by Kim Goldman
In a perfect world, we would have buried that book where it would never see the light of day, and that would have been the end of it. But this wasn’t an option. While we thought we had some measure of control over the book, it was not completely ours to do what we wished. And something bigger than us had a different plan.
Before we could make a decision regarding the auction, the next punch was thrown: Arnelle Simpson, the killer’s eldest daughter and a principal owner of Lorraine Brooke Associates, filed Chapter 7 on the phony company, just days after the auction order came through. This was a strategic move to stop the cycle from spinning out of their control. We would now be moving this circus to a Miami bankruptcy court.
Early on, the bankruptcy judge denied a request by Lorraine Brooke Associates to switch the case from Chapter 7 (liquidation) to Chapter 11 (reorganization). The judge also ruled that the transfer of the book rights from the killer to Lorraine Brooke Associates was fraudulent—he saw right through their scheming. From the court’s point of view, If I Did It was an asset that had to be monetized. And because we levied early on to stop him from earning any money, and because we had the biggest claim against him, the rights were awarded to us.
The bankruptcy court compelled us to publish the book within 18 months, and the money made from the proceeds would pay off the creditors, as well as the bankruptcy trustees. Basically we were ordered to publish a book that we had yanked off the shelves, so that the money we earned for our hard work and sacrifice could pay down our very own judgment, and help him pay down his outstanding debt, which included the Brown family, old attorney bills, some outstanding cable bills, a car loan, and whoever else threw their claim into the pot.
The legal gymnastics is exhausting and leaves my body and mind incredibly twisted. Every day there was a new obstacle, a new law suit, a new attorney, another delay, another predicament that my father and I would have to endure as it related to this stupid book. I hated it. I hated all of it. I hated what it represented, who it represented, and the sheer fact that if we did nothing, he would once again regain the book and stand to make millions and millions of dollars, as he laughed in our faces. I spent many a sleepless night searching my heart and soul for the right answer. I don’t know that I ever found one.
Once we read the book, we realized that it was not by any stretch a “manual to murder.” Images and stories on Google are far more graphic than his account of what happened on June 12, 1994. That being said, I do believe it is his narcissistic attempt at setting the record straight about what happened. So finally he could state his case, hide behind some fiction, and paint a picture that makes him the hero, the god that he believes he is. I skimmed the chapters leading up to the night he slit Nicole’s throat and stabbed my brother to death. I couldn’t stomach the denial and the victim blaming and the justifying for what he was about to do in Chapter 6, “The Night in Question.”
I’ve always been terrified at the thought of what my brother endured the night he lost his life. What was he thinking, what did he see, what did he hear, what did he feel? Was he scared? How long did he lay there, begging for someone to save him? And selfishly, I wondered if he thought of me and my dad and died knowing how much he was loved. No matter how much time passes, these are the thoughts that creep into my sleep.
By the killer’s accounts, he went to Bundy that night to “scare the shit out of Nicole.” He donned a knit cap, snuck in the back gate, got into an altercation with Nicole, taunted my brother who tried to defend himself, and then poof, seconds later was covered in blood. “More blood than I had ever seen,” he says. He even went as far to talk about another person at the scene, Charlie, who concurred that he, O. J. Simpson, was the killer. Once I read that, as hard as it was, there was no doubt in my mind that this was his confession. I was very willing to do whatever it would take to let the world read it.
In the end, we decided that since we were ordered to publish that book, we would do it our way, adding our commentary and publishing it under our names, not his. We received some criticism for this, and I understand that, but the reality was this was the best of a lot of bad options.
For the first time in years, there was a shimmer of hope that a little bit of the civil judgment money could be recovered as a result of our efforts. And that maybe my father, pushing seventy years old, could stop working twelve hours a day to barely make ends meet. That I, a single mother, raising a kid alone with no other financial support, could ensure that my son have a decent future. And finally, my brother. It always came back to him…that his killer would finally be punished for stabbing my best friend over and over again. The thought of punishment made me feel giddy.
For years, my dad and I always made decisions, first and foremost what was best for our family. But we were also very concerned about the Simpson children. While these were the killer’s children, they were also Nicole’s. They were innocent, and they had suffered from their father’s actions as much as we had. We avoided a number of legal options for fear of how it would impact the killer’s family. We were entitled to a lot of legal maneuvering that would have resulted in money toward the $33M civil verdict, but the sacrifice was too great and it wasn’t worth it to us to endanger Nicole’s kids or the killer’s family. They were all collateral damage, someone had to look out for them.
When it came to If I Did It, it was no different. We hemmed and hawed and considered all of the accusations about it “hurting the kids” and “reopening” wounds if the book was published.
But the “kids” were adults now, and they weren’t completely innocent. In a deposition with Arnelle Simpson, she revealed that Justin and Sydney (now in their early twenties) knew all about the book, knew all about its contents, knew all about the money they stood to receive, and they even knew where to sign on the dotted line as 25% owners of the company designed to be a shell corporation to hide assets from us. And this wasn’t their first time at the Rodeo De’ Simpson. This was the third or fourth company established to avoid civil accountability.
