Without a Doubt

Exposure

After Bill’s gurney disappeared down the hallway, all of us, deputies and law clerks alike, milled around the War Room, stunned. I stood for a moment, as confused as any of them. Then I pulled myself together, marched back to my office, and shut the door. Cheri Lewis slipped in behind me. She thought I might want some company, but I was beyond talk. I paced for a while. Then, in direct violation of county rules, I lit up a Dunhill.

Cheri arched her eyebrows.

“So what are they going to do?” I snapped as I blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Send me Downtown and make me try the Simpson case?”

A knock on the door.

“Who is it.”

Gil poked his head in. I quickly stubbed out the cigarette.

Here was the man who’d told me to “lay back,” to “lighten up” a little. “Don’t be so tough,” he’d said. “Humor the judge.” But there was nothing conciliatory in Gil Garcetti’s expression now.

“Fuck him,” he said tersely. “Take the gloves off.”

No problem, Chief.

The defense’s misconduct had made Ito look like a stooge for Simpson. Right after the hearing the public flooded our office-and presumably Ito’s as well-with faxes and telegrams venting their outrage at how badly we’d been treated. This kind of reproof wounded Ito’s pride and often caused him to veer wildly in the opposite direction. I figured he’d be pretty sympathetic to whatever we suggested in the way of sanctions.

If I’d wanted to play hardball, I could have demanded that every witness for which the Scheme Team had not provided discovery be excluded from testifying. Bye-bye to Mary Anne Gerchas, Howard Weitzman, and Skip Taft, among others. Exclusion is the most serious penalty-short of contempt-that can be imposed upon attorneys who have deliberately hidden witnesses to gain tactical advantage.

Tempting as this was, such a demand would have been counterproductive. For one thing, exclusion posed an appellate risk. Preventing witnesses who might offer material evidence from testifying is arguably an infringement of a defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. All things considered, I felt that it was more equitable to let the disputed witnesses come to the stand-provided we be allowed to let the jury know how they’d been illegally hidden from them. This way they could make up their own minds about these folks’ credibility.

I figured Lance would give us that much. But I wanted more. I intended to request that he allow me to reopen my statement: do a second opening! This would let me expose at least some of Johnnie’s misrepresentations-that this was a drug murder, that the defense had proof of a second assailant, that Simpson was at home during the time of the murders. But I had no idea if there was any legal precedent for this. Never in my fourteen years of practice had I heard of it happening.

I buzzed my law clerk, Dana Escobar.

“Dana,” I told him, “I’ve got a tricky one for you.”

“No problem, boss.” He and a handful of other clerks set to work. Amazingly, within the hour, they had pulled up a 1964 civil case in which the court had allowed the reopening of the statement. Cheri and Hank commandeered a corner of the War Room and began drafting a motion to reopen.

Our investigators had also picked up a paper trail on Mary Anne Gerchas, who’d supposedly seen the four men in watch caps running from Nicole’s condo.

“Looks like she stayed at a Marriott for about four months and stiffed them on the bill,” one investigator told me. “She owes thousands.”

I whistled softly. “No wonder they wanted to hide discovery on her.”

Our investigators had also turned up an exercise video that Simpson had taped only two weeks before the murders. It showed Simpson, at a trim 212 pounds, doing push-ups and throwing jabs and uppercuts. The video would refute the defense’s claim more vividly than words ever could; no way was this guy the feeble cripple described by Johnnie in his opening statement. Simpson was also running on at the mouth-an infuriating trait his fans seemed to perceive as charm.

“I’m tellin’ you,” he joked, throwing out his right arm as if delivering a punch. “You just gotta get your space in if you’re workin’ out with the wife, if you know what I mean. You could always blame it on workin’ out.”

It was incredible. Here was the defendant making light of wife-beating. I wanted the jury to hear that; I would push for both the video and audio portions of the tape to be entered into evidence. And then I worried, Will this jury even get it?

For two days in court, we haggled over what punishment the defense should receive. Ito, clearly chastened by Bill’s collapse, gave us a receptive ear. But when it came right down to sanctions, as usual he split the baby.

I could reopen my statement, but I’d only get ten minutes. We could show the exercise video, but we couldn’t run the sound, which, of course, meant losing the wife-beating remark. And most disappointing, he denied us the chance to correct the impression that Nicole had the blood of some unknown suspect under her fingernails. His reason? We hadn’t lodged an objection at the moment Johnnie made the statement. Those jurors needed to know that Johnnie had misled them. Maybe I could live with the damage, I told myself, as long as Ito dressed down the defense in front of the jury. Ito had us half believing that he would do this. He also promised to make sure the jury realized that the trial had been delayed for two days because of the defense’s misconduct. But at the last moment, Lance lost his nerve.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the jurors after they had settled into the box on the morning of Monday, January 30. “I need to advise you of certain things.”

