Nicole:
Would you just please, O.J, O.J., O.J., O.J., could you please…Please leave.
O.J.:
I’m leaving with my two fucking kids* is when I’m leaving. You ain’t got to worry about me anymore.
≡ Transcripts of this call show this word as ‘fists’, but I said ‘kids’.
Nicole:
Please leave. O.J. Please, the kids, the kids…Please.
Dispatcher:
Is he leaving?
Nicole:
No.
Dispatcher:
Does he know you’re on the phone with police?
Nicole:
No.
Dispatcher:
Okay. Where are the kids at right now?
Nicole:
Up in my room.
Dispatcher:
Can they hear him yelling?
Nicole:
I don’t know. The room’s the only one that’s quiet.
Dispatcher:
Is there someone up there with the kids?
Nicole:
No.
I’m really losing it about here, yelling to beat the band.
Dispatcher:
What is he saying now? Nicole? You still on the line?
Nicole:
Yeah.
Dispatcher:
You think he’s still going to hit you?
Nicole:
I don’t know. He’s going to leave. He just said that…
O.J.
You’re not leaving when I’m gone. Hey! I have to read this shit all week in the National Enquirer. Her words exactly.
Nicole:
What, who got that, who?
Dispatcher:
Are you the only one in there with him?
Nicole:
Right now, yeah.
Dispatcher:
And he’s talking to you?
Nicole:
Yeah, and he’s also talking to my – the guy who lives out back is just standing there. He just came home.
Dispatcher:
Is he arguing with him, too?
Nicole:
No. Absolutely not.
Dispatcher:
Oh, okay.
Nicole:
Nobody’s arguing.
Dispatcher:
Yeah. Has this happened before or no?
Nicole:
Many times.
Dispatcher:
Okay. The police should be on the way – it just seems like a long time because it’s kind of busy in that division right now. (To police) Regarding Gretna Green Way, the suspect is still there and yelling very loudly. (Back to Nicole) Is he still arguing? Was someone knocking on your door?
Nicole:
It was him.
Dispatcher:
He was knocking on your door?
Nicole:
There’s a locked bedroom and he’s wondering why.
Nicole:
Can I get off the phone?
Dispatcher:
You want – you feel safe hanging up?
Nicole:
Well, you’re right.
Dispatcher:
You want to wait till the police get there?
Nicole:
Yeah.
Dispatcher:
Nicole?
Nicole:
Um-hmm.
Dispatcher:
Is he still arguing with you?
Nicole:
Um-hum.
Dispatcher:
He’s moved a little?
Nicole:
But I’m just ignoring him.
Dispatcher:
Okay. But he doesn’t know you’re—
Nicole:
It works best.
Dispatcher:
Okay. Are the kids are still asleep?
Nicole:
Yes. They’re like rocks.
Dispatcher:
What part of the house is he in right now?
Nicole:
Downstairs.
Dispatcher:
Downstairs?
Nicole:
Yes.
Dispatcher:
And you’re upstairs?
Nicole:
No, I’m downstairs in the kitchen.
Dispatcher:
Do you see the police, Nicole?
Nicole:
No, but I will go out there right now.
Dispatcher:
Okay, you want to go out there?
Nicole:
Yeah.
Dispatcher:
Okay.
Nicole:
I’m going to hang up.
Dispatcher:
Okay.
Then the cops showed up, two of them, followed by a supervisor, and it took both me and Nicole a little while to calm down. I told the officers that Nicole was exposing my kids to all sorts of unsavory people, which I wasn’t happy about, and she told them that all I did was complain about her friends. I don’t think they were all that interested in the details, because one cop just cut to the chase: “Has he ever hit you?” he asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Once. We had this one incident in 1989.”
Once. I hit her once – not even hit her, technically – and ever since that day I’d been known as a wife-beater. Whatever they were thinking, I wasn’t there in the capacity of a so-called wife beater – I was there because I was concerned about my kids.
Let me share with you an excerpt from the civil trial. The man on the stand is Robert Lerner of the LAPD, one of the officers who responded that day, October 25, 1993. The man asking the questions is attorney Robert Baker:
Baker:
Now, in terms of your conversations with O.J. Simpson, Mr. Simpson was upset about the people – and he informed you of this – that his wife was running around with, correct?
Lerner:
Correct.
Baker:
And he was upset about the fact that she was, in fact, in his view and from his information, running – having people in the house who were hookers, correct?
Lerner:
He was concerned.
Baker:
And he was concerned that there was one person that he thought was bad for his kids and that his wife shouldn’t associate with, and he didn’t want him around the house; isn’t that true?
Lerner:
Yes.
Baker:
And that was a gentleman with the first name of Keith, correct?
Lerner:
Yes.
Baker:
And he expressed that to you, that in fact these people that were around the house had some sort of dealings with Heidi Fleiss, correct?
Lerner:
That’s what he indicated.
Baker:
And he was upset about that, those people being around his house where his kids were; he informed you of that, didn’t he?
Lerner:
Yes.
