Nicole was pregnant, Simpson called her sister a “fat pig,” and about how uncaring he was as a father. How he liked to show the kids off, but he really wasn’t around for them.

The Browns gave me a document, written by Nicole, dated Sunday, January 10, 1988. I found this particularly harrowing. Nicole had taken Sydney, along with her mother and Mini, to see “Disney on Ice.” When they all got back to Rockingham, Simpson was there with Al Cowlings. Nicole could tell something was wrong. A.C. looked tense.

[O.J.] followed Mini and Mom out to the car, rattling 100 mph about what a liar I am. He never stopped. He followed Sydney and I around the house. “Please don’t yell and scream in front of Sydney.” So A.C. grabbed her. And I tried to get away from her so she wouldn’t have to hear it.

Here was Nicole, two months pregnant at the time. He tells her he wants her to get an abortion. He orders her out of the house, saying, “I have a gun in my hand right now. Get the fuck out of here.”

She grabbed her baby, the cats, the diaper bag, and a bottle. Then she “got the heck” outta there.

Given the circumstances, I found Nicole’s account strangely dispassionate, as if she were separated by habit from her own feelings. And yet as I read between the lines, I could sense her mounting panic as she tried to protect her child. I could just imagine what Sydney must have seen and heard. That poor little girl. Forced to watch and listen as her father humiliated her mother. Kicked out onto the street. And I’m thinking, This guy abuses his pregnant wife, demanding she abort their baby, and now he moans to the world that the worst part of being incarcerated is the separation from his children?

The Browns also gave us a journal in which Nicole had chronicled more of her husband’s systematic neglect of his children. When I first glanced through it, I did not recognize it for what it really was. Nicole’s lawyers would later explain to me what these notations meant. They’d instructed her to write everything down in case of future litigation on custody or child support. When the father failed to show, missed days, came late, she was to document it in writing. And she had done as they’d instructed.

As I read through those entries, I saw and heard a Nicole who was becoming increasingly agitated. The angrier she got, the more she wrote. Beyond the simple recording of dates, she had started describing how her ex-husband acted, what he’d said to the kids. In the strictest sense, what we had from Nicole was not really a diary. And yet it was the essential diary.

Nicole began making entries in early 1992, after leaving her husband for the first time to set up housekeeping at her new condo on Gretna Green in Brentwood. “Home,” she wrote on Sunday, February 23. “Moving in.” Most of her entries were spare; one of the longest was for Monday, June 29, 1992.

O.J. called about 7:00 or 7:30. Justin kept wanting to talk. Asked if he can sleep there. Such a need for Daddy… Sad!! So he came at about 8:15. Justin is in heaven. I stayed home w/Sydney. It’s been 2 weeks since Justin spent the nite & saw OJ. 3 weeks since Sydney spent the nite and saw OJ…

During the early part of 1993, Nicole was clearly considering reconciliation. “O.J. & I got back together April 12 93,” she wrote. By spring of the following year, however, they were on the skids again. Nicole had bought her condo on Bundy. She seemed to be shuttling between Bundy and Rockingham, unsure of where to call home. OJ. was a chronic no-show as a father. By May 1994, Nicole had apparently had enough. “We’ve officially split,” she announced to her journal. “I told OJ we’re going back to every other weekend…I need the rest & O.J.‘s gone so much-he needs time alone with [the kids] ‘til he leaves again.”

On June 3, when she had little more than a week to live, Nicole documented another violent outburst. O.J. had come by the condo to pick up the kids; when he discovered they’d made other plans, he lit into Nicole for some perceived slight of the day before.

“You hang up [sic] on me last nite, you’re gonna pay for this, bitch!” he shouted at her. “You’re holding money from the IRS-you’re going to jail you fucking cunt!… I’ve already talked to my lawyers about this,” he continued. “They’ll get you for tax evasion, bitch… You’re not gonna have a fucking dime left.”

He continued his tirade even as Sydney’s little girlfriend arrived for a sleepover. “I’m not sure if they heard all or any of it,” Nicole agonized. “I just turned around & walked away.”

