O J Simpson Quotes

A sonnet might look dinky, but it was somehow big enough to accommodate love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if you shoved hard enough.

You don`t get mood swings from eating cornflakes

It's strange. They say people don't change, but I say they're wrong. People change, but it's usually for the worse.

malignant narcissism

She was battered incessantly, regularly, all the time. I'm not saying 24 hours a day, but the incidents of battering were extraordinarily high.

It also made me think about the fact that all relationships are messy, and that everyone suffers through their fair share of pain- and that sometimes more than their fair share.

O. J. Simpson drew bigger crowds, but most of his admirers were around 12 years old. Two-thirds of them were black and many looked like fugitives from the Credit Bureau’s garnishee file.

Jesus Christ, O.J.—what have you done?

This is a love story too. And, like a lot of love stories, it doesn't have a happy ending.

Still, I've heard it said that all stories are basically love stories, and my story is no exception. This is a love story, too. And, like a lot of love stories, it doesn't have a happy ending.

An offender who kills someone close to him is usually motivated by a great sense of perceived betrayal, revenge, or anger, often fueled by jealousy and outrage. We saw this with the O. J. Simpson case, in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Siblings are the only people who know each other their whole lives, and the bond between an only brother and an only sister seems especially strong.

Many assume that being the victim of a crime leaves you powerless. Those of us who live in that world know all too well that we are survivors and we are a mighty force.

By virtue of his celebrity, he would be coddled by worshipful cops, pumped up by star-fucking attorneys, indulged by a spineless judge, and adored by jurors every bit as addled by racial hatred as their counterparts on the Rodney King jury. O. J. Simpson slaughtered two innocent people, and he walked free—right past the most massive and compelling body of physical evidence ever assembled against a criminal defendant. I am not bitter. I am angry.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and O. J. Simpson have a lot in common. We don’t normally lump them together, because certain key contrasts are tricky — for example, one man is a Muslim intellectual and the other more or less decapitated his ex-wife.

. . . I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences. 'After the O.J. Simpson verdict, one of the jurors appeared on TV and said with absolute conviction, "Race had absolutely nothing to do with my decision,"' psychologist Joshua Aronson says. 'But how on earth could she know that? What my [and others] research . . . show[s] is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say "I don't know" more often.

Why did we bother with all the distractions we did? Back home, the O. J. Simpson trial was in full swing, and there were people who surrendered their entire lunch hours watching it, then taped the rest so they could watch more at night. They didn’t know O. J. Simpson. They didn’t know anyone involved in the case. Yet they gave up days and weeks of their lives, addicted to someone else’s drama.

The Simpson verdict was your forced atonement. O.J. awakened your collective white rage. That or you’re obsessed with him because he’s the one that got away, the one who challenged your view of whiteness, made you madder than anybody—that is, until Obama. But there’s little real justification for Obama hate, except that he was a black man in charge of our country, and many whites wanted to take it back and make it great again. Hence, the election of Donald Trump as president.

The really strange thing about this is that it was one of the Fog Facts. That is, it was not a secret. It was known. But it was not known. That is, if you asked a knowledgeable journalist, or political analyst, or a historian, they knew about it. If you yourself went and checked the record, you could find it out. But if you asked the man in the street if President Scott, who loved to have his picture taken among the troops and driving armored vehicles and aboard naval vessels, if you asked if Scott had found a way to evade service in Vietnam, they wouldn't have a clue, and, unless they were anti-Scott already, they wouldn't believe it. In the information age there is so much information that sorting and focus and giving the appropriate weight to anything have become incredibly difficult. Then some fact, or event, or factoid mysteriously captures the world's attention and there's a media frenzy. Like Clinton and Lewinsky. Like O. J. Simpson. And everybody in the world knows everything about it. On the flip side are the Fog Facts, important things that nobody seems able to focus on any more than the can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known.