His voice was so soft, it was scarcely audible. This was how he intended to censure Johnnie Cochran?

“I need… to explain to you some of the reasons for the delay that we have had over the past two days… During the course of the opening statements, defense counsel mentioned witnesses who had not previously been disclosed to the prosecution… This was a violation of the law. And one of the causes of the two-day delay, including the absence of Mr. Hodgman.”

The absence of Mr. Hodgman! I couldn’t believe it. Listening to this castrated admonishment, the jury could reasonably infer that the delay was Bill’s fault.

If anyone was going to repair the damage, it would have to be me. And I would have to do it with a surgical strike. When it came time to do what would be called my “historic” reopening, I walked very slowly to the lectern. I paused. This was not to be an angry scatter blast or rebuttal. I would be calm and deliberate. I would limit myself to three points-each of them a promise to definitively refute Johnnie’s reckless assertions. When we delivered, and the defense failed to back up their claims, the jurors would know which side was credible and which side depended on lies.

Item: That on the night of June 12, O. J. Simpson was physically unfit to commit murder.

“You will see him doing push-ups,” I told the jury. “You will see him stretching, reaching, throwing jabs and uppercuts… You will see him doing trunk twists… We are going to show you that tape during the course of this trial.”

Item: That the LAPD refused to allow O. J. Simpson to have an attorney present when he gave his statement to police.

“In fact, what the evidence will show is that the detectives asked Mr. Weitzman to stay for the interview, but that he declined to do so, stating that he would prefer to go out to lunch… Mr. Simpson… said, ‘Go ahead.’…”

Item: That we’d deliberately hidden from the jury the existence of Mary Anne Gerchas. We hadn’t told them about her, I explained, because we didn’t know about her.

“You’ll be hearing a lot more about Ms. Gerchas along the course of the trial,” I told them. “But right now, I’ll address a few points that Mr. Cochran didn’t tell you about. For example, she spoke to [a friend] the day after the murders… [and told her] that she was not even at Bundy on the night of the murders. [The friend] will tell you [that] Ms. Gerchas is one of these people who comes out of the woodwork in high-profile cases… [She] was obsessed with this case and she talked as if she knew the defendant personally… The evidence will show that Mary Anne Gerchas is a known liar and a Simpson case groupie.”

I spoke for only seven of the ten minutes allotted to me. I didn’t want to take a chance of running over and having Lance bawl me out in front of the jury.

CAR TAPE. It’s Wednesday, February first. I reopened our opening statement yesterday very briefly just to tell them about some of [the defense’s] lies, but I don’t know if it’s enough to bring them around. If it was an ordinary jury I’d just be sitting there laughing because no reasonable mind could possibly buy the garbage they’re feeding them. But with a jury where people don’t want to believe the evidence, they’ll seize on anything. We may all be playing to the second jury, assuming this one hangs up and doesn’t acquit. What a lovely frame of mind.

A common procedure in murder cases is to call the coroner as the first witness. It’s easy to understand why prosecutors do this. Calling the coroner places the victims’ bodies squarely in the jury’s line of sight. You can’t say it any more bluntly: “Two people have been murdered, folks. That’s why we’re here.” If ever a jury needed a reminder of that, it was in this case, where so much of the attention had been riveted upon the defendant.

But this wasn’t a standard case. We simply could not afford to lead with Dr. Golden.

Even before preliminary hearings back in July, we’d realized that the deputy medical examiner’s report was riddled with errors. Some of the victims’ wounds, which could be clearly seen in the coroner’s photos, hadn’t been documented at all. Worse, the tissue samples removed from Nicole’s brain showed evidence of a brain contusion, but Golden’s report had made no mention of it. The problem with the omission was that now we couldn’t determine which side of the head had been struck-and not knowing this seriously hampered any reconstruction of the attack upon Nicole.

The contusion was critical because it lent support to other findings that Nicole had been attacked, but left alive and unconscious for at least a minute or two before the coup de grâce to her throat. This indicated that Simpson had stuck around after the first attack on Nicole. Now, why would a man who had just committed murder hang around to risk getting caught, not to mention missing his alibi flight to Chicago? The crucial minutes of Nicole’s unconsciousness were clearly Simpson’s window of opportunity to kill Ron.

How could we salvage this fiasco? Bill had a good idea. Why not get a reputable M.E. from outside Los Angeles to examine all the data, and testify either in addition to or in place of Dr. Golden? He suggested Dr. Werner Spitz, former chief medical examiner of Wayne County, Michigan. Spitz had written a key textbook in the field, and had consulted on other high-profile cases. Gil had heard that he was a “good man” and told us to give him a call.

