Still, I was sure I got some things wrong. I was especially troubled by all this so-called blood all over the place, and in the Bronco in particular. I thought maybe I had cut myself in the house the previous night, rushing around to get ready for the flight to Chicago, but I wasn’t real clear on how it had happened, or exactly when. And I’d recently cut myself in the Bronco, reaching for my cellphone charger, but I couldn’t remember how recently. And hadn’t I had cut myself in Chicago when I threw that glass? Or was that an old cut that just got opened up?
Christ, it was hard to keep track of things. I don’t know how they expected me to remember so much detail when half the time I couldn’t remember what I’d had for dinner the previous night or where I was supposed to be later that day.
The only thing that mattered was that they believe me: I was 100 percent not guilty. They had to believe me.
That’s not the way it looked to the cops, though—they had spent hours going through every room in the house, looking for evidence—and it’s certainly not the way it looked on the news. We went into the den and flipped through the channels. The major networks were all over the story, and they all seemed to be saying the same thing: O.J. Did It.
That really threw me. People were starting to think that I was capable of murder. Worse, the media was starting to dissect my relationship with Nicole—a woman I had loved for fifteen years, before everything went to hell. I could already see the story taking shape: She was leaving him, and he loved her and wanted her back, and when he realized she wasn’t coming back he went over to her place and killed her.
Things were quickly getting out of control.
The press interviewed anybody they could get their hands on, whether it was a passing neighbor near the Bundy condo or a cleaning woman up on Ashford. I didn’t realize so many people were so desperate to appear on TV, but I guess that’s Hollywood for you.
I also saw plenty of file footage on Yours Truly, documenting my glory days on the football field, my many years as a football analyst, and my various business successes, but the stories always came full circle and ended on me and Nicole: The young waitress I’d swept off her feet when she was barely eighteen. The storybook romance that turned volatile and ended in divorce. And, endlessly, this crazy notion that I wanted her back.
Who the fuck were these people, thinking they knew anything about my relationship with Nicole?
There’d been a time, almost two years earlier, when Nicole decided she wanted to separate, and, yes—I had fought hard to make her change her mind. But she wouldn’t change her mind, and I moved on. Months later she found she was having second thoughts, and she wrote to share them with me:
O.J. You’ll be my one and only “true love.” I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you and I’m sorry we let it die. Please let us be a family again, and let me love you—better than I ever have before.
So I tried again, and I put a whole goddamn year into it, and we failed miserably, and when it finally ended I was glad to be out of it. Everyone who knew Nicole and me knew that story, but the reporters didn’t want that story—it didn’t support their theory. To hear them tell it, I’d been pining for Nicole for the past two years, begging her to come home, and on the night of June 12 I finally snapped.
It was unreal. As I stood there, watching one misguided reporter after another, each of them hammering the same theme, I felt like I was losing my mind.
The real story, as I’ve told you, was much simpler and much less dramatic. Nicole and I had been together for seventeen years. The first fifteen had been absolutely terrific; the last two had been total hell. Sounds like a lot of marriages, right? But now everything I was hearing about myself was based on a cartoon version of those last two years. I heard myself described as an obsessively jealous ex-husband so many times that the media almost had me believing it. To make matters worse, a number of reporters ran around interviewing these so-called experts on battered women, creating the impression that Nicole had been a battered woman, and that I, O.J. Simpson, her former husband, was a known batterer. I remember hearing the phrase “escalating violence” a number of times, and wondering how it applied to us. I realized that anyone listening to those particular reports would come away thinking that there had been some kind of pattern in our marriage—that I had repeatedly beat my wife, and that the beatings had become progressively worse. Jesus! I hadn’t even begun to mourn Nicole, and here they were, telling me—and the world—that I’d beat her mercilessly.
Whenever I changed the channel, I’d come across a variation on the same theme. Someone would be talking to another one of these so-called experts about the right way for a woman to leave an abusive man, for example, and I would stand there in shock, open-mouthed, listening. I simply didn’t get it. This was a story about my ex-wife, who had just been murdered, and they were turning it into a story about spousal abuse. One expert went through various scenarios on the proper way to escape—call the police, leave the house while he’s at work, get a restraining order—yada yada yada. I had to turn off the TV. It was making me nuts.
The saddest part is, people bought it. If it was on the news, it had to be true.
Many months later, when I was sitting in prison, being tried on two counts of murder, I was visited on several occasions by Dr. Lenore Walker, a real expert on battered women, and she agreed with what Dr. Bernard Yudowitz had told me—that I did not have the personality of a batterer. She had subjected me to a number of standardized tests, and while I was happy with her conclusion, I’ve got to tell you—just to be honest here—that those tests were pretty much bullshit. I remember pointing this out to her: “You have some questions on there that don’t make any sense at all,” I said.
She asked for examples, and I immediately came up with two. The first was, “When you walk into a room, do you think everyone is looking at you?” Fuckin’-A they’re looking at me! I don’t think it. I know it. Everybody is looking at me.
The second was, “Do you think you’re the subject of conversation in most social situations?” Hell, yeah! I am the subject of conversation!