In his book, originally titled If I Did It, subsequently published as I Did It when the Goldman family won the rights based on their civil suit, O. J. Simpson recounts the killings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman as if O.J. had actually committed the crimes. From my perspective of forty-plus years in law enforcement and behavioral analysis, this book, written years after O.J.’s acquittal for the murders, was just another display of Mr. Simpson’s contempt for moral standards, his sense of power over and remaining anger at Nicole. In other words: the actions of a sociopathic narcissist.

He’s coming off the bridge,” said Serge. “The rocks will start soon.” “Rocks?” “It’s local tradition, and another reason I love the Keys.” Serge stood and put on his sneakers. “It’s our version of when those people went out to the overpasses and waved at O. J. Simpson during the slow-motion chase. Except in the Keys, when there’s a high-speed pursuit on TV heading south, the locals line the road and wait for the car to come off the bridge to Key Largo. Last time was around Christmas.” “You’re right.” Coleman pointed at the TV again. “They’re lining the side of the road. They’re throwing rocks.” “And we’re at Mile Marker 105, so that gives us about three minutes.” Serge tightened the Velcro straps on his shoes. “Let’s go throw rocks.

Chabot Gun Club, in the hills above Berkeley. One day, a Cal law student and a friend happened also to be on the club’s range. “That afternoon I noticed a group of three or four men shooting at the far left of the range, dressed in camos and shooting what I thought was an M-1 Carbine,” he recalled. “Sometime while my attention was on my own target, I heard someone to my left let loose a three-shot burst that sounded like a fully automatic weapon, something illegal in California at the time.” The law student and his friend “looked at each other and we each mouthed the words, ‘Auto?!?!’ ” In light of the dangerous and unlawful firepower nearby, the pair decided to depart the premises posthaste. The man with the machine gun was Joe Remiro, and the student was Lance Ito, who later became the judge in the criminal trial of O. J. Simpson.

As to the central fact in the case, it is my view that Simpson murdered his ex-wife and her friend on June 12. Any rational analysis of the events and evidence in question leads to that conclusion. This is true whether one considers evidence not presented to the jury—such as the results of Simpson’s polygraph examination and his flight with Al Cowlings on June 17—or just the evidence established in court. Notwithstanding the prosecution’s many errors, the evidence against Simpson at the trial was overwhelming. Simpson had a violent relationship with his ex-wife, and tensions between them were growing in the weeks leading up to the murders. Simpson had no alibi for the time of the murders, nor was his Bronco parked at his home during that time. Simpson had a cut on his left hand on the day after the murders, and DNA tests showed conclusively that it was Simpson’s blood to the left of the shoe prints leaving the scene. Nicole’s blood was found on a sock in his bedroom, and Goldman’s blood—as well as Simpson’s—was found in the Bronco. Hair consistent with Simpson’s was found on the killer’s cap and on Goldman’s shirt. The gloves that Nicole bought for Simpson in 1990 were almost certainly the ones used by her killer.

There is no substitute for victory" Oscar Wilde "I didn't say that--wouldn't have. Maybe it was Vince Lombardi" O.W. "Not I, either. Try Count von Schlieffen" Vince Lombardi "What's the big deal. I said it---I think. Doh!" Homer Simpson "Imposter. 'Twas I." Homer the original (Greek guy)

Look innocent. Have hope.” “Okay.” “And remember…” “What?” “Even O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

According to the telephone poll, a full 40 percent of black women felt that the use of physical force was appropriate in a marriage. And black women especially could not abide Marcia Clark.

We were not interested in making life better for some some people. We wanted everyone to thrive and accomplish their dreams in Los Angeles: gays, straights, blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, Russians, Armenians, Pacific Islanders, and many others. Even when my detractors couldn't believe that I stood for equality and fairness, I'd always govern with those guiding principles.