As I picked my way through a spotty trail of journal entries and documents, I could see how, over the next five days, the hostilities escalated. Simpson’s letter threatening to report her to the IRS flung kerosene on the flames. That letter had apparently gone through a few drafts. When we subpoenaed it from O. J. Simpson’s divorce attorney, Skip Taft, we also recovered a note from the lawyer saying that he had made the changes O.J. wanted but did not get “revengeful.” Two days later, Simpson sent Nicole a nasty follow-up to the IRS letter, informing her that while he welcomed the children at Rockingham, “Gigi [his housekeeper] is not an emergency cook, baby-sitter or errand running [sic] for you! She is an employee of mine and I expect you to respect that-now, and in the future.”

Four days later, Nicole was dead.

I knew there had to be more to document this downward spiraling relationship. Correspondence, a daybook, photos. I wanted to find just one shot of the Simpsons standing side by side-one in which Nicole was not wearing heels-to show the disparity in their sizes. I was sure her family could give us what we needed, but every time we went to them with a request, we had to wheedle and beg, and often came away empty-handed.

(For the time, when they were stalling on giving us the journals, Chris and I actually discussed the possibility of serving Lou with a search warrant. Talk about unprecedented. A search warrant on a victim’s family? Would we ever have looked like heartless bastards! Fortunately, the Browns turned them over before this became necessary.)

Unlike most victims’ relatives, who desperately try to move your case forward-“What can we do? What information can we offer to put this animal behind bars?”-Lou Brown played things very close to the vest. Lou had cleaned out the condo after Nicole’s death and reportedly stored her belongings. Chris and I asked him repeatedly to produce those boxes; he kept dodging us. It was “I’ll get it for you… I’ll look for it, I’ll look for it.” He never came up with them.

As to why, I can only speculate. Perhaps he felt that our probing violated his privacy. Believe me, I could relate to that, since my own secrets had become a tabloid commodity. But what completely floored me was then learning that the Browns had cooperated with Sheila Weller, author of a soon-to-be-published book called Raging Heart, and that they had given her information they’d never given us. That book, I’d learn, was pretty hard on O. J. Simpson. I couldn’t figure out why they were being so reticent with the D.A.‘s office. After all, we were the people who had a shot at putting him away.

Faye Resnick seemed to be right: O. J. Simpson had given the Browns considerable financial help over the years. We discovered a deed to their house that seemed to indicate that Simpson had taken over the mortgage. I wondered if Lou’s reluctance came from feeling beholden to his son-in-law. Or was he afraid of him? Or both?

Early in December we got a call from Nicole’s bank. She’d been renting a safe-deposit box, bank officials told us. Her father was now trying to get into it. We knew that the box might contain crucial evidence. Given Lou’s prior recalcitrance, we thought it was better just to go and get it ourselves. So Chris sent a couple of D.A.‘s investigators down to the bank with a warrant and instructions to drill that box.

The contents were more disturbing to me than anything I had seen to date. There were three Polaroid pictures of Nicole. The first looked like it was taken when she was very young, early in her relationship with Simpson, when she was still a teenager. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel. Her eye was blackened, her face puffed up and reddened. I studied the shot, looked at Chris, and just shook my head.

The box also contained several letters, one written by Nicole to O.J. very early in their relationship, complaining that he neglected her. There were three others from him to her, apologizing for having abused her and taking responsibility for having gone crazy. Implicitly acknowledged in one of those letters is the fact that he beat her because she refused to have sex with him.

Why would a woman keep those things in a lockbox? There was only one explanation. Even as she was trying to break free of O.J., part of Nicole accepted that she would never really escape, that O. J. Simpson might murder her. The message in the box was clear: in the event of my death, look for this guy.

I kept coming back to her eyes. She was so young at the time those pictures were taken that her eyes still reflected authentic emotion. I compared the photos mentally to those hanging by the stairs at Rockingham. A decade or more had passed between those two shots. The pain in her eyes had gelled into a glassy, deadened stare. Seventeen years of denying terror and clinging to hope, only to have that hope destroyed time and time again.