Now, if a guy who sells insurance says that—and I don’t have anything against guys who sell insurance—it might mean he’s got some kind of personality disorder. Hell, for all I know, it makes him a wife-abuser. But it doesn’t mean shit when I say it, because it’s the truth. I remember telling Dr. Walker, “It isn’t that simple. People are different. I don’t see how you can put so much faith in these tests.” And I told her this after she came to me with the results, after she decided I didn’t have the makings of an abusive husband.
And I told her this for one very simple reason: I didn’t need anyone to tell me that I wasn’t abusive, let alone some bogus tests. I knew I wasn’t abusive.
But that’s not what the media wanted to hear. It didn’t bolster their story.
As far as they were concerned, I was the one and only suspect, and they were going to make a case against me before I even went to trial.
8.
THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE
AT SOME POINT, late that same evening, somebody turned off the TV and urged me to go to bed. The stories were too upsetting and were making me crazy. One minute I’d be crying, the next I’d be on my feet, screaming at the TV set.
I went to bed, but I don’t remember sleeping much, and in the morning, with the press still camped outside, Bob decided I should leave the house and move into his place, in Encino. I had to try to get out of the house without being spotted by the media, and I told him about the secret path that cut through Eric Watts’ property, over by the tennis courts. Before we left, I asked Kardashian to get me something from under the Bentley’s front seat. He went and got it. It was my black grip, with my .357 Magnum inside (though of course he didn’t know this). I then packed a few things into my black duffel—some clean clothes, toiletries, et cetera—and we left the house at the same time.
Kardashian drove though the Rockingham gate, and turned toward Ashford, an
d a few minutes later I met him on Bristol. None of the reporters had been smart enough to follow him. They all thought I was still inside the house.
I asked him to take me to the airport to pick up my golf bag, which we’d left behind, and I found it right away. The bag was made by Victorinox, the Swiss Army Knife people, and had that distinctive logo. It had been given to me some months earlier by the company, with whom I was doing business.
After we left the airport, we drove straight to Kardashian’s house, in Encino, and Bob started talking about the other Bob—Bob Shapiro. He felt that Howard Weitzman wasn’t the right guy for us—he wasn’t a criminal attorney—and he thought we should see what Shapiro had to say about the situation.
“What are we going to do about Howard?” I asked.
“Let’s worry about that later,” he said.
When we got to Kardashian’s place, my close friend A.C. Cowlings was waiting for us with my kids. They were in one of the guest bathrooms, playing in the Jacuzzi, and when I first saw them I almost fell apart. I hugged both of them and told them we had a lot to talk about, and I asked them to get dressed and come downstairs when they were done.
When they showed up, looking so clean and fresh, I could feel the blood rushing to the back of my throat, and I found myself fighting tears. Again, the whole thing felt unreal. I’d seen the kids less than two days earlier, and they were the same kids, but in that short period of time the whole world had changed. Suddenly I felt very alone. Up until that point, ever since I’d heard the news, I’d either been traveling or in rooms full of people, but now it was just me and the two kids, and I didn’t know where to begin.
“Something has happened to Mommy,” I began, but Sydney cut me off before I could continue.
“We know,” she said. “She’s in heaven.”
I had assumed that I was going to be the one to break the news, but apparently Judy had already told them.
“That’s right,” I said. “She’s in heaven.”
“Can we play a game?” Sydney asked.
I realized that neither of them really understood what had happened to Nicole, let alone the long-term effects that her death would have on their lives. But then, what did I expect? I hadn’t processed it either.
They wanted me to read them a story, and I read them a story, and they wanted to play, so we horsed around a little and I tickled them and made them laugh. But it was unbearably hard for me. I was sitting there staring at these kids, knowing that they were never again going to see their mother, and knowing how deeply that was going to affect them for the rest of their lives. That really destroyed me. I was so overwhelmed that I excused myself for a moment and locked myself in the downstairs bathroom and wept. Then I pulled myself together and rejoined them, and the three of us sat there, enjoying each other’s company, pretending that everything was just fine—that life was great.
Later that same day, A.C. took the kids back to Dana Point, back to the Browns, and I watched them pull away in his white Bronco and felt all emptied out. As I look back on it now, I believe that that’s when it finally hit me—that that was the moment I finally realized Nicole was truly gone.
A short while later Bob Shapiro showed up to talk to me about what lay ahead. He immediately cut to the chase. Almost the first thing he said was, “O.J., I need to know: Did you do this?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I didn’t do it, and I still can’t believe it actually happened.”
We talked for a couple of hours—Kardashian, Shapiro, and myself—and Shapiro seemed especially upset about the fact that Weitzman had let me talk to the cops. I told him that I had insisted on talking to the cops, and he said that that wasn’t the point. Weitzman should have tried to stop me, and—when that didn’t work—he should have been at my side for the interrogation.
Shapiro asked me a few more questions—about Sydney’s recital, the flight to Chicago, the cut on my hand, et cetera—then got to his feet.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us,” he said. “I better get started.”