Baker:
And he also indicated to you, sir, that he never had intended, nor was he ever considering any physical violence to Nicole Brown Simpson that evening, correct?
Lerner:
Correct.
Baker:
And he also indicated to you that the door that she said was broken, before that, she told you he broke – it was broken before he ever went to the house. Isn’t that correct?
Lerner:
That’s what he claimed.
This was in October 1993, almost eight months before Nicole was murdered. Still, when the trial finally got under way, everyone acted like my lawyers were making this stuff up. They weren’t. Nicole had been associating with hookers and drug dealers and unsavory characters from way back, and I’d been begging her to keep those people away from my children. And I went on record with my concerns that night when I spoke to the police about it.
Now here’s the weird part: The next day, the very morning after the fight, I was back on the set, working, when Nicole called. “Hey, how you doing?” she said,
as if nothing had happened.
“Fine.”
“Did you play golf this morning?”
“No. I’m working. We’re shooting.”
“So everything’s good?” she asked.
She was feeling me out, seeing if I was still angry, and I told her yes, I was very flicking angry. She dragged me back to the house and then called the police on me, and all because I was concerned about my kids, and about the direction her life was taking.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Great!”
“What are you doing later?”
“Going back to New York. What the hell do you think I’m doing?”
For the next several weeks, I stayed on that crazy back-andforth schedule. I’d be in New York for the sports show, then fly back late Sunday to work on Naked Gun for a couple of days. Then it was back to New York, with a stop or two on the way to interview one athlete or another for the show. Sunday night, the cycle started all over again – like my own personal version of that movie, Groundhog Day.
Whenever I was in L.A., visiting with the kids, Nicole was generally on her best behavior, but during this period she began to seem unusually tired. I think the stress of keeping it together around me was almost more than she could take. She really wanted this thing to work, so she was determined to be a good little girl, but the effort left her exhausted. I also began to wonder whether she was doing drugs.
The one thing that she wasn’t able to control was this constant harping about our living arrangement. She kept pushing me to let her and the kids move back into Rockingham, and I kept telling her no. I suggested that she rent another place, or, better yet, buy one, and she finally took my advice and found a nice condo on Bundy, near Dorothy Street. There was one major problem, though. She couldn’t afford to buy it unless she sold her condo in San Francisco, and because the timing was wrong she was worried about the tax bite. When she looked into it, she discovered that she could avoid that problem by claiming that the place on Bundy was a rental property, and to indicate in her tax return that she and the kids were actually living with me. I didn’t want any part of that scheme, and I told her so. “The last thing I need is a problem with the IRS,” I said.
“But I don’t understand,” she said. “I’m going to be moving back in with you anyway.”
“I can’t do it,” I said.
She was pretty angry, and for a while the good Nicole was nowhere in evidence. Luckily I wasn’t around too often, but even when I wasn’t home she somehow managed to bring her problems to my doorstep – literally. She would come by the house with the kids, say, to use the pool, and she took to ordering Michele around, acting like she still lived there. Michele tolerated it, but there were limits. One day Nicole asked to be let into my home office, which was locked, and Michele told her she’d have to get permission from me. “No one is allowed in Mr. Simpson’s office,” she reminded her. “It’s one of his rules.”
“I’m not asking you,” Nicole said. “I’m telling you.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Nicole. I can’t let you in without Mr. Simpson’s say so.”
Nicole went off on her, cursing and calling her names, then went out to the pool and grabbed the kids and took off in a huff She was making friends Ieft and right.
I came home for Christmas, and we focused on the kids, spoiling them with presents. I got a few small presents of my own, but only one of them really meant anything to me, and that was the fact that we didn’t have a single scene or a single argument in the course of that entire week. I don’t know if that qualifies as a present, but I appreciated it, and I made a point of telling her so. To be honest with you, when things were good like that, I always found myself feeling bad – always found myself thinking about the way things might have been. Nicole had given me fifteen great years, but that Nicole hadn’t been around much recently, and the Nicole who had taken her place was not someone I knew or even wanted to know. At that point, I was pretty much biding my time until the year was up. And in some ways, to be honest, I was already gone.
I remember speaking to Nicole’s mother about the various problems – the business with the housekeeper, the questionable friends, the drugs – and she was just as concerned as I was. Unlike me, though, she was still hopeful. “Maybe it’s just a phase,” she said. “Maybe she’ll get tired of running around with those people.”
“Well, I hope so,” I said. “But I don’t know. Whenever I try to talk to her about it, she gets pissed off.”
“I don’t think there’s anything either of us can do,” she said. “Nicole’s going to have to get through this herself.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what it was she was supposed to get through, to be honest. People fail at marriage every day, and they either find their way back or not. The question, for me, even then, was why did we fail – where did we go wrong? Nicole had old me on more than one occasion that she felt as if she’d been with me forever, and that she was tired of living in my shadow. Maybe that was it. Maybe she had sabotaged the marriage so she could go off and relive her lost childhood or something – one of these ‘delayed adolescence’ things. If I was right, and if that was what she had to get through, I figured I had a very long wait ahead of me.