On Sunday afternoon, December 18, Chris and I drove out to Dana Point to confront the Browns. Phil and Tom went with us, although they were not real happy to be there. For starters, they were ticked off at Chris and me because we had used D.A. investigators, not the LAPD, to drill the box. But I’m sure they were also dreading the encounter with Lou, who by now had learned that we’d done an end run around him.

As always, Juditha Brown was gracious. She laid out a plate of pasta for us. I sat across from Lou. He didn’t appear angry, but there were tears in his eyes.

“Why didn’t you just ask me?” he said.

Tom and Phil were only too happy to let someone else answer. I was trying to come up with a reply when Chris stepped into the breach. He could be very good under pressure. He mumbled something plausible: “We weren’t sure that you could get into it legally. We could. We just felt it would be better for everyone if we went ahead and did it.”

That diplomatic fiction seemed to ease the tension. Juditha sat down with us for a long taped interview. I pressed her for specifics on the battering incidents we were trying to document. By her own admission, Juditha had no head for dates. And she had no memory at all of that harrowing incident following “Disney on Ice” when her son-in-law had called the pregnant Nicole a “liar” and a “fat pig.” I showed her Nicole’s letter to refresh her memory. Nicole had been clear about the fact that her mother and Mini had been there when O.J. flew off the handle, “rattling 100 mph.”

“I don’t remember anything about that at all,” Juditha told me.

I was flabbergasted.

“You were there,” I reminded her. “And he was calling her a fat liar.”

“Yes,” Juditha acknowledged, “but, you see-the problem with all these things is that all this stuff happened so many times, it… didn’t mean anything anymore after a while.”

It didn’t mean anything?

The thing that seemed to upset Juditha most was her son-in-law’s treatment of his children. After Nicole and O.J. fought, she would go often to a beach house they owned. “That was always her refuge,” Juditha explained. “And then when she left him, that was the first lock that he changed. So she couldn’t go down to the beach house anymore. That’s how much he loves his kids. You know, all this circus about ‘I love my kids.’ That was their favorite place!”

Juditha was warming to the subject. It seemed curious to me that she could work up more outrage over the ill-treatment of her grandchildren than over the very obvious abuse of her own daughter.

“And another thing that upset me about him was, when she once said she cannot afford the school anymore, it’s just so much money. And he says, ‘Then put ‘em in regular school. Other kids survive.’ So there was no consideration to the kids as long as he could get to her. This is something I hold against him, and I always have. Just out to hurt Nicole. If Nicole didn’t do how O.J wanted, it was always money and it was how to get to her then.”

After the murder, the Browns received a call from Simpson’s lawyer. “Don’t expect Nicole’s alimony check,” Juditha recalled hearing, “because the children just have to get used to a lower lifestyle.”

This would have appalled me if I had not already formed an opinion as to what a selfish, unfeeling creep Orenthal James Simpson really was.

Lou promised to give Phil and Tom permission to search the storage facility where he had put the contents of Nicole’s condo. Before we left, I showed him one of the photos taken from the lockbox. As he looked at it, his expression did not change.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“Well, they’d had a fight,” he replied.

Inside I was screaming: Why didn’t you encourage her to leave? Why didn’t you say to her, “Baby, you shouldn’t be with this monster?” But I didn’t. I’m sure in his own way, Lou Brown was suffering terribly. Maybe he was saying those same things to himself. Maybe. But I had to keep my mouth shut. You cannot afford to alienate a witness.

CAR TAPE. December 16, 1994. We have to go out and see the Browns again this Sunday. This case is kicking all my personal issues… That little girl, Nicole, never had a chance. What a tortured life she led. I don’t think she ever had much peace.

I can’t talk about this anymore…

I was dashing around Glendale trying to run a month’s worth of errands in two hours and log a few minutes of car tape in the process, when the earth seemed to give way under me. I felt queer and shaky. I had to pull into a parking lot.

That little girl, Nicole, never had a chance… I shut off the tape and rested my head on the steering wheel. I really couldn’t talk about it anymore.