I thanked him and he left, and Kardashian called Weitzman to take him off the case. Weitzman didn’t take it well. He began cursing Kardashian, who got tired of trying to explain the situation to him and simply hung up. Not surprisingly, the press found out that Weitzman was no longer representing me, and they even tried to use that against me, suggesting that Weitzman had pulled out because he had doubts about my innocence. I don’t know whether he had doubts about my innocence, but I do know that Weitzman didn’t pull out—he was pushed.
After his conversation with Weitzman, Kardashian called a psychiatrist he knew and asked if he might prescribe a little something to get through the wake and funeral. I spoke to the doctor on the phone. “It’s going to get very tough in the days ahead,” he said. “I’m going to prescribe something that should keep you from hitting bottom.”
The pharmacy delivered the stuff a short while later—sleeping pills, anti-anxiety pills, antidepressants—and I followed the directions. It said the anxiety pills would kick in pretty fast, but that the antidepressants wouldn’t take effect for at least a week or two.
When it was time for bed, Kardashian walked me to the room he’d set aside for me and wished me a good night. “I’m glad Shapiro’s on board,” he said.
“Me too,” I said.
I thought about that as I stripped and got into bed. I didn’t even know Bob Shapiro, and from the looks of it my life was in his hands—I was in control of absolutely nothing.
I hardly slept again that night, even with the pills. I kept thinking of the kids, and of Nicole, and as I drifted off I vaguely remembered having been told about the wake, which was scheduled for the following afternoon. I was so out of it that I actually remember thinking, A wake? For whom? Who died?
In the morning, I turned on the TV and it was the same old shit. The reporters were still harping on this idea that Nicole was leaving me and getting on with her life, and that I’d been unable to handle it. There were also those misguided rumors about Howard Weitzman, and the real reasons he had removed himself from the case. I remember thinking that the press got everything wrong. I also remember thinking that they got everything wrong really, really fast.
In the middle of yet another report, Kardashian walked into the den and told me that Lou Brown was on the line, calling from Dana Point. I got on the phone and Lou told me that the first viewing was going to be in Laguna Beach, at four that afternoon. I told him that I didn’t want an open viewing for anyone other than the direct family. I said I didn’t want to see a picture of Nicole in her casket in some tabloid. I said I didn’t want the kids to have to live with an image like that for the rest of their lives.
“I want them to remember her just as she was,” I said.
“Okay,” Lou said.
In the afternoon, a limo arrived to pick me up. Kardashian went with me. The drive took over an hour, and I don’t remember talking much. I think I fell asleep, to be honest. The drugs the shrink had given me were pretty powerful.
I remember waking up as we were pulling into the mortuary parking lot. There were dozens of people there, and dozens of reporters, and I climbed out of the limo and went straight inside without even looking at anyone. All of my kids were there: Jason, Arnelle, Justin, and Sydney. Al Cowlings was with them. I saw Judy and Lou, and we exchanged a few words, and then I went over and took a look at Nicole. She looked as white as a sheet. I leaned over and kissed her, and I could hear Arnelle crying just behind me, and a moment later everyone kind of shuffled out of the room and left me there with Nicole. I don’t know how long I was in there. I remember just standing there, shaking my head, still refusing to accept her death, and then I heard someone behind me and turned around. It was Judy. She looked at me and started crying, then asked me, point blank, “O.J., did you do this?”
I didn’t even get upset, to be honest. “No,” I said. “I could never have done this. I loved her too much.”
Much later, Judy
went on national television and repeated this story, but long after that, during the civil trial, she told the story but failed to mention my denial. At that point the attorneys played a tape of her television appearance. I guess people remember what they want to remember.
After the viewing, we went to the Browns’ for a little while—I was in a complete fog, and I only know I was there because I was told I was there—then I got back into the limo for the ride home. I remember that part: I cried all the way.
Kardashian tried to comfort me, but he was pretty broken up himself. He didn’t know what to say because there wasn’t much he could say.
By the time we got back to Kardashian’s place, in Encino, I was in terrible shape. For the first time in my life, I thought about killing myself. I felt sorrowful and angry at the same time, and most of all I felt hopeless. I felt like I had nothing to live for. I felt like my life no longer made any sense.
At some point I fell asleep—I was exhausted and all hollowed out and I took a couple of extra sleeping pills—and when I woke up the following morning, groggy and disoriented, I felt more depressed than ever. I went downstairs and found Kardashian in the kitchen, and I tried to revive myself with coffee. A.C. showed up while I was in the middle of my second cup. He had brought a suit for me to wear to the funeral.
I went upstairs and it took me a very long time to get dressed. I couldn’t seem to make my arms work. They felt heavy and sore, like they would if you overdid it in the gym.
The funeral took place at St. Martin of Tours, a church on the corner of Sunset and Saltair, in Brentwood. I couldn’t have made it through the service without A.C. and Kardashian. Kardashian led me to some seats in the second row, behind the Browns, and I remember that they turned to look at me. They weren’t smiling.
If I Did It Page 22