That itty bitty fact made our decision much easier. It’s hard to factor in their feelings when we learn that they were essentially working against us. Now to be fair, they may not have totally understood what was happening, and they may have trusted family members who assured them that it “was no big deal, just sign here, and then you’ll get some money.” It’s hard to know.
What I find interesting in our long pursuit of justice is that the wins don’t feel victorious for very long. The feeling of pride and accomplishment we get, with each small success, is intermittent. He still has his freedom, his house, his kids, his money, his future, and we will always have a broken version of all of that. It doesn’t seem fair. And now, again, we won in court but the prize is having to publish his nonsense.
I added a few chapters explaining how and why we ended up being such an integral and driving force behind If I Did It. We added a victim resource section, and we added a piece written by Dominick Dunne, with the hope that it would numb the sting of the book. We left everything as was written by him; only changing the title, making the “If” miniscule, leaving the words “I DID IT” prominent and permanent.
We did the media circuit, underwent hordes of scrutiny, and did our best to promote what we felt was his admission of guilt after a decade of denial. There was no joy when the book sat on the best seller list for weeks on end; there was no hip hip hooray when the book orders kept rolling in. We were in turmoil.
But then, as luck would finally have it, what happened in Vegas, didn’t stay in Vegas. It was all caught on tape and airing on every news channel across America.
On September 16, 2007, O. J. Simpson was arrested in a robbery-kidnapping fiasco in Las Vegas. It turns out that three days earlier, the day that our interview with Oprah Winfrey aired talking about If I Did It, he stormed a Vegas hotel room, with guns, demanding his “stuff” back. My dad and I are in New York, doing a live TV interview on FOX, when the news breaks that he was under investigatio
n
When I caught a glimpse of him in his orange jumpsuit, handcuffed, I laughed wildly. I can only hope that seeing our family on the Oprah show, talking about HIS book, pissed him off just enough to act like a thug.
While I love the idea that our Oprah appearance pushed him over the edge, the show itself caused me great angst.
I hate the word “closure.” I have been listening to people suggest it to me for nineteen years, and I don’t think that they honestly understand what they’re really saying when they use that term. Not even Oprah herself.
“Kim, the country has moved on. When will you find closure, find peace, and move on?”
In my mind, Oprah’s tone was patronizing and condescending, although not too dissimilar to the tone of the other people who have suggested it to me.
Apparently, on this day I had reached my limit.
“It’s insulting to me that you would assume we would ever move on. I live with the loss of my brother every day. You don’t ‘get over’ that!” I responded to her.
When people use the word “closure,” as it relates to grief and loss, it stirs up a litany of emotions.
While those of us who are mourning the loss of a loved one appreciate that a friend or a family member is probably trying to comfort us, encouraging us to find closure is the last thing we want to hear.
Please, just hand us Kleenex, listen if we need to talk, or say nothing and learn to be comfortable in the silence.
I know it is hard to see us in pain, but suggesting that “moving on” is the best thing to do is confusing and insensitive. There is no magic word to make this “go away.”
We will be okay. We will adjust. We will find happiness.
We realize this is hard for you, too. So sometimes we might just let you say the words “get on with your life, your loved one would want that for you,” but know that secretly we would prefer it if you just stopped talking.
Being sad is okay. Feeling grief is okay. Not fixing it is okay. For as long as we are living, loss will be part of our emotional repertoire.
Please try and understand this, instead of encouraging us to box it up and put it high up on a shelf…because it will eventually come crashing down that way.
As long as I’ve been living with the loss of my brother, I have had to face countless uncomfortable emotions, which include facing fears of my own mortality, the anxiety of thinking I could lose everyone around me, and the worry that erupts each time my friends and family don’t call after a long car ride or flight.
And yes, sometimes I still experience intense, immeasurable anger.
I still pick up the phone to call my brother, even though I am painfully aware that he won’t answer. I can’t help it. I have forgotten that I can’t talk to him anymore. The longing to hear his voice is overwhelming. I still grapple with that intense desire to want to reach out and connect with him through laughter and conversation.
I still shudder when I think of what he went through on the night he was murdered.
I still wonder what his children would have looked like.
At any given moment, I can be so overcome with an ache in my heart that I just want to die, so I won’t have to feel it anymore…
But not allowing myself to experience all of those erratic—yet absolutely consistent—feelings makes me think I am dishonoring my brother’s memory in some way. Believe me, that is far harder to deal with than the ups and downs of mourning.
I have always said that grief is like a best friend. It knows me better than anyone. It’s reliable and always there when I need it. It makes me angry, makes me sad. Comforts me, loves me, protects me. I will never have another relationship quite like it.
But that’s my process.