It occurred to me that Spitz might not like the idea of having to second-guess another pathologist’s work. But I thought that he might be sympathetic to our dire circumstances and agree to lend a hand. Bill and Dr. Spitz exchanged phone calls for about a week, but in the end, he never testified for us.

I should point out here that Werner Spitz became the expert witness who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Simpson civil case. He was extremely helpful to them, describing how the cuts on O. J. Simpson’s hands had probably been made by the victims’ fingernails. He also proclaimed in unequivocal terms that the murders took only a minute and a half. It was damning stuff, and I wish to heck we’d had it. But we couldn’t get the good doctor to our courtroom. Looking back on it, I think that he and a lot of other potentially compelling witnesses might have been scared off by the frenzy surrounding the criminal trial and the gratuitous abuse they were likely to suffer at the hands of the defense. Bill ended up spending at least a hundred hours on the phone trying to enlist a reputable medical examiner. Not one would agree to help us.

So we went to our fallback position. We had Golden’s report redone under the direction of his boss, the chief medical examiner, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran. Dr. Lucky, as we called him, would have to use Golden’s memory and the police photos to splice together some description of the wounds. But at the time, the redone report was a work in progress. Dr. Lucky wasn’t ready to go to the top of the lineup. He wouldn’t have the original report completely redone; we’d have to start our case by admitting a whole lot of Golden’s original mistakes. Not a strong opening gambit.

Another possibility was leading with our most compelling evidence, the DNA. But that meant opening with Dennis Fung. More mistakes. More egg on our face. And besides, it was such technical stuff that the jury would have been asleep from the get-go. No, thank you.

Chris and Scott were pushing to open with domestic violence. As usual, I hung back. I knew the risks. We were dealing with ambiguous and volatile testimony. It’s difficult to convince jurors of either sex, of any race, that spousal abuse is a crime. And yet, opening with the New Year’s beating incident offered us a substantial logistical advantage as well. It would enable us to tell, in roughly chronological order, the tortured, complicated story of how O. J. Simpson’s obsession brought him to Bundy on the night of June 12, 1994. That tipped the scale. We’d open People v. Orenthal James Simpson with domestic violence.

“Mr. Darden,” Ito asked Chris, “who is your first witness?”

“Sharyn Gilbert, Your Honor,” he replied.

Gilbert, a neatly dressed black woman in her late thirties, raised her hand and took the oath.

“Ms. Gilbert,” Chris said, “were you a 911 operator and dispatcher [for the LAPD] on January [1], 1989?”

“Yes, I was,” she replied.

Gilbert explained that she had been at her console at 3:58 A.M. on New Year’s morning when she received a “drop in.” A distress call. At first, Gilbert couldn’t make out a voice on the other end. She made a note in her log: “trouble unknown.” A few moments later, however, she heard someone being hit.

Chris played the tape to a quiet courtroom. At first you could hear only the incongruous hiss of an empty line-then came a woman’s screams. In the distance blows were struck and there was more screaming. And then the line went dead. I stole a glance at the jury box. Glum stares. No evidence of thoughtful contemplation. No hint of emotion.

Gilbert told how she’d picked up the caller’s address off the computer and dispatched a cruiser to 360 North Rockingham. Detective John Edwards took the call. He was our next witness. Under Chris’s deliberate questioning, Edwards told how he’d driven into the hills on Rockingham. There was a thick mist that morning. It had been raining. He buzzed the security gate. A half-nude, mud-caked Nicole stumbled out of the bushes. When she managed to get the gate open she flung herself on him and clung tightly.

“She was wet,” Edwards recalled. “She was shivering, she was cold. I could feel her bones and she was real cold. And she was beat up.”

Nicole was also crying, “He’s going to kill me.”

Edwards’s testimony was very damaging to O. J. Simpson. He’d seen a one-inch-long cut on Nicole’s left upper lip. Her right forehead was swollen. One of her eyes was starting to blacken. Her cheek was puffy and she had a handprint on her neck. Moreover, Edward saw that Nicole Brown Simpson seemed genuinely terrified of her husband.

To my way of thinking, a smart defense attorney would want to get this guy off the stand as quickly as possible. Not Johnnie. He trotted Edwards back through the details of the incident, sniping at him for not going into the house to interview the maid. (Please keep in mind, this officer had an injured victim in his car!) Johnnie wanted to position Nicole as the provocateur and Simpson as the reasonable one. But that backfired. Asked to describe Simpson’s demeanor, Edwards replied, “He had veins… popping out right here [he gestured to his own temple] on the upper part of his head, along the side of his head. The veins were pulsing and popping out, and I’d never seen that before on television or anywhere.”