O. J. Simpson

In any event, if upon recounting your eerie encounter you get caught up in the spirit of the story and say you saw an ethereal being, then you may convince not just your audience, but yourself. One notable finding of modern psychology is how systematically misleading memory is. People often remember events wrongly from the get-go, and even when they don’t, their memory can later be steered toward falsehood. In particular, the act of reporting false details can cement them firmly in mind. You don’t just recount what you remember; you remember what you recount. (Football star O. J. Simpson’s former agent was sure Simpson had killed his ex-wife and also sure that Simpson believed he didn’t.) This built-in fallibility makes sense from a Darwinian standpoint, allowing people to bend the truth self-servingly with an air of great and growing conviction. And, clearly, bent truths of a religious sort could be self-serving. If you were a close friend or relative of the deceased, then the idea that his powerful spirit is afoot may incline people to treat you nicely, lest they invite his wrath. Another gem from social psychology: publicly espousing something not only helps convince you of its truth; it shapes your future perception, inclining you to see evidence supporting it but not evidence against it. So if you speculate that the strange, shadowy creature was the disgruntled spirit of the deceased, you’ll likely find corroboration. You may notice that one of his enemies fell ill only a week after your sighting, while forgetting that one of his friends fell ill a few days earlier. If you’re a person of high status, all of this will carry particular weight, as such people are accorded unusual (and often undue) credibility. If, in a hunter-gatherer band of thirty people, someone widely esteemed claims to have seen something strange—and has a theory about what it was—twenty people may be convinced right off the bat. Then the aforementioned tendency of people to conform to peer opinion could quickly yield unanimity.

Little did they know that the case would hold media interest for just one day. The next night, the ex-wife of football great and not-so-great actor O. J. Simpson would be found murdered along with an acquaintance in Brentwood, and that would suck all media attention away from the Pearlman case as well as everything else in the city.

Fame,” O.J. said, walking along, “is a vapor, popularity is an accident, and money takes wings. The only thing that endures is character.” “Where’d you get that from?” Cowlings asked. “Heard it one night on TV in Buffalo,” O.J. said. “I was watching a late hockey game on Canadian TV and all of a sudden a guy just said it. Brought me right up out of my chair. I never forgot it.” —From an article by Paul Zimmerman, Sports Illustrated, November 26, 1979, on O. J. Simpson

In 2016,” he says, “after Trump was elected, I realized that America had declined to the point that we were willing to put a complete idiot in the White House. A con man with almost no objective qualifications for the office. Trump had obviously racist beliefs, criminal tendencies, serious problems with women, repeated business failures, no ethics whatsoever, no conscience, no remorse. He even despised the military. Yet white America, in its panic, wrapped their arms around the guy and rode him all the way into Washington. Even the evangelicals went with him. And why? Because he personified all their secret hopes and fears and prejudices. He gave them permission to be their real selves. Their worst selves. In essence, he was a living ‘Fuck you’ to everyone who ever made a rube feel stupid, or small, less than the next guy. He still is. He’s the white O.J. Simpson, Penn. His supporters know he’s guilty—of all of it—but they don’t give a shit. That’s not the point for them. Anyway, the myth of my grade-school years was finally true: anybody could become president! Anybody with sufficient fame, and the willingness to say and do anything necessary to win, that is.” Bobby turns and scans the bluff once more, from habit probably,

Lee huddled with Gene Colan, who based the Falcon’s look on college football star O. J. Simpson;

O. J. Simpson theory of legal fees: I’m not paying you; you’re lucky to be here; go make a buck with your book.

Activision was promoting an adventure game called Pitfall Harry and had built a little jungle scene in which passersby could swing on a makeshift vine. In another room, a company called Zombie had a metal sphere that shot blue electric bolts through the air. But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall vagina. Gwar, the scatological rock band that id had hired to produce the display, had pushed their renowned prurient theatrics to the edge. The vagina was lined with dozens of dildos to look like teeth. A bust of O. J. Simpson’s decapitated head hung from the top. As the visitors walked through the vaginal mouth, two members of Gwar cloaked in fur and raw steak came leaping out of the shadows and pretended to attack them with rubber penises. The Microsoft executives were frozen. Then, to everyone’s relief, they burst out laughing.