The case was taking its toll on me. The stress. The long hours. That’s the punishment you expect as a prosecutor. But the type of battering this case was giving me was of a more hurtful, insidious order. It had come to the point where the mention of Nicole’s name caused me pain.

On the face of things, there were not many points of similarity between Nicole and me. She’d been a WASP goddess in a white Ferrari. I was a scrappy Jewish civil servant with a swamp for a bedroom. What are the odds that two such dissimilar women could experience anything close to the same kind of misery? And yet, so many details from her brief and tormented life seemed to resonate with my own.

In early December, Nicole’s divorce lawyers at had messengered us a packet of documents. These included a deposition Nicole had given Simpson’s attorneys in the interest of establishing her own inability to support herself. Within its pages, Nicole’s true helplessness showed through with painful clarity.

She told how she’d tried her hand at interior decorating, but her only “clients” had been her husband and his friends. She’d thought about going into the restaurant business or starting up a coffee bar with Faye Resnick. You could see her turning over and over in her mind the alternatives that would reduce her dependence upon O. J. Simpson’s money. She was looking not only for a job, but tor a career-one that would support her and give a sense of purpose to her life.

“I’m sure I’ll get a goal someday,” she’d told them. That plaintive line struck me to the heart.

Nicole had the right instincts. She knew the way to save herself was to find a career. She just couldn’t connect, somehow. Lack of talent? Lack of drive? I don’t know. When all is said and done, not enough of Nicole was revealed in these documents to answer those questions. Whenever I was tempted to fault her for having stayed in that awful relationship for fifteen years-seventeen if you count the fitful two years after the divorce-I took stock and realized that my own first marriage had lasted for five, eight if you count the time Gaby and I lived together. What tricks do we play on ourselves, to linger so long in hell?

These were not thoughts I shared with anyone at the office. At least not directly. Whenever I met with our domestic violence experts, Lydia Bodin and Scott Gordon, I’d ply them with questions.

“Why the hell didn’t she cut and run?” I’d ask Scott.

“Minimizing” was what he called it. He told me, “Women who are in abusive relationships downplay the seriousness of their own circumstances. They deny it to themselves. They present a brave front to others, trying to hold things together. It’s a coping mechanism.”

Minimizing. That certainly hit me where I lived. Nothings wrong here. I can get this thing back under control. Just don’t admit that there’s a problem.

Scott, of course, was delighted by my newfound interest in DV. Since the beginning, he’d been arguing to me and anyone else who’d listen that domestic violence was the cornerstone of this case. I’d remained aloof, but through sheer persistence, he’d picked up advocates. When, in early October, I finally assigned Chris Darden to this detail, the domestic violence movement within our office gained even more momentum.

Chris, Scott, Lydia, and Hank Goldberg, a fellow D.A. who was terrific at writing motions, worked like Trojans to document incidences of O. J. Simpson’s brutality toward Nicole. This was not easy to do. As I’ve said, an abuser does not normally hit his victim in the presence of others. So, as a starting point, they turned to an inventory Nicole had compiled at the suggestion of her divorce lawyers. According to this document, she’d gotten her first beating right after she started to live with O. J. Simpson. A year or so later, while they were staying at the Sherry Netherland in New York City, Simpson beat Nicole for hours as she crawled for the door. From her diaries we had Nicole’s own description of how he “hit me while he fucked me.” How he called her mother a “whore.” These violent episodes continued throughout the eighties.

Chris, it turned out, had an excellent way with the domestic violence witnesses. He was calm, reassuring, patient. He managed to get Denise Brown to recall an upsetting episode. The scene was Rockingham, where Denise and her date were hanging out after an evening with O.J. and Nicole. Everybody was drunk. Denise blurted that she thought O.J. took Nicole for granted-and Simpson blew. He grabbed his guests and his wife and flung them, one by one, onto the lawn.

Chris also turned up a woman named Connie Good, whose boyfriend had lived next door to Nicole’s apartment in 1977 or 1978. She told how on one evening in particular, while she was visiting, she’d heard screaming from Nicole’s apartment. She’d also heard thuds.

“Sounded like it was either on the floor or against the wall,” she recalled. Simpson was shouting, “Fucking bitch!” Later, Good ran into Nicole in the elevator; the girl had two black eyes.