“So you associated that with anger?” Johnnie persisted.

Duh.

I have to believe that left to his own devices Johnnie would have been more effective with Edwards. He could have taken the tack, “Did you ever have the occasion to go out to Rockingham again, Officer Edwards?”…“No, I did not, sir.” That would have suggested to the jury that his client was reformed and repentent. I suspected that he did not do this because his client was pressuring him to take Edwards down. Still galled by the New Year’s Eve incident, Simpson was looking for any opportunity to rewrite history. (This perverse impulse, in fact, persisted into the civil trial, when, in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, he continued to insist that he’d never struck Nicole. Never!) Unfortunately for Simpson, kicking Officer Edwards around was not his ticket to rehabilitation. It only served to repeat the facts of a crime to which he ultimately had pled “no contest.”

“Amateurish,” I scribbled on a Post-it to Chris. He rolled his eyes in agreement.

I wondered if the jury was taking all this in.

The 911 dispatchers and Detective Edwards had laid a credible foundation for our next witness, Ron Shipp. Chris and I were pinning a lot of our hopes on Ron. Of all of our domestic violence witnesses, he was potentially the most damaging to the defendant. His testimony was also the hardest won.

Back in July, the cops passed me a tip about Ron. A former LAPD officer, he’d suffered from a drinking problem and left the force about five years earlier. Since then, he’d apparently tried his hand at acting, without much success. The really interesting thing about him was that he’d been a longtime friend of O. J. Simpson’s. He’d even worked security details for O. J.-and, in fact, had had some contact with him after the murders. The cops suspected that Shipp knew “something very important.” I sent out the word that I wanted to speak with him.

Shipp showed up at the CCB on Thursday, July 28, in the company of his attorney, Bob McNeil-as it happened, a law school buddy of mine. Shipp was a compact black man, a few years younger than O. J. Simpson. His honest, open face, strewn generously with freckles, radiated decency.

I motioned them to an office down the hall from mine. Phil Vannatter joined us. He and Ron went back a long way on the force; I let him do the questioning.

“You know why we’re here, Ron,” Phil said. “We’re here to talk about O. J. Simpson and Nicole… And what I would like you to do… is just tell me what you know about their relationship. What was going on between them.”

Ron hesitated.

“I met Nicole before they were married and were living together… fifteen years [ago]… As far as I was concerned… they had a great marriage. A great relationship.”

So far, no good.

Shipp explained that he’d known Simpson for twenty-six years. When he was working patrol, he’d bring his cop friends over to play tennis at Simpson’s house. Ron insisted he hadn’t known about any problems in the Simpson marriage before the New Year’s Eve incident. A couple of days after that happened, Nicole had telephoned him for help. Ron, she knew, taught classes at the Police Academy dealing with spousal abuse. She wanted him to talk to her husband. Ron came over to the house with some lesson plans from the class, including a profile of the victim and the batterer.

“And she sat there and she pointed out hers and what she thought was his [profile],” Ron told us. At this point, he stopped. He was clearly uncomfortable.

“You would feel better if you know that you’ve told the truth,” I said gently. “You could not have prevented what happened… no matter how hard you tried… The only thing that you can do now… is to tell the truth.”

Ron took a deep breath. “I told her before she let him back in the house to get counseling,” he said.

At Nicole’s request, he arranged to talk to Simpson and show him the batterer’s profile. “When he first saw it,” Ron recalled, “he says, ‘It’s not me.’ ” Then Simpson backed up to admit he saw a “little bit” of himself in the category of “pathological jealousy.”

Simpson was terrified that bad publicity from the New Year’s battering would ruin his career. Ron suggested that he make a bold move. Simpson should go public with his problem. If he did that, Shipp predicted, women’s groups would rally behind him.

“He acted like it sounded good to him,” Ron recalled. “The next day, I don’t know who he talked to, but he was advised by someone… not to touch it with a ten-foot pole. And that was that.”

We asked Shipp what happened after Nicole and Simpson split up. Ron said, “She had this thing about who was going to be her friend.” Most of the couple’s mutual friends, he said, threw their loyalties to the Juice. But even at the risk of offending his hero, Ron would check in on Nicole from time to time to see how she was. This I found touching. I could see that Ron Shipp was a man of integrity and courage.

Phil asked whether he had any opinion about Simpson’s guilt or innocence. It was obviously a tough question. Ron paused.

“Whoever did this did a heck of a job of framing him,” he finally replied.

There were tears in his eyes.

I knew even then that there was way more that Shipp could tell us. I told Phil to stay on top of him. Months passed. Meetings were set; meetings were canceled. But Shipp, it turned out, hadn’t been so elusive with everyone.

