During the first few weeks of the case, Kris and Candace had been working on my behalf to reel in Resnick. Faye, a wealthy divorcée and, as she was most often described, a “West Side socialite,” was a friend of the Jenners. Kris had introduced her to Nicole about two years earlier. Faye, too, was elusive, but Kris managed to coax her into my office late one night in July.
During that first encounter Faye Resnick came across as childlike and wary. She was a thin, waifish woman with an enormous mane of dark-blond hair. There was certainly nothing about her to prefigure the self-possessed siren who would eventually hit the talk-show circuit, to say nothing of the cover of Playboy. In fact, she sat almost curled up in a ball, staring at the floor.
“If it’s Simpson you’re afraid of,” I told her, “the best thing to do is come forward.” Even as I said it I was aware of the half-truths I am often forced to tell. Sure, she might be safer physically. But I had a feeling that if the defense got her on the stand, they’d cut her up pretty good. Clearly, this had occurred to Faye as well.
“You don’t want me for a witness,” she told me. “The defense will trash me for my drug habit. They’ll make me out to be so bad it will ruin your case.”
Faye’s “drug habit” was supposedly a thing of the past, but Simpson’s attorneys were already floating stories, claiming that she and Nicole had borrowed money from Colombian drug lords to open a coffee bar. Supposedly, that led to Nicole’s being murdered.
“Let me worry about that,” I told her.
If all she had to offer was hearsay, she’d never make it to the stand anyway. But any information at all was helpful.
“Faye, if you have anything that could help our case, please share it with us,” I said. “Do it for Nicole’s sake.”
Faye said she’d think about it. I didn’t put too much pressure on her that night. Kris had warned me that it would probably take at least one more meeting to draw her out. This meeting, at least, had served as an icebreaker. Before she left, I gave her a supportive embrace.
But now this! Deirdre handed me my own personal copy of Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted.
I took the slender volume back to my office and began to read. To my surprise, Faye devoted her first chapter to our interview. Her version wasn’t exactly as I remembered it, but was impressively accurate. She even described how I’d hugged her “warmly” before she left.
I read on, intending to underline and annotate the book for future reference, and as I did, my eyes grew wide. Faye asserted (as the defense team would later) that Nicole had been carrying on a secret affair with football star Marcus Allen, who was O. J. Simpson’s best friend. (Allen denied any romantic connection with Nicole.) This was not, strictly speaking, news. The rumors about Marcus Allen were out there from day one. I was just shocked that she came out and said it. I figured that O. J. Simpson would be way pissed off about that.
Faye wrote that she’d begged Nicole to cut off the affair with Marcus and warned her, “You may be signing your death warrant.” During the weeks before her death, Nicole apparently told her about beatings and abuse that had never come to the attention of our investigators. Once while they were staying at a Las Vegas hotel, Simpson allegedly flipped out, grabbed Nicole by the hair, and flung her into a corridor. She lay in the hallway sobbing, mostly naked, until a security guard found and rescued her. But the worst beating, Faye claimed, occurred about a year before their son, Justin, was born. Nicole had found a jewelry box in one of her husband’s drawers. It contained a pair of diamond stud earrings. Assuming he had bought them for her birthday, she put the box back. But the birthday came and went; no diamonds. Later, according to Faye, Nicole learned that one of Simpson’s steady mistresses, a former Miss New York named Tawny Kitaen, had been wearing them around town. When she confronted him about it, he punched and kicked her, and then locked her in a closet. For hours after that, she lay quivering. And what was O. J. Simpson, American hero, doing? Lounging in the other room, watching some sports special. Every so often he would come back to the closet, open it, and kick her some more.
I thought Faye’s book would be tabloid nonsense-Life and Times in the Brentwood Fast Lane-but it wasn’t. It impressed me. I believed she was speaking honestly; the book had the ring of truth. From a prosecutorial point of view, however, it was frustrating. Much of the information it contained, unfortunately, was hearsay. We’d have trouble getting it admitted at trial unless we could get independent corroboration. I began to focus my reading, trying to find isolate things that could be introduced as evidence. And about three-quarters of the way through the book, I found something. Around April 1994, Simpson and Nicole were on the rocks again. He’d extracted some bizarre promise from her that she wouldn’t see other men until August, when he was due to leave for New York to start a new sportscasting contract with NBC. Even though they’d broken up, he simply couldn’t bear the humiliation of seeing her, or others seeing her, with other men, at least when they were on the same side of the Mississippi.
Simpson had called Faