by Kim Goldman
He leaned forward, kissed my forehead and said, “Okay, I am listening.”
But did he hear me?
In the end, it wouldn’t matter.
Three hours later, he dumped me.
* * *
Since 1994, I have been left vulnerable to attacks from the media, Hollywood, the public, when I least expect it. Our case has become part of pop culture, and whether or not you were of voting age at the time of the murders, or subsequent trials, everybody knows a little something about the biggest case in recent history.
Everybody can recall where they were when the Bronco chase interrupted Game 5 of the NBA (National Basketball Association) Finals, when the New York Knicks ultimately beat the Houston Rockets. They can remember what they were doing on the day that the verdict was read, when the news showed the reactions of blacks versus whites all day long; or the civil verdict, when President Bill Clinton was delivering the State of the Union, while the other side of the split screen was announcing that our families had just been awarded $19.5 million.
Coincidentally I learned from a former boyfriend of mine that First Lady Hillary Clinton was an intense follower of the trial. She was obsessed with it. My boyfriend was her make-up artist and would often share with me her inquiries about my family and my well-being.
A year after the split-screen incident, in fact, my father, Patti, and I were invited to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., where we would unexpectedly meet the Clintons and the Gores.
I apologized to the president for “sharing air time” with him.
President Clinton responded kindly, “It all worked out okay for the both of us, didn’t it?”
He and Hillary both commended us for our courage, and said they were proud of us.
As you might imagine, it blew me away to think that the president of the United States was proud of me and my family for what we accomplished for the cause of justice. That is pretty heady stuff.
Nobody can deny that the attention surrounding this case was ridiculous and nauseating, and it is in many ways ongoing. Not at the same level as it was all those years ago, but there is still such a fascination connected to it.
In fact, in early 2011, while watching the Thursday-night lineup on NBC (my escape from real life), two references to the case blasted my TV speakers. New episodes of The Office and 30 Rock made derogatory references to the killer and the case.
As I tried to fall asleep later that same night, there was an episode of The Family Guy that also depicted the killer in a negative light. I wasn’t surprised to hear the first comment, thought the second one was just bizarre, but after the third reference, I wondered if I was being punk’d.
And while I appreciate that there is such spite for him and what he did, it’s still my life that gets dredged up for fodder.
Here we are nineteen years later, and it is still a hot-button issue.
As I am writing this book, this very chapter, I am being bombarded with e-mails from friends sharing an article about Oprah and her life’s dream to get “him” to finally confess…on her failing network. She has been outspoken that he is the one “get” that she never got.
Quoted at a Cable Conference in Chicago, in June 2011:
Asked whom she hoped to interview on her new network, Winfrey said she has for many years wanted to interview O.J. Simpson. “I have a dream of him confessing to me,” she said, eliciting both laughter and applause from the crowd. “And I am going to make that happen.”
Wow! And she wonders why I can’t find closure.
Oprah publicly humiliated me on national television, saying “the rest of the country moved on, why haven’t you?” She shunned my father and me for publishing that “abhorrent” book, If I Did It, which we deemed his confession. She accused us of getting blood money. I wonder how her having him on her OWN network isn’t the same thing.
* * *
Despite what some people might think, we don’t get paid when we appear on news programs or participate in interviews. My father and I have never exploited Ron’s murder for our own financial gain. We both work full time in order to make ends meet; we don’t live the high life. We are not rolling around in $40M, which is now where our family’s portion of the civil judgment is at.
And when we received money from the publication of the If I Did It book, which we were ordered to publish, people expected that my father and I would donate that income to charity. And why should we have to do that?
That has always confused me—we were held to that expectation, and then, because we didn’t adhere to it, we suddenly disappointed people and were marked as greedy. If you were in a car accident and were compensated for your injuries, would the world expect you to give it away? Doubtful. Why was this different?
It has taken me years to adjust to the notoriety of my brother’s murder—or more accurately, my brother’s murderer. An enormous number of people are killed on a daily basis, and nobody ever hears about them. Their families are left in despair and with a gaping hole in their hearts. In some ways I envy them that they can deal with their sorrow and their pain in privacy.
For so long, I have been put into some superhuman category of victims, and I have always resented it. They act as if my pain and my grief are different somehow, and they need to be handled with kid gloves.
The only thing that makes my loss different from someone else’s is that the public watched us grieve on national TV. And regardless of the years gone by, or the amount of attention we get, my wound is still gaping. And just when I least expect it, someone pours salt in it and I am left to regroup, alone.
* * *
Each day I live in fear that when I walk through the grocery store I will see something on the newsstand and I will have to answer to my son. He still doesn’t know who the bad man is who killed his uncle. He knows that Mommy and Papa are on TV sometimes, and we are in magazines. He knows that people stop us on the street to extend their condolences, and he realizes that Ron’s murder is talked about on the news sometimes. He has no idea the implications of any of it, and I am okay with that for today.
I worry that someone else will say something to him before I am ready for him to know more than he does, but I am confident that I have created a safe environment for Sam to ask me questions and to talk about anything. I wonder how long it will take before he realizes he can search the Internet, or open the encyclopedia (if he even knows what that is, in this digital age) to discover how public his uncle’s death really is.
Right now, my focus is on my brother and sharing as much as I can about him with Sam. The notoriety surrounding his murder doesn’t seem important.
I hope I can stay in that frame of mind for a long time.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Justice is a temporary thing that must come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.”
—Martin Luther
* * *
I have spent nineteen years focusing my energy in one area: the man I believe murdered my brother. I have never deviated from that belief, nor has my disdain for him lessened over the years.
However, that doesn’t mean that I am debilitated by my anger; I have learned how to manage so that I am not crippled by it. The space the killer takes up in my brain is compartmentalized and doesn’t consume my thoughts. With that said, it definitely has taken up some real estate that can be overwhelming at times.
On October 3, 1995, when the killer was acquitted of murdering Ron and Nicole, he walked out the same courtroom doors that we did. Knowing he had his freedom, and was able to roam the streets— the same ones I was wandering—gave me such anxiety. Never knowing when he would appear always left me looking over my shoulder. I never feared him physically hurting me, but my fear was the loss of control: the randomness of his antics, the upper hand that he had because he commanded media attention whenever he wanted.
I was always caught off guard whenever his picture would appear on the front of a magazine as I was checking o
ut at the grocery store, or when his name was mentioned on the late-night news or became material for comedians, talk show hosts, and movies. At times he seemed to be everywhere. And although he was always the butt of every joke, and the inferences about him were always about his guilt, he invaded my privacy and catapulted me into a paralyzed emotional state until I could process my emotions and move on. His presence was always unexpected, unwanted, and undesirable.
Even when he was held responsible for Ron and Nicole’s murder in the civil case, on February 4, 1997, he once again walked out the same doors that we did.
It has been almost eleven years since a jury unanimously awarded us a verdict in the civil case.
At that time, we were so grateful that a jury of his “actual” peers saw it the way we did and saw it the way the evidence did—that he killed Ron and Nicole. The pride that we felt was so overwhelming. But as quickly as the jury returned their verdict, the killer pushed himself back from the table and sauntered out of the courtroom, waving to the cameras as he entered his SUV and drove off into the night. In a blink we were reminded that despite having the verdict that He Did It permanently inscribed on the record, he had the power to walk away and the audacity to go out for ice cream minutes after being told he was a killer. We were left with a piece of paper that said he owed us $19 million and he went out for cookie dough ice cream.
The killer’s brazen disregard for the pain he caused, his endless taunting of our family, and his continued disrespect for the system that gave him his freedom—all of it empowers and motivates us to pursue this path as fervently as we have all these years.
—from If I Did It, published and written by the Goldman family
He continued to have the same freedom that he had been experiencing for the last few years: breathing the same air as me, drinking the same water, feeling the same sun on his face—all of the luxuries that my brother never will have again because of him. And even though we proved in a court of law that he brutally killed two innocent people, he went home and slipped into his own bed. He woke up in the comfort of his own home, while the mother of his children and my best friend lay in pine boxes six feet under.
Whether or not I feel that his life has been good or bad since the murders is irrelevant. It’s the sheer fact of knowing he has been able to live his life that pains me. His brazen “Fuck you!” attitude toward us, the country, and the legal system that gave him his freedom obstructs my ability to let my guard down.
I have no idea what his existence is like in the wake of all this.
Is he revered as a onetime sports hero? Is he identified as a double murderer? Is he spit on, booed at, screamed at, or gushed over? I have no idea, and it upsets me not to know.
I have this wish that he would be treated like a leper, a pariah in his own neighborhood, and shunned into the admission of his guilt.
But I know that he is charismatic, charming, and narcissistic, so would any of it even matter? I am sure he surrounds himself with people who hold him in the highest regard, so they probably stroke his ego and create a safe haven for him to hide. I just don’t know, but I am left to wonder.
I hope that, somewhere, he is miserable and constantly reminded that most of the country thinks he is a killer, but I just don’t know. People try and comfort me, saying, “Karma will get him.”
I have repeatedly said, “But I will never be there to see it.”
Well, guess what?
Ironically, thirteen years to the day that he was acquitted of murder, on October 3, 2008, he was found guilty of twelve counts of armed robbery and kidnapping in a Las Vegas courtroom. Two months later, I got to see karma in its most beautiful form.
* * *
I hated not knowing things about him, so I followed the Vegas debacle as much as I could. Even though that case had nothing to do with my dad and me, it was connected to us; the crap he was trying to steal was technically ours because of our judgment against him. That is the best part of the whole story for me: This asshole, who had everything in the world handed to him—natural athletic talent, successful career, beautiful women fawning all over him, wealth, status, four children, cars, homes, pensions—risked it all when he killed Ron and Nicole. But then, he blew it all again after he was given his freedom by stealing a frickin’ football jersey.