Suzanne, Patti Jo, the law clerks, everyone was constantly dropping must-reads on my desk. In December one of them had deposited Sheila Weller’s Raging Heart. My first impulse was to dismiss it as sensationalism. But things had reached the point where, in order to keep up with the latest developments in this case, I had to check out the best-seller list. So late one night, as I was doing a turn on my exercise bike, I propped the book on the handlebars and started skimming.

I hadn’t gotten ten pages into it before a passage leaped out at me. It concerned a man named “Leo” who’d spent time with Simpson at Rockingham the evening after the murder. Leo was identified as a man with a “good working knowledge of criminal forensics.” Simpson had asked to speak to him privately that night in his bedroom.

“How long does it take for DNA to come back?” Simpson had supposedly asked him. Leo thought it took a couple of months. Simpson then told him that the police had asked him to take a polygraph but that he’d refused, ” ‘Cause I have had some dreams about killing her.’ “

I read this account with dawning amazement. Leo was Ron Shipp! Ron had told us he’d been to Rockingham that night to pay his respects to O.J. and his family. But he certainly hadn’t passed along any conversation that he might have had while alone with Simpson in his bedroom. And he certainly hadn’t mentioned the dream.

The following day, I had Chris bring Shipp in. This time we got the full story-the one he had told Weller. After hearing about the murders on June 13, Shipp had driven to Rockingham. At first, he was turned away at the gate, but later, around six o’clock, he’d managed to get in.

The house was full of people-Arnelle and Jason; Simpson’s sisters and their husbands; Simpson’s personal assistant of many years, Cathy Randa; Bob Kardashian. At one point Simpson said he wanted to go to bed. He asked Ron to come upstairs with him. Shipp told us how Simpson took off his shirt and pants and folded them carefully. Simpson was apparently meticulous about his clothes. As he was undressing he’d asked Ron about polygraph tests. How reliable were those things?

“Very reliable,” Ron had told him.

And Simpson had replied with a chuckle, “To be honest, Shipp, I’ve had some dreams of killing her.”

Had Ron taken any money from Sheila Weller? Chris asked. Ron insisted he hadn’t. He’d told Weller about Simpson’s dream because he wanted to unburden his conscience. He wanted the information to get out, but he didn’t want to be fingered for it. Weller had promised him anonymity.

So much for anonymity. We intended to put Ron Shipp on the stand.

Actually, there were pros and cons involved in Shipp’s testimony. It looked pretty bad that he’d originally withheld the information from us. But it was also apparent that he was telling the truth. The “dream” conversation had allegedly occurred on Monday night-the same day that Vannatter and Lange, in the course of taking Simpson’s original statement, had asked him if he’d consent to a lie-detector test.

Remember, Simpson had told them, “I’m sure eventually I’ll do it. But it’s like I’ve got some weird thoughts now… You know, when you’ve been with a person for seventeen years, you think everything. I’ve got to understand what this thing is. If it’s true blue, I don’t mind.”

The “dream” mentioned to Shipp obviously fell into that “weird thoughts” category. What he wanted, no doubt, was to argue that his angry thoughts about Nicole aroused such internal turmoil that it might make a polygraph needle jerk. Even then, the son of a bitch was working up an alibi in the event he failed the lie-detector test.

The defense lawyers, of course, had access to our interview with Shipp, and the prospect of this “dream” evidence clearly agitated them. Out of the presence of the jury, Carl Douglas argued strenuously that it shouldn’t be admitted because dreams could not “predict behavior.” Of course, we were never suggesting that they could.

What we wanted to show was Simpson’s general mind-set on the day after the murders. Here you have him suggesting to Tom and Phil in the police statement that he and Nicole were totally cool about their failed reconciliation. A few hours later he’s telling Ron Shipp that he’s had dreams of killing her. That day, Ito rejected Douglas’s arguments, allowing us to present Shipp’s testimony. Lance caught flak for that ruling among the talking heads and eventually he wimped out and instructed the jurors to ignore the dream comments. Too bad-he got it right the first time.

I ran into Ron moments before his testimony. He was sitting in the little foyer outside the War Room. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping well. I went up to him and gave him a hug.

“We’re behind you,” I assured him. “And we can party when you’re done.”

He laughed, but I could tell he was heartsick. I really felt for the guy. He was not just an admiring fan about to bring down his hero. He was a black man testifying against another black man. Ron knew-we all knew-that he’d catch some hell for turning on Simpson. But none of us had any idea how much he’d end up paying.

When Ron took the stand, Chris laid a brilliant foundation for his long, adulatory history with Simpson.

“And do you and the defendant remain friends today?” Chris asked him.