The 49ers didn’t have a first-round pick—it had been traded years earlier to the Bills in the O.J. Simpson trade—and Walsh was hoping to take Simms at the top of the second round. But the Giants took Simms seventh overall, and Walsh had to settle for Joe Montana with the last pick in the third round.

This was America's new cable-wired, online nationalism, honey-combed lives intersecting during collective agony, the knee-pad titillation of Oval Office sex, the rubbernecking of celebrity violence. Until the Women's World Cup, the two biggest sports-related stories of the 1990s were the murder trial of O.J. Simpson and the knee-whacking shatter of figure skating's porcelain myth. Fans cheer for professional city teams and alma maters, but there is no grand, cumulative rooting in the United States except for the disposable novelty of the Olympics. With the rare exception of the Super Bowl is background noise, commercials interrupted by a flabby game, the Coca-Cola bears more engaging than the Chicago Bears.

Woefully bad books fall into three broad categories: the stupid, the mega-stupid, and the ones written by O. J. Simpson.

As únicas mulheres mencionadas na carta são secretárias, esposas e namoradas - o que resumia bem a visão de O. J. sobre o lugar das mulheres no mundo.

O caso Simpson, continuou Grossman, "carrega em seu bojo um risco elevado de semear a discórdia racial em nossa comunidade.

Como se vê, ao se dirigir aos colegas atletas, a carta deixada por Simpson assume um tom de anuário escolar.

O. J. Simpson was wonderfully stiff in both Capricorn One and The Towering Inferno. David: I directed him in the Naked Gun movies. Although he actually improved with each film, his acting remained a lot like his murdering—he got away with it, but no one really believed him.

Kardashian’s divorce from Kristen pained him, especially because she left him for Bruce Jenner, the former Olympic decathlon champion. Jenner and Kristen later married, and at the time of the murders they were starring in a frequently played infomercial for a thigh-exercising device. According to a close associate of Kardashian’s, “It bothered him that she was on TV all the time with the Thighmaster. This case was his way to step over them. This was better than infomercials.

Ultimately, it is not surprising that black jurors decide to punish the police for its sorry past and that, alas, O.J. Simpson turned out to be the undeserving beneficiary of this ignoble tale.

Indeed, though Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were the first and most important casualties of this case, they were not the only ones. There was Simpson’s family, those decent and loyal women in yellow who endured this long trial for a man they loved, and of course those two children, who would grow up without a mother. There were Simpson’s friends, many of whom came to realize how blind they had been to O.J.’s narcissism and brutality. There were the peripheral figures, like Shipp and Huizenga, who degraded themselves on the altar of celebrity. (Shipp, at least, came to realize what he had done.) And there was even the public at large, whose passions and biases were inflamed by the events Simpson had set in motion. None of this mattered to O.J. Simpson, because, as he had done his entire life, he cared only about himself.

When we were kids, he watched the O. J. Simpson trial and that was it. It was like when Mr. J gave me my first guitar. We both knew.

The man with the machine gun was Joe Remiro, and the student was Lance Ito, who later became the judge in the criminal trial of O. J. Simpson.

I have strong feelings on the subject of American youth and here’s one of them. I’m really bothered at the emphasis given by the media on sports in the schools. Far too many youngsters spend all their energies and time on the basketball courts, wanting to be a Michael Jordan. Or they throw their energies toward being a Reggie Jackson on the baseball diamond or an O.J. Simpson on the football field. They want to make a million dollars a year, not realizing how few who try make those kinds of salaries. These kids end up throwing their lives away. When the media doesn’t emphasize sports, it’s music. I often hear of groups – and many of them good – who pour out their hearts in a highly competitive career, not realizing that only one group in 10,000 is going to make it big. Rather than putting all their time and energy into sports or music, these kids – these bright, talented young people – should be spending their time with books and self-improvement, ensuring they’ll have a career when they’re adults. I fault the media for perpetuating these grandiose dreams.