Think about how many times he had tempted fate in the course of his lifetime and prospered—only to lose it all in a dingy hotel room full of thugs and losers in Las Vegas, just because he got greedy. I will never forget the pure joy I felt when I saw him in shackles after the news that he had been arrested. Priceless.
I couldn’t stop the laughter; it poured out of me. I relished the moment that he was arrested for stealing his own memorabilia. In that moment, I finally knew that all of our efforts to break him down were working. We brought him right to the edge with our unrelenting pursuit—and then gave him a nice swift kick when we published If I Did It right out from under him. Is it really coincidental that, as we were appearing on Oprah the same day to talk about the book, he stormed a hotel room with a gun and tried to get back his stuff so he could keep it from us? Yeah, I don’t think so either.
My publicist and very good friend, Michael Wright, called me at 9:45 p.m. that night to inform me that the Las Vegas verdict was going to be read in thirty minutes—live—on CNN.
“Holy shit, Michael, now? Are you sure? Great, my dad and Patti are out of town and I am by myself.”
He offered to come over and sit with me, but I declined. It would take him too long to get to me, and I didn’t want him to miss a word of the reading.
* * *
Within seconds, my heart is pounding fast and hard through my chest, I feel burning, and my hands are starting to shake. My eyes brim with tears. I can’t believe how quickly I find myself in the grip of the same anxiety I felt during the other two trials.
During the criminal case, I received an almost identical call from Patti Jo Fairbanks in the DA’s office. I was by myself when I picked up the phone to the panic-provoking words, “The verdict is going to be read tomorrow morning at ten. Tell your father.”
I was left in charge of gathering the troops that day, so it was bizarre that I was in the same exact position thirteen years later. But this time, I would watch the verdict on the news along with the rest of the country, and away from the watchful eyes of the media.
I hung up quickly and started to share the news. I felt like a modern-day Paul Revere: “The verdict is coming! The verdict is coming!”
I immediately called my dad’s cell phone: no answer. Then my stepmom’s cell phone: no answer. Then my stepbrother Michael’s house, where they were visiting in Ohio: again no answer. I called Michael’s cell phone, and his wife Samantha’s cell phone: no answer.
Really, people? Answer your phones!
I left messages after each beep: “Hey, guys, I hope it’s not too late to be calling, but I need someone to get my dad on the phone ASAP. The verdict is being read any minute. I think he’d want to see this. Please call me back.”
While I am leaving numerous messages for my father, I frantically send e-mails and texts to my friends, Denise, Michele Azenzer, Lisa Whitecrow, Vicki Tiberi, and my then boyfriend: The verdict is being read in 30 minutes.
My son is upstairs asleep, completely oblivious to what is developing in the family room. I have been in this house for many stressful moments that require pacing, and have realized over the years that my pacing takes on an almost obsessive quality: I start at the kitchen sink, turn on the water and rinse out the sink, then move the papers around on the center island (which creates more piles), and then swiftly walk across the tile floor to the front door and back to the kitchen where the process starts all over again. Back and forth, trying to release some of this nervous energy, back and forth.
I keep thinking I need to get my slippers. My feet are starting to hurt, but I don’t want to leave the TV. I don’t want to miss a second. Then the calls start to come in, at a rapid pace. I
am manning the house line, my cell phone, the text, and the e-mail. Thank God for technology.
But still no dad.
My best friend, Denise, wants desperately to come sit with me, but she just took a pain pill for her back and can’t drive.
“It’s okay, D. Thank you, though.”
My boyfriend is on the other line: “Aw, babe, do you want me to come over? I just got home from a work party and I’ve been drinking, so I don’t think I should be driving, but I can take a cab or something?”
“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
I start to feel isolated, and not entirely able to comprehend how scared and alone I feel in this moment. My support circle is shrinking, and I don’t know how to ask for help. I feel guilty intruding upon other people’s time and lives.
It has always been difficult for me to request assistance because I have viewed it as a sign of weakness. Then, of course, when I deny the offering of help, saying, “I am okay, I got this,” people just assume I am “strong” and can handle everything. I paint myself into a corner, alone.
But truth be told, I am so overwhelmed with emotion that I can’t determine for myself what I need or want. I am just going to accept what I have.
After numerous phone calls, I finally got my dad on the phone, though I woke him out of a deep sleep.
And for the next hour or so, my dad is on the landline in one ear and my boyfriend on the cell phone in the other ear. We watch the verdict together on TV.
I sit on the cold floor, staring at my big-screen TV, sweaty palms, heart racing, hands shaking. Silence is in my ears, but not in my mind. I am trying to prepare myself for the worst-case scenario. It never occurs to me that he actually can be found guilty.