“I still love the guy. But-um… This is a weird situation,” Ron allowed.

Leading up to the dream episode, Chris asked Ron, “Did he [Simpson] ask you any questions about the investigation that night?”

“After he told me about what they found at his house,” Ron replied, “he asked me, ‘How long does it take DNA to come back?’ “

“And at that time, did you know the correct answer to that question?”

“I just off-the-cuff said two months.”

“And what did he say in response?”

“He kind of jokingly just said, you know, ‘To be honest, Shipp… I’ve had some dreams of killing her.’ “

I winced a little. The defendant’s dream comments had originally been made in the context of his having been asked to take a lie-detector test. But that couldn’t be said in court, because testimony relating to polygraphs is inadmissible under California law. So while the jury heard that Simpson had dreamed of killing his ex-wife, that comment now seemed to come out of nowhere. They couldn’t be told that it was part of a scheme to give himself an excuse for failing a lie-detector test.

What followed was one of the meanest cross-examinations I’ve ever seen. It was intended, I think, to send a message that no traitors from the Simpson camp would be tolerated; the defense was determined to destroy Shipp. Johnnie, it came out, was related in some distant way to Ron, and he couldn’t bring himself to make the kill. Carl Douglas was the designated hit man.

First, Carl tried to establish that Shipp didn’t know the defendant as well as he’d claimed. After all, they never double-dated with their wives. O.J. had never played a single game of tennis with him.

“I guess you can say,” Ron said slowly, “I was like everybody else, one of his servants.”

Far from compromising himself, Ron’s reply served to make him appear both humble and self-aware.

Carl hammered away at Shipp, trying to get him to admit that the dream story was nothing more than an attempt to call attention to himself and advance his own acting career.

“I’m doing this for my conscience and my peace of mind,” Ron replied calmly. “I will not have the blood of Nicole on Ron Shipp. I can sleep at night, unlike a lot of others.”

As Ron looked better and better, Carl’s jabs got meaner.

“Isn’t it true that you were never alone with O. J. Simpson that night at Rockingham? Isn’t it true that the defendant’s sister, Shirley, was the one who accompanied him upstairs alone that night?” Carl even offered a veiled hint that Ron might have been in on the police conspiracy to plant evidence.

Ron looked right past Carl, straight into the face of his former hero.

“This is sad, O. J… This is really sad.”

Then Carl Douglas sank to a new low, even for the Dream Team. First he brought up Ron’s old drinking problem. We objected, of course-what was the relevance of a condition that ended years ago? Overruled.

Wasn’t it true, he asked, that a few days before the murders Ron brought a tall blond woman to Rockingham and asked to use the Jacuzzi? Objection, irrelevant. Overruled. Ron tried to explain that he and his wife were friends of hers. Didn’t matter. The message Carl intended to send to those five black women on the jury was perfectly clear:

Black man steps out on his black wife with a white bitch. Are you going to tolerate this, my sisters?

It was horrible.

I was unprepared for the reports that came back to me following Ron’s testimony. Black journalists in the newsroom below us were branding him a liar and a traitor. The next issue of the city’s black-owned newspaper, the Sentinel, ran a banner headline proclaiming Shipp a “drunk” and accusing him of joining “O.J.‘s Cast of ‘Addicts, Liars.’ ” For weeks thereafter, Ron received death threats against himself, his wife, and his children.

I had been aware, of course, of the deep racial schism in this case. But I’d held out some hope that a man of such obvious integrity as Ron Shipp might somehow bridge the divide. When I saw the trouble he’d bought upon himself and his family by speaking the truth, I felt both my ideals and my confidence crumbling. If Ron Shipp’s testimony could be flung away so cavalierly, there would never be enough evidence in this world to prove O. J. Simpson’s guilt.

Denise Brown was pretty much a law unto herself. And I had no illusions about how she would be received. She was the white girl’s white sister.

During the pretrial motions, she’d taken the defense to task on camera asking why, if they were trying so hard to find the truth, they were trying to get the evidence suppressed. On a personal level, I dug her gutsy style, but as a prosecutor I wasn’t thrilled with her penchant for publicity. One ill-considered remark to the press, I knew, could render her worthless as a witness. On top of it, Denise had had her own problems with alcohol. Shapiro was threatening a blistering cross in which he would exploit whatever information he had to taint her credibility.

“You’d better clamp down on her,” I told Chris. We needed to keep the testimony tidy and circumscribed. Understated sincerity. Easy on the tears. That was the ticket for this witness. Ito had ruled that we couldn’t bring up any violent incidents that occurred before 1981, so we had to be especially careful.

But Denise was not so easily reined in. On the morning of her testimony, she showed up in a black pantsuit with a large gold cross hanging from her neck. It was very stylish, but way too hip to make points with this jury.