The average North American has probably lavished one hundred times more attention on O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky than he has on the new microtechnologies that are poised to antiquate his job and subvert the political system he depends on for unemployment compensation.

Nicole Brown Simpson died one month and one day after my mother. Her daughter was only eight, but I kept thinking she was twelve. Her neighbor found her, but I kept thinking her daughter had. I remember watching that slow-motion chase intently, hoping O.J. would follow through on his threats to kill himself. He entered my life, however distantly, just when I needed a killer upon which to focus my anger.

American Tragedy: The Inside Story of the Simpson Defense,

Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted

Nicole’s prophetic words haunted me throughout the trial. She had said to friends and family, “He’s going to kill me, and he’ll get away with it, because he’s O. J. Simpson.” It breaks my heart that I was unable to prove her wrong.

On the morning of June 13, 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found—their bodies butchered and discarded like grass clippings—all of that changed. Their murderer, O. J. Simpson, would turn justice on its head. By virtue of his celebrity, he would be coddled by worshipful cops, pumped up by star-fucking attorneys, indulged by a spineless judge, and adored by jurors every bit as addled by racial hatred as their counterparts on the Rodney King jury.

O. J. Simpson slaughtered two innocent people, and he walked free—right past the most massive and compelling body of physical evidence ever assembled against a criminal defendant. I am not bitter. I am angry. And I ask myself over and over again, How could this jury fail to see? Was there something else we could have done? Something more we could have said?

How many times did I lead that jury along the blood trail? Following the bloody prints of that rare and expensive Bruno Magli loafer—size 12, the same as Simpson wears—leading away from the bodies, up the front steps to the rear gate of Nicole Brown’s condo. A blood trail leading right to the foot of O. J. Simpson’s bed, for God’s sake! On Ronald Goldman’s shirt, a head hair that matched those of the defendant. Simpson’s hair. On the navy-blue cap dropped at the crime scene, the same black hairs, as well as a carpet fiber matching those found in the defendant’s Bronco. Stop and think for a moment. How did all this stuff get there? The defendant’s blood is found where there shouldn’t be blood. The defendant’s hair where there shouldn’t be hair. There was enough physical evidence in this case to convict O. J. Simpson twenty times over.

Now, the fact that O. J. Simpson had beaten his wife didn’t mean that he’d killed her. Not all the men who beat their wives end up killing them. But my years in law enforcement had shown me that men who kill their wives have often beaten or abused them in the past. Whether that was what we had here, I couldn’t tell.

Even before I left the office that night, I was hearing rumors that the LAPD brass were in negotiations with Robert Shapiro to allow O. J. Simpson to surrender voluntarily. Our threat to go grand jury must have lit a fire under them.

As the evidence piled up, so did O. J. Simpson’s incentive to flee. “What if Simpson pulls a Polanski?” I asked Gil. Film director Roman Polanski—allowed to remain at large while under investigation on charges of statutory rape—had fled to France. Why couldn’t it happen here? The clock was ticking, and we didn’t want to be the saps who failed to move because the cops didn’t give us permission. There were other concerns as well.

It’s Simpson,” she said. “He was supposed to turn himself in at Parker Center this morning and he didn’t show.” What? Shapiro, Patti Jo told me, was to have brought Simpson in to Parker Center by eleven o’clock. An hour later, still no sign of him. “The cops are plenty pissed,” she told me. “They’re going to send a unit out there to get him.” “I thought they didn’t know where he was.” “He’s staying over at Kardashian’s place in the Valley,” Patti Jo replied. She was referring to Robert Kardashian. Up till then, I’d never heard of the guy, but he was apparently a longtime buddy of O. J. Simpson. Curiouser and curioser. How did so much manage to happen without our knowledge? I’d never seen this before—and it was certainly a bad sign.