4
The Two Nicoles
Nicole moved into the Bundy condo in late January and she liked it just fine, but she was still pissed that I hadn’t asked her to move back into Rockingham. “I can’t believe you made me buy my own place,” she whined.
“Nicole, we’ve been through this. Give it time.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know. You’ve been saying for a while.”
“Well, it makes me wonder,” she said. “I’m trying to be hopeful, but you’re making it really hard.”
“It’s January. We’ve got four months before Mother’s Day. On Mother’s Day, it will be exactly one year.”
“I know,” she snapped. “Stop reminding me. I feel like I’m on trial here.”
The move created one other problem for Nicole, aside from the tax issue, and this one concerned her houseboy, Kato. At the Gretna Green place, he’d lived in the guesthouse, but on Bundy all he had was a little maid’s room, so she asked me if I’d put him up at one of the three guest houses on my property. It was supposed to be temporary, until Kato could find a place of his own, and I told Nicole I was glad to help out. Within a week, Kato was living at Rockingham. Years later, when the trial got underway, somebody floated a crazy story about this. They said that Nicole had offered Kato the maid’s room at the Bundy condo, and that he was game, but that I didn’t want them living under the same roof. Again, people didn’t seem to understand that – by that point – I had absolutely no interest in reconciling with Nicole. After all, if I had wanted her back, she would never have bought the place on Bundy. She and the kids would have moved into Rockingham, which is what she’d been hounding me about all along.
In short order, Nicole began to resent Kato. I don’t know what it was exactly, but he was living at the house, and she wasn’t, and I think that really pissed her off. I know it makes absolutely no sense, but a lot of the shit we went through made no sense, and I think my theory’s as good as any.
Now there were two people at Rockingham that really pissed her off: Michele and Kato. (Three if you count me.) But she kept coming by anyway, mostly to hang out by the pool and to torment me with her unhappiness. At one point, she told me, “O.J., when I come by the house, I don’t want to see either Michele or Kato. Kato shouldn’t even he on the property, and Michele should hide in her room until I’m gone. You understand? When I’m around, I don’t want either of them around.”
I looked at her, wondering if she’d lost her mind. Who was she coming by to tell me how to run my home? If she didn’t want to see Michele and Kato, she didn’t have to come by at all. She could drop the kids off out front, and I’d be glad to hang by the pool with them. I told her as much, and she looked at me with such hatred I thought she was go
ing to leap off her lounge chair and attack me.
But she didn’t attack me. She picked up her copy of People magazine and ignored me.
To make matters worse, several of her close friends started coming by to express concern about the shape she was in, as if I could do something about it. Nicole was still hanging out with that same bad crowd, they said, drinking too much and clearly doing drugs. Every other day, I heard variations on the same theme: “O.J., you gotta do something about it. She needs help.”
But what could I do? Whenever I brought it up, which was often, believe me, she told me she didn’t want to hear it. Or worse – she stormed out. As usual, everything was my fault. In her mind, if I’d only let her move back into Rockingham, life would be perfect. But I hadn’t let her move back in, and all she had was her friends – and a big tax problem. The tax problem was my fault, too, of course. It was all my fault. Nicole’s life was turning to shit because I didn’t love her, and she was certainly lovable, so the problem was me – I was responsible for everything.
One afternoon, she came by the house to drop off the kids so she could run a few errands, and I thought she looked a little glassy-eyed. When the kids were out of earshot, I asked her if she was okay. I did it nicely – not accusing her of anything, not confronting her. “You know,” I said, “I’m hearing from a lot of people – your friends mostly – that you’re fucking yourself up with drugs and shit. You want to talk about it?”
“Fucking myself up? That’s crazy? What ‘friends’ are telling you this?”
“People who are worried about you.”
She got mad. She said it was bullshit, that these so-called friends of hers didn’t know what they were talking about – that she was in complete control.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t have any concrete evidence to back up the allegations. The woman looked worn down, yes, and she was erratic, and sometimes she seemed completely out of it, but it’s not like I really knew anything. If I had, trust me, I would have done something about it – both for her and for the kids. But when I looked at my kids, and I looked at them closely, believe me, they seemed fine. They didn’t look messed up or haunted or any of that shit. On the contrary, they seemed solid and happy, and they were as loving toward Nicole as they’d ever been, if not more so. If something really bad was going on, I figured I’d see it, but I didn’t see a thing – not in them, anyway. In Nicole, though, the changes only became more obvious with time. She became even more erratic, looked even more worn down, and she seemed increasingly lost. It was hard to understand. For as long as I’d known her, Nicole’s head and heart had always been in the right place. Whenever any of her friends had a problem, they always went to her first. She was solid and clear-thinking, and she always made the right moral decision. But that was another Nicole, and she hadn’t been much in evidence lately. In fact, in some ways it was as if the new Nicole was taking over, and I can’t say I much liked her.
If I Did It Page 8