During her first few minutes on the stand, Denise seemed in control of herself. Chris handled her well, leading her carefully through the early days of her sister’s relationship with O. J. Simpson.

“When did you first meet the defendant?” he asked her.

“Back in 1977,” she replied. “He was playing football for Buffalo.”

Nicole had invited Denise and Dominique out East for a game. While they were sitting in the stands, a friend of O.J.‘s came over to say hello to Nicole. She kissed him on both cheeks.

“And after the game, did you go to the defendant’s house? Chris asked.

What! I thought. Why is Chris giving her this opening? She’s not supposed to discuss anything that happened in 1977.

“You returned to the defendant’s home after the game, right?”

Yes, they did.

“Anything unusual happen then?”

Denise began to vent.

“O.J. got real upset and he started screaming at Nicole.”

Shapiro objected and asked for a sidebar. I couldn’t blame him. Ito dressed Chris down for letting his witness mention an incident that occurred before the ten-year time limit.

“You are to disregard the last… answer,” Ito told the jury. “Treat it as though you never heard it.”

Things got worse. Denise told about the night she and her boyfriend Dino had double-dated with Nicole and O.J. at a watering hole in Santa Ana. They were throwing back shots of tequila when Simpson grabbed Nicole’s crotch and proclaimed, “This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.”

“And Nicole just sort of wrote it off like it was nothing,” Denise said. “Like she was used to that kind of treatment.”

A quiver had crept into her voice. Oh no, I thought, no tears!

For some reason, Chris then asked Denise whether Simpson shied away when people came up to ask him for autographs. Denise, contempt in her voice, said, “Oh, no, not at all. He loves the attention. He loves it. He’s got a big ego. It feeds his ego.”

Another objection. Another sidebar. This time Ito directly instructed the witness to stick to relevant issues.

Denise then described that other double date after which they’d all returned to Rockingham, a little drunk on margaritas. They were sitting at the bar when she was moved to tell O.J. that she thought he “took Nicole for granted.” He “blew up,” she said, and started throwing things around: pictures; photos-then Nicole and the other guests. “She ended up… falling,” Denise said of her sister. “She ended up on her elbows and on her butt.”

At that point, Denise rested, forehead in hand, and wept.

“It’s just so hard,” she whimpered.

There was no doubt in my mind that she was sincerely overcome. But I cringed at how this would play to the Twelve Stone Faces. “No tears,” I’d warned Chris. But when you put on a grieving relative, you take your chances. I glanced at the jury box. Sure enough, I saw not compassion but scowls of disbelief.

I knew this icy reaction to Denise’s testimony was sounding the death knell to our domestic violence case. We’d put the brutal facts right in front of this jury, and they were quite visibly rejecting them. It couldn’t have been more clear if they’d actually given the thumbs-down.

Right then and there I made a quiet decision to cut our losses. Chris would not accept this without a fight. He and Scott were so personally invested in DV that they would want to pick up the thread again later on in the trial, when Ito had said we could present the B-string battering incidents. I knew I could not let this happen. Introducing the abuse witnesses so late in the case would seem out of context-certainly a step backward. It would also seem like a desperate effort at character assassination, the kind of move you make if you’ve failed to prove your case. The witnesses would seem like afterthoughts, and the jury would have been furious at hearing them then. I held the veto and I would use it.

On February 3, the day of Denise’s testimony, we had proof positive that this jury was too besotted by the fame of the defendant to hear the cries of his victims. No one else knew it for sure. But I knew Denise Brown would be the last domestic violence witness in the case of People v. Orenthal James Simpson.

CAR TAPE. It’s February 6, Monday. Came to work and saw the National Enquirer’s two-page inside spread of me… I use the word with great intent. I’m just plastered all over the place. [It’s] just so disgusting. I felt so humiliated…

This would never happen to a man. The world is so far more sexist than anybody ever dreamed. I feel so sick, I can barely see straight.

After Denise’s breakdown on the stand that Friday afternoon, Ito dismissed us early. In a way I was relieved that the rest of her testimony would be held over until Monday. It would buy me some time. I was due to put on the dog-bark witnesses immediately after Chris wrapped up domestic violence. Now I had an unbroken block of weekend hours to polish my questions.

When I arrived at my office on Monday morning, I was feeling pretty squared away. There was a knock on my door. Suzanne appeared, looking very uncomfortable.

“What’s up?” I asked her, trying to arrange foldersful of witness outlines in chronological order.