The DV dragnet turned up something else especially heartbreaking. Sojourn, a battered-women’s hotline out of Santa Monica, reported taking a call five days before the murder from a woman in West L.A. Her name was Nicole. She had two children and she was frightened because her ex-husband was stalking her. She’d called the cops more than eight times. Their response? “Nothing much ever done.”

As the evidence mounted, Chris and Scott put more pressure on me to give domestic violence a bigger role in the case.

“This is not some murder that incidentally involved domestic violence,” Scott would tell me. “It’s a domestic violence case that ended in murder.”

I had to admit that this approach afforded us a solid legal advantage. If we identified this as a domestic violence case that ended in murder, we could argue that the incidents of abuse that led up to the crime should be admissible. Being able to present those attacks in open court might have two beneficial effects: one, to strip the jury of their rosy illusions about the defendant; two, to give us the opportunity to present a compelling motive for murder.

Scott was pressing me to meet with a couple of domestic violence experts he’d brought in from out of town, Angela Brown and Dr. Donald Dutton. I kept putting him off. Finally, we’d run out of time. I remember very clearly one afternoon in mid-December when both experts had been hanging around all day to meet with me and Chris. Dr. Dutton had to get back to British Columbia. I looked at my watch. God-it was 8:30. They’d been waiting for me for more than five hours. I felt horribly embarrassed.

I grabbed my notebooks and ran to Scott’s cubicle. There, I found Donald, in his tweedy jacket and sensible shoes, and Angela, in her long, flowing skirt and silk drape blouse, sitting on the floor in Scott’s cubicle, surrounded by their binders and notes. I threw myself on their mercy.

“Do you have another hour or so of energy to talk to me?” I asked.

“I think we’re kind of bushed, to tell you the truth, Marcia,” Don replied. “But if you want to join us, we could probably continue our discussion for a bit over cocktails, hey?”

We went over to the Inter-Continental Hotel, where Chris joined us. There, we ended up engaging in one of the liveliest and most perceptive discussions any of us had ever had about the case.

The question pressing most heavily on my mind was whether, given all we knew of the Simpsons’ relationship and the events leading up to June 12, the experts would have predicted that Simpson was about to erupt into a homicidal rage. Was this murder the result of a long-standing plan, or one formulated on the night it was committed?

The critical variable, Don Dutton explained, was “estrangement.” When Nicole didn’t invite Simpson to sit with her at Sydney’s dance recital, when she declined to invite him to join them at Mezzaluna, she made a public declaration of her independence and embarrassed him in front of friends and family.

“A rebuff equals incitement to murder?” I asked, still incredulous. A month ago I would have had a hard time buying this proposition. But Don now made a cogent argument for how O. J. Simpson would have overreacted to rejection. His overweening ego and controlling behavior masked a fundamentally flawed, insecure, and extremely immature personality. To such an unstable man, violence would seem a justifiable means of reestablishing control.

Still, I wondered silently, why would these snubs, this evening, have proved so incendiary? Two years earlier, Nicole had divorced him, a development that he appeared to take with comparative equanimity. I suspected that there had to have been something else that incited him-and that it had to do with a string of calls made from the cell phone in his Bronco that night to Paula Barbieri. Paula, of course, was continuing to elude us, so I didn’t know for sure what had gone down. But my guess was that Simpson’s frustration over his inability to reach her that night had spilled over in rage against Nicole. The first time Nicole dumped him, he’d had Paula to catch him. The second time, he went into free fall.

Months later, of course, this hunch would prove correct. In a deposition given at the civil trial, Paula would testify that she had left a “Dear John” message on Simpson’s machine the afternoon before the murders. It was clearly the emotional trigger. We certainly could have used it at the criminal trial.

Thanks loads, Paula.

After that night of conversation, the domestic violence advocates finally won me over. I felt they should be allowed to take their best shot. So I gave them my blessing to draft a motion asking the court to allow into evidence all the incidents of domestic violence they had worked so hard to unearth.