One of the things I learned early on in my grieving was that I wasn’t only managing my own pain. I was also dealing with everybody else’s reaction to it as well. That was something I wasn’t prepared for.
I could barely function in my own world, and now I had to make everyone else feel better too? How was I going to be able to do that?
When someone suggested “finding closure” to me, it was really just their way of saying, “I have no idea what to say to you, so I am just going to say something that will make this awkwardness less awkward.”
People were so uncomfortable around my sadness, it made me self-conscious, so I hid from it and tried to be “OK,” so they wouldn’t shift in their seat every time I was around.
If I said I was sad that day, or kind of down, people wouldn’t know what to do with me, so they would blurt out supposedly comforting comments.
“Oh, it’s part of God’s plan. Ron is in a better place.”
“Would Ron want you to be sad?”
“Ron is watching over you.”
And most of the time I just wanted to argue, because those comments aren’t comforting to me at all. They make me crazy, and they insinuate that I am abnormal for feeling sad or less than for not believing in God. And how the hell do I know what Ron would want me to do? It’s not as if we ever talked about what the proper behavior should be should one of us die.
So, as I always do, I act “strong.” I hate that word too. The opposite of that word is “weak,” and the implication is that you are either one way or the other. The category of “strong” or “weak” can be debilitating, no matter which one you choose.
But the truth is, none of us really knows what we are doing or how to deal with it. Loss is unique to each individual person. It has to be, because relationships are unique to each of us.
I have had the relatives of victims tell me that the greatest loss of all is the loss of a child—that nothing else compares to it. Were they saying that my grief, isn’t as valid as my father’s grief, because I am just a sibling? I don’t know for sure, but I used to get really offended, and then sometimes I actually felt selfish in thinking that maybe I wasn’t being sensitive enough toward my father’s loss, that maybe his was worse than mine. As if I needed more to worry about.
Even though my dad and I both lost the same person, our bond with Ron was very different, so we inevitably feel his loss differently. None of us can understand 100 percent what the other one is feeling, even if we have suffered something similar. It’s just not possible. There can be no comparison. Loss is loss. I don’t care how it comes to you, or how deep the relationship went, it is a horrible feeling to lose someone in your life whom you love, regardless of cause of death or bloodlines.
The one thing that remains the same—no matter the victim, the tragedy, or the relationship—is that most of us will agree that “closure” does not exist.
So rather than try and fix it, let’s try having a dialogue about what it feels like: What do we worry about? What are our triggers? What are our coping skills? Where are we vulnerable? Where are we stronger? What do you need from us? What do we need from you? How can we help one another? Do you want me to just sit in silence with you?
These are the questions and the situations that need addressing. Perhaps rather than worrying about “closure,” we should invite an “opening” of these doors.
* * *
There have also been times when the bumbling discourse between the griever and the consoler has reached cartoonish sitcom proportions.
“So next weekend is the observation of my brother’s death,” I said amid the buzz of a noisy restaurant in Santa Monica, in June 2010.
My on-again-off-again boyfriend of the time nodded in acknowledgment.
Phew, half the battle, he remembered the date.
He is so considerate, I thought.
So, feeling safe, I continued to open up.
“Assuming that we will be together at some point in the day, I wanted to share with you a bit. I get kinda spacey, a little anxious. And as the day progresses, I tend to shut down more because I start to obsess about the time and monitoring Ron’s last movements.”
He was still listening.
“So I just wanted to let you know that the day is r
eally hard for me, and the days leading up to it are equally difficult.”
Wow, this isn’t as hard as I thought it would be I mused, as I continued to share the difficulty of that date and all the emotion I was bound to feel.
And then my partner took my hand softly in his, pulled himself in a little closer, and said, “Kim, it was sixteen years ago, and it’s not going to happen again. So, you could choose to celebrate Ron’s life that day and not mourn him.”
I was stopped in my tracks and immediately felt the walls go up. Feeling a little bit of throw-up in my mouth, I paused to regain my composure.
I sighed and said, “True, it won’t happen again, and it was sixteen years ago, but I know myself pretty well, and I am fairly confident that this day will run much like it has every other year prior, you know, considering it has been sixteen years.”
Still nodding, he said, “Right. But rather than be the victim, you could choose to think positively about Ron and not dwell on the bad stuff. It’s a choice, ya know.”
Barely peeking over the iron wall that I had just erected, I said calmly, “Ya know, three hundred sixty-four days of the year I choose to honor and celebrate Ron in the best way I can. I ward off evil, morbid thoughts and I do my best to survive every day to the best of my ability. And I think I am doing a great job of not living the life of a victim, but on this one day, I choose not to be in control of my grief, my mourning, and my sorrow. For one day, I give myself permission to feel it all because no matter what I want to do, my brain is flooded with images. Every day I choose not to let the negative thoughts take over my life, which, by the way, take a nanosecond to appear, so on this day, I let ’em have at it. In some ways, that is how I honor him, but, more important, myself.”