“Um… Marcia…” she stammered. “I don’t know how to tell you this…”

That stopped me cold. Whenever Suzanne opened a conversation this way, it usually meant fresh hell from the “newses”-her quaint expression for the broadcast media. I kept expecting those guys to lose interest in me. Each new offensive left me more bewildered than the last. I felt like I was chained to a breakwater. The waves would batter me into the pilings. They’d subside for a while and then swell and pound me again. There was nothing I could do about it.

“It’s really not that bad,” Suzanne continued in her best effort to soothe. “It’s just that your ex-mother-in-law…”

Huh?

“Well, she sold some pictures of you to the Enquirer… Did you ever visit a nude beach in Europe?”

Nude beach? At first, it didn’t register. And then my befuddled thoughts settled on an image of that carefree afternoon more than twenty years ago when I was kicking loose after the bar exam. In my mind’s eye, I could see Gaby and me and our Italian train-conductor friend. We were playful and giddy. I’d shed my top. It was so innocent. And such a long time ago, and in another world.

I’d never been on real close terms with Gaby’s mother, Clara. After Gaby’s accident, she’d taken him back to Israel to live with her. I hadn’t spoken to her for at least fourteen years, but I could imagine she was pretty bitter about the way things turned out. And I’m sure she held me responsible, however unfairly, for Gaby’s misfortunes. But to sell a personal photo of me to a tabloid? I later learned that a private eye, hoping to curry favor with the Dream Team, had tracked her down in Israel and put her in touch with the Enquirer.

I tried to speak but I couldn’t get any words out.

“I can bring it to you if you want,” Suzanne offered, breaking the long silence.

I knew if I looked at those photos, realizing that they were being sold by the millions at checkout counters around America, I’d fall to fucking pieces. The only comfort, however slight, came from the knowledge that my jury was sequestered. Even if news of them were tracked into the Inter-Continental by visiting spouses, at least the jurors wouldn’t be able to see them. But wouldn’t just the knowledge of those photos affect my credibility? And what about my peers? I’d have to walk down the halls of my own office knowing everyone had seen me bare-breasted. And what about the defense? The defense. I’m sure those low-dealing bastards were laughing up their sleeves about now.

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I finally managed to get out. “Maybe I’ll come by later and take a look.”

It was a lame attempt at bravado. But better, I guess, than self-pity.

I packed up my books and notepads and flattered myself that I could shut the whole incident out of my head. During the morning session, I felt as if I did manage to concentrate on Denise’s testimony. By the mid-morning break, I was finally feeling strong enough to assess the damage. I asked Scott Gordon to come with me for moral support.

We ran into Suzanne’s secretary at the door.

“Maria,” I whispered to her. “Before I take the gut shot, tell me, what do you think?”

“I tell you, girlfriend,” she whispered back, “you got nothin’ to be ashamed of.”

The Enquirer was lying on Suzanne’s desk. I flipped to the spread. There I was, wearing a “sunny smile” and a striped bikini bottom. And nothing on top. A black bar had been superimposed over my nipples. But it did nothing to mitigate the tawdry effect. Here I was, a professional woman in the middle of prosecuting a major criminal trial, suddenly exposed naked in a supermarket tabloid. I was so lost in my own humiliation that I couldn’t hear the words of comfort my co-workers were trying to offer me.

I should never have tried to make it back to court that day. I guess I wanted to prove that I was tough enough to keep my head up and keep on working. I overestimated my own strength. No sooner had I taken my seat at the counsel table beside Scott than I felt the tears welling up in my eyes.

Oh, God, no, I told myself. You can’t lose it now.

Way off in the distance, I heard Chris’s voice as he conducted his redirect of Denise. He turned in my direction and beckoned me to sidebar. I could tell that he needed me immediately.

It didn’t matter. I felt myself slipping further and further into pain. The tears were rolling down my cheeks. I wiped them away and leaned into Scott’s shoulder to hide my humiliation from the defense, the jury, the press.

The redirect ended quickly, and Lance must have caught my distress, because, in a singular act of compassion, he quickly managed to recess court for the day.

I holed up in my office, trying to regain my composure. I couldn’t stop beating myself up for crying in court. Chris walked in without knocking and, with his usual lack of ceremony, dropped into a chair.

“I’m sorry I let you down today,” I apologized. “It won’t happen again.”

He shrugged.

“Don’t let them get you down, G,” he said. “In a week no one will remember it.”

He was right. Or at least I wanted to think he was right.

“Besides,” he continued, “I thought you looked real good in those pictures.”

“You really think so?”

“Sure.”

“You didn’t think I looked fat?”

He laughed.

“No way, man. It gave me a woody.”

I took a minute to get it. By that time Chris was grinning.

I laughed. Then we both started to laugh. And we laughed and continued laughing until we were actually howling. With a single bawdy quip, Chris had managed to restore my perspective. How, I asked myself, does he manage to do that?