The Dream Team, of course, fought tooth and nail to keep that motion under seal. Up to that point, they’d more or less succeeded in advancing the fiction that Simpson was a decent guy who had just hit a rough patch in his marriage. Now, he was about to be unmasked as a sadist.

The defense managed to get the hearing delayed for a month, until the jurors were safely sequestered at the Inter-Continental Hotel. For now, domestic violence was temporarily on hold.

While Chris and crew were planning their DV offensive, I’d remained on the sidelines of the action. I’d been up to my ears preparing the physical evidence, which was turning out to be a monumentally complicated task. All along, I’d expected Barry Scheck to object to the admissibility of the DNA test results. That meant we could look forward to a set of what are called Kelly-Frye hearings that would take us well past the first of the year. Suddenly, without warning, they changed their game plan.

I heard about it one Sunday morning, after a late night of work capped off by a game of pool and a shot of Glenlivet. Suzanne called to say that Art Harris at CNN was trying to get in touch with me. I had played phone tag with him the day before, but figured he had just wanted some inside skinny. As it turned out, he had something to tell me: the Simpson team was going to withdraw their challenge to the DNA evidence. On one level, this shouldn’t have surprised me. We’d known all along that they wanted to rush us into trial as quickly as possible-and cut our preparation time as much as possible. It also kept Simpson’s public image as a celebrity fresh in the public’s mind-the longer he sat in jail, the more like a criminal he would seem.

Even so, on hearing the news, I went into shock. I’d been planning on taking a lot of the physical-evidence witnesses, like Dennis Fung and Greg Matheson, myself. But the chunk of time I was counting on to prepare that part of the case-and maybe even have a day or two at home over Christmas-would now be gone. I am such an anal-retentive overpreparer by nature that this news from Art conjured up my personal vision of hell. I would have to pedal twice as fast just to finish everything I had to get done on my own part of the case as well as keeping an eye on the work of others.

It was at that point, I think, that I realized the impossibility of adequately preparing for the trial, now set to start in mid- to late January. The stress was getting to me. Most of the time, I felt ill. I suffered from respiratory ailments, head colds, aching joints. And these disturbing new illnesses were compounded by bouts of bone-crushing fatigue. I had enough self-awareness to realize where this was leading me. And I didn’t want to go there.

Not again.

When I was very new at this job, I had an experience that left me badly shaken. I’d been a D.A. only about six months when I prosecuted my first rape case. The victim asked that she be assigned a woman prosecutor. I was the only one available.

I met the victim outside the courtroom before the preliminary hearing. She was a light-skinned black woman with close-cropped hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She looked about my age-mid-twenties-and had an average build. She’d been waiting forever for a bus, and she was late for work. Out of nowhere a man pulled up in a car and offered to give her a ride. She hesitated but she wasn’t going very far and he seemed okay, so she agreed. He pulled into an alley-and raped her. She’d been able to escape from the car and made her way to an emergency room, where the police were called. They caught the guy the same day.

I was impressed by this woman. She was calm, articulate, conservatively dressed. She was going to make a terrific witness. Since it was my first rape case, I remember taking what seemed to me awkward steps to reassure her.

“You only have to look at him once to identify him for the judge,” I told her. “Other than that, you can look at me, and when his lawyer’s asking you questions, you can look at the lawyer. If you need a break, say so. I’ll make sure it happens… You’re to be treated with respect, and I’m here to make sure of it.”

How do you comfort someone like that when you haven’t been in her shoes? I squeezed her hand and gave her my phone number.

She smiled and thanked me.

I went back to work. An hour later my head was throbbing. My bones ached. My skin hurt. Down in the courtroom, I could barely stand up to handle a motion for a continuance. The defense attorney actually looked over at me and said, “Go home. It’s making me hurt just to look at you.”

I did go home. And when I got there I crawled right into bed. I was burning with fever. Then freezing. Then burning again. I took my temperature: 103 degrees. As I lay there shivering, I wondered how this could have come on so suddenly. I’d felt perfectly fine that morning. All the way up until the interview. What was it about the interview? Slowly, as though curtains of gauze were parting in my head, I saw unfold a series of events that had occurred almost ten years earlier.