He looked like he’d been sleeping on the street. He wore a dark suit that seemed to sag on his body. In accordance with rules of the suicide watch, he wore no belt or shoelaces. His features were slack, his manner distracted. I suspected he was tranked. He looked half-angry, half-scared, utterly deflated. In the coming months I would watch an alert, carefully coached O. J. Simpson put on an affable, confident face for the jury and the world to see. And I would remember the way he looked this first morning. A common thug, collared.

during this interview the shove came way too late and way too gently. “O.J.,” Phil says uneasily. “We’ve got sort of a problem.” “Mmnh-mmh,” the suspect replies. “We’ve got some blood on and in your car. We’ve got some blood at your house. And it’s sort of a problem.” Tom puts in, “Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at Nicole’s house?” “No,” Simpson replies. “It was last night.” “Okay, so last night you cut it?” “Somewhere after the recital…” “What do you think happened?” Phil asks him. “Do you have any idea?” O.J. subtly puts the detectives on the defensive. “I have no idea, man. You guys haven’t told me anything. I have no idea… . Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit…

At Nicole’s urging, Keith left her alone to talk to her estranged husband. Several minutes later, O. J. Simpson emerged from the bedroom. Keith said he was frightened, but then, to his surprise, Simpson stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings, right?” he said, shaking Zlomsowitch’s hand. “I’m a very proud man.” As Zlomsowitch spoke, I stood there with my mouth open in amazement. O. J. Simpson was spying on his wife in the bushes while she was having sex, then, the next day, shakes the hand of her lover? That was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. (Since then, I’ve had a chance to learn a lot more about the nature of domestic violence. Batterers only rarely blame other men. It’s usually the wife or girlfriend, “the bitch,” who takes the heat. But at the time I first heard this story, Simpson’s behavior struck me as utterly incomprehensible.)

had to tell the jury to disregard the statement attributed to Nicole. At that point, though, they seemed to be hanging on Zlomsowitch’s every word, breathless to hear what happened next. “We went back to Nicole’s house,” he continued. “We lit a few candles, put on a little music, poured a glass of wine, and we… began to become intimate.” After they’d had sex, Nicole told him she thought it best if he went home and she went to bed. The following day, ZIomsowitch came back to the house and sat with Nicole by the pool as her children swam. She complained of a stiff neck; they went into a bedroom off the swimming pool where he began to give her a neck massage. After about five minutes, Zlomsowitch recalled, O. J. Simpson appeared two feet in front of them and said, “I can’t believe it… . Look what you are doing. The kids are right out here by the pool.” According to Zlomsowitch, Simpson went on to say, “I watched you last night. I can’t believe you would do that in the house. I watched you… . I saw everything you did.” Then he demanded to speak with Nicole alone. Zlomsowitch, who was still sitting on Nicole’s back at that point, eased off slowly. He told us that he didn’t want to make any sudden moves that might incite Simpson to anger.

So I wound up listening with innocent fascination—along with everyone else in the courtroom—as Keith told how he had met Nicole in Aspen about two years before her death. At that time, he was director of operations for the Mezzaluna restaurants’ Colorado and California operations. Nicole was legally separated from Simpson then and living at Gretna Green. In the spring of ‘92 he and Nicole became lovers, but only for about a month. During that time, Zlomsowitch said, O. J. Simpson would follow Nicole when she went out in the evening. Once Nicole and a party of friends showed up at the Mezzaluna in Beverly Hills, where ZIomsowitch was on duty. As he was sitting with her at her table, he noticed O. J. Simpson pull his car up to the parking attendant. Simpson came in and went directly to Nicole’s table. He leaned over, stared at ZIomsowitch, and said, “I’m O. J. Simpson and she’s still my wife.