I was almost seventeen and I’d just finished high school. As a graduation gift, my parents sent me on a Jewish youth group tour to Europe. I was one of about thirty girls in a group that ranged in age from sixteen to twenty-five. I think I was the only one from California; the rest of them were from around New York. When we landed in Europe, we were bused to a resort and parceled off in groups of four into a cluster of little huts.

We went to dinner that night in the hotel dining room, where we occupied one long table. We were attended by two waiters, young men in their twenties, who were clearly delighted at having exclusive access to a group of young American tourists. One of the waiters, a stocky dark man, spent a lot of time leaning over my shoulder and brushing against me. After dinner, he and his buddy invited the entire group to join them at a nearby restaurant-bar. Everyone agreed, except me. I was tired and didn’t like to party in large groups. But the waiter who’d been dogging me was persistent.

“Come with us,” he urged me. “You’ll have fun. You can’t just sit in a room by yourself.”

Once again, I refused.

The others left. I went back to the hut. It was empty and I enjoyed the first few moments of solitude I’d been able to steal since leaving the States. I flopped down on the hard bed and fell asleep.

It seemed only a few minutes later when I felt a weight on the edge of my bed. I opened my eyes and saw to my shock the waiter who’d been coming on to me at dinner. I was paralyzed with fright. I remember that he was trying to talk to me and then he started to stroke my hair. I pulled away and asked him to leave. He said he wouldn’t until I came with him. I knew I had to get him out of that room.

I found myself walking around the grounds of the resort with a man who had broken into my room. I simply did not know how to get free from him. I suppose I could have run, but I was held there by some inexplicable imperative not to offend him. Pretend everything is all right, I told myself, and it will be.

It was so strange. His manner was uncomfortably intimate, yet somehow respectful. I let him lead me into a “club.” It wasn’t a bar in the usual sense. There was no hard liquor, just beer and wine. There was a jukebox that played local hits, and everyone was eating watermelon and dancing. I spotted some of my friends from the tour, and that put me more at ease. My companion guided me to a table near the window, left me for a moment, then returned with a couple of plates of watermelon. I ordered a Coke.

Pretty soon we were talking easily. I’d begun to doubt my own senses. Had I not awakened in terror only a couple of hours earlier to find this man sitting on my bed? Had I dreamed that? No, of course not. I wouldn’t even be here now, sharing a bright comfortable space, with my friends all around me, if he hadn’t broken into my room.

My “companion” had launched into a long narrative about himself. Waiting tables was just a temporary thing. It gave him quick money until he could figure out what to do with his life. When a stranger shares his aspirations with you, it somehow inspires confidence. Perhaps I’d been spooked too easily.

After an hour or so we left the club to take a walk. I noticed that it was getting harder and harder to hear him. A strong, hot wind had kicked up and it was whistling past my ears, carrying his words away. I had to ask him to repeat himself over and over again, even though he was only about a foot away. He suggested that we sit on the steps of the hotel restaurant where we’d had dinner earlier, so we could hear each another.

“I have a bunch of records in my room,” he told me. “Why don’t you come over and I’ll play them for you?”

I loved music and the idea of being out of this eerie wind listening to R &B seemed comforting just then. Still… He sensed my indecision and put a hand on my arm.

“Look, I feel so close to you. I feel like a brother to you. You’re almost ten years younger than me. I know you’ll like the music. We’ll listen to a few records, and then I’ll walk you back to your room.”

As we walked toward his room, I tried to get my bearings. Where was my hut? Out here in the dark they all looked alike.

His room was bare. It contained only a chest of drawers and a nightstand. A small record player, the kind that’s obsolete nowadays, sat on the top of the dresser. There were no chairs, so I perched primly on the edge of the bed-legs crossed, back hunched, my arms around my knees-while he selected a record.

Within moments he was seated next to me, whispering in my ear how pretty I was and how much he liked me. I pulled away, confused and betrayed.

“What are you doing?” I complained.

He leaped over to the door and threw the bolt. When I tried to follow he turned and fixed me with a hard, determined look.