The LAPD crime lab had just recently begun to do DNA testing. None of its technicians was all that experienced in the process. They were perfectly capable of performing the simplest test, called PCR DQ alpha. But it had to be done correctly. When contamination occurs, you get wildly erratic results. That was why I breathed a sigh of relief when I read Collin’s report: in this case, the results were perfectly consistent. Every blood drop on the trail at Bundy displayed O. J. Simpson’s genetic markers, and only his genetic markers. Bull’s-eye.

But the O. J. Simpson who emerged from that police interview struck me as cold and detached—fundamentally unaffected by the news of his ex-wife’s murder.

That jocular, almost flippant tone pervaded the entire interview. Simpson tells them about how an endorsement deal gets him Bugle Boy Jeans for free—“I got a hundred pair,” he brags. He also tells them his preference in sneakers—“Reebok, that’s all I wear.” He even gives a little rap, referring to himself in the third person, about how he rushes for a plane, just like in the Hertz commercial—“I was doing my little crazy what-I-do. I mean, I do it everywhere. Everybody who has ever picked me up says that O.J’s a whirlwind at the end, he’s running, he’s grabbing things.

At last, the door opened. The courtroom went silent. O. J. Simpson strode in, impeccably dressed, looking surprisingly fit. What an impressive transformation from the bedraggled, confused defendant who had appeared for his arraignment. His new role was the O.J. You Know and Love, Falsely Accused. And no Shakespearean actor would play this one better.

Eventually, I imagine, O. J. Simpson will reclaim it and auction it off on Larry King Live.

Reluctantly, they agreed to try again. Within two minutes they were off and gossiping on another subject not mentioned on the tape—the Bronco chase. Black jurors believed Simpson had only wanted to visit Nicole’s grave. When one of the more neutral jurors suggested that it might—just might—have been the escape attempt of a guilty man, one of the female blacks shot back with a defense of Simpson, referring to him as “my man O.J.” “My man?” I thought to myself. The only way he’d be your man is if you were white, twenty-five, and built like a centerfold.

As I turned to leave the podium, I caught Simpson out of the corner of my eye. He was shifting in his seat, his face contorted with—what was it? Rage? Frustration? Disbelief? His lawyers had probably told him that he had a good shot at making bail. And here I’d gone bringing up all that Bronco business. Being at the mercy of a woman had to be O. J. Simpson’s personal idea of hell. That gave me at least a moment of satisfaction. But as so often happened in TFC, even my smallest triumphs were short-lived. Johnnie did an end run around me, announcing that his client wanted to “address the court.” If the defendant has counsel there to speak for him, he shouldn’t be allowed to speak directly to the court unless he’s prepared to take the witness stand. I started to object, but it was too late. Lance had granted the request. “How do you feel?” he inquired amiably of Simpson, who now stood, hands clasped in front of him, the very picture of wounded virtue. How did he feel? “Well,” he complained, “I feel I’ve been attacked here today.” Attacked? Does he not get it that he’s the defendant in a double homicide? “I’m an innocent man,” he continued. “I want to get to the jury… . I want to get it over with as soon as I can. I have two young kids out there. That’s my only concern… . I’ve got two young kids out there that don’t have a mother… .” It disgusted me to the point of nausea to hear this man use his children this way. And then Simpson turned toward me. I didn’t meet his eyes—not because I was intimidated by him; I just didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had my attention.

For several weeks now, the team had been pulling together a montage, a sort of visual history of this crime. Over the images, we’d decided that we would play the 911 tapes. Although I’d seen bits and pieces of this opus as it was coming together, I didn’t feel the full power of it until this morning, when Jonathan hit the “play” button. You heard “Emergency 911,” then the static confusion on the caller’s end. The thumps of blows landing on flesh. Then, the more frantic pleas of the 1993 call. “He’s O. J. Simpson. I think you know his record. He’s fucking going nuts.” All the while, on the large screen, we showed the photo of Nicole taken after the beating of 1989. She was lifting her hair to reveal the full extent of the damage to her face. Her eyes were downcast, as if in shame. Then, the photo of her smeared with mud. Cut to the Bundy trail, the knit cap, a close-up of Ron’s shirt. Behind those images, O. J. Simpson’s voice rose to a peak of rage. Suddenly, the audio stopped, and all that was left was a picture of Nicole’s body curled in a pool of blood. We held on that image for thirty seconds in complete silence. There was sobbing throughout the courtroom. But all I could think was, It’s over.

By the end, we had over 150 entries pointing to guilt. It was too much for a summation, so we boiled it down to eight key pieces of evidence—each of which had an irrefutable connection to O. J. Simpson: The knit cap. Ron Goldman’s shirt. The shoe prints up the Bundy walk. The droplets of blood leading from Bundy. The blood in the Bronco. The Rockingham blood trail. The Rockingham glove. The socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed. We’d originally included the Bundy glove as well, but it had less significant blood, hair, and fibers. Ultimately, we left it out. It didn’t add to proof of guilt.

The elements of that argument were threefold: opportunity; identity; motive. Opportunity presented no problem. Here was O. J. Simpson, a man whose face was recognized everywhere he went, who had no one to document his whereabouts for what we now computed as seventy-seven minutes, the exact period during which Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered. Identity was also a lock. We had identified O. J. Simpson six ways from Sunday as the man whose blood was at the murder scene—and in the Bronco and on the bloody Rockingham glove, where it was mixed with the blood of his victims.

As I’ve said, the prosecution never needs to prove that the defendant had motive, only intent. It is usually useful, however, to suggest to a jury why the defendant might have gone so far as to slit another human being’s throat. The motive for this particular murder was sexual rage. And I felt that now, in our final moments, we were compelled to pull this jury’s nose flat up against the truth. O. J. Simpson was a sadist who’d terrorized his wife for years—until she’d finally stood up to him and paid for it with her life.

watched Simpson as the deputies led him out of the courtroom. He gave the crowd a thumbs-up. Beneath that three-thousand-dollar suit he’s just one more sadistic punk, I told myself. You’ve put a lot of those away. He’s no different. But, of course, he was. By my estimate, O. J. Simpson had already sunk more than a million dollars into his defense, and the case was barely six weeks old. Shapiro alone must be pulling down a retainer well into six figures. Possibly seven. With each passing week, the defense team seemed to be doubling in size. There were at least three private investigators we knew of working for the team, with scores more P.I.s on the freelance pad. Their names kept turning up in the press—as did those of defense attorneys around town looking to get some ink. One of those was Johnnie Cochran.

doubted that Cochran would risk his reputation as a pillar of the community for the likes of O. J. Simpson. The defendant was not some brother who’d been shaken down by cops for driving in a white neighborhood. O. J. Simpson could have jogged nude through Bel Air without being arrested. He hobnobbed with white golfing buddies, married a white woman, lived in a mansion, and had effectively turned his back on the black community. He had, moreover, committed two murders of horrific savagery.

Simpson arrived at court that morning sporting an expensive dark suit and an irritating swagger. This was new. I remember thinking that his handlers must have adjusted his medication because he was clear-eyed and alert. He appeared confident, which gave me odd comfort. My guess was that Simpson’s confidence often led him to do stupid things. He seemed in the mood to bluster. I wondered if he was being coached to display that swagger in hopes that press and public would remember that the guy in the dock here was the ostentatiously confident O. J. Simpson. “Do you understand the charges against you, sir?” asked the supervising criminal court judge, Cecil Mills. Simpson stood up straight and answered as if breaking from a huddle. “Yes, Your Honor.” “How do you plead?” Simpson snapped to full attention and boomed, “Absolutely, one hundred percent not guilty.” You asshole, I thought. You unregenerate, scum-sucking creep.