“Don’t make me hurt you,” he said.

I began to scream, but no one came.

“No one can hear you,” he hissed. “Not over the winds tonight.”

I began to gag on my own tears as he straddled me, ripped open my light cotton pants, and raped me.

It was over in seconds. As I lay there sobbing, he took my face in his hands and said, “Now, you will never tell anyone about this. And when you leave tomorrow you will say good-bye to me sweetly or I’ll make you sorry. Do you hear?”

Too terrified to object, I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Now I will walk you back to your room. Fix your pants.”

I looked down at my pants. The zipper was completely ripped out. I held them together at the waist as I stumbled out the door behind him. I know he spoke to me as we walked back to my hut, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because the winds were still strong and I was lost in a world of pain.

After he left me at the door, I waited for him to be gone before I looked inside the room. I prayed that no one would be there. I couldn’t stand the idea of being seen by anyone. I felt dirty, worthless.

The hut was empty. I hurried inside, yanked off my pants, balled them up, and hid them. Then, carefully, I put on a new pair and sat on the floor, unable to think of any way to make the pain to go away. And then I remembered the sea.

The hut was near the beach. I walked out to the shore until the waves came up over my bare ankles. The water was warm, somehow reassuring. I waded in up to my knees. It was very shallow near the shore. I had to go out quite a ways before the water reached my shoulders. I let myself be lifted and lowered by the gentle waves. In that numbed state it would have been so easy for me just to drift away.

I watched the shimmer of lights across the dark expanse of water to the north. They were lovely. And when I found myself admiring their beauty I became aware of myself again. In an instant, the numbness gave way to anger. What am I doing? I should destroy myself for what he did to me? I was up to my nose in brine, when I just exploded in rage. “No!” I screamed. And I began to swim back to shore.

The next morning when we boarded the bus, my attacker smiled at me, waiting for his big good-bye. I stared right through him.

Over the next few days my group leader noticed my withdrawal and took me aside.

“Just a mood,” I told her. “I’ll get over it.”

And I did. I willed myself to. I buried that memory good and deep. Ten years later it came hurtling up through layers of defenses in a blazing fever.

I knew how to minimize. Boy, did I ever. And as a result, I’d learned the power of memories denied. In December 1994, I saw my own memories reemerge. Nicole Simpson had awakened them. I found myself flashing on old arguments, screaming matches, shoving matches, and tearful reunions. Events that had seemed only bizarre at the time replayed themselves now in a more sinister light.

One episode in particular haunted me. During one of my many separations from Gaby, I was staying in a girlfriend’s apartment. A neighbor called the police to report a prowler. In fact, it had been Gaby lurking around my patio. I didn’t know about any of this until he called me from jail, frantic. They’d taken his shoes and belt and he was confined to a small cell.

“Get me out of here,” he demanded. “Now!”

I didn’t have any money, so I ran around that night collecting bail money from various “contacts.” Then I raced down to the police station.

I’d never been in a jail before. I was relieved to find the watch commander a cheerful, matter-of-fact guy who stared in disbelief when I told him I was there to bail out Gaby. It was a “What are you doing with an asshole like that?” sort of look. As I paid out the money, I could see Gaby pacing his cell like a cat. I thought he’d be furious, but he was just so relieved to be sprung he grabbed me and kissed me. I lived with him for two more years.

At the time, I accepted these events as normal. Only now did I finally get it. I was being stalked, for God’s sake. Not only had I been stalked, but I went to the jail to bail out my stalker! The parallels with Nicole Brown Simpson’s life were chilling.

Memories. Once you unleash them, you have to be prepared to reckon with them. In the interest of self-preservation, I made a decision to suppress certain ugly realities about my life with Gaby.

As I look back on it, I can see that others about me were doing the same thing. What I had seen in the Browns as disengagement was, I realize now, an attempt to protect themselves from the ravages of memory. Not that I wasn’t angered by their stonewalling, but as the New Year dawned, I felt infinitely more compassion for their plight. Denial is sometimes the only comfort you can offer yourself. Because once you let yourself feel, the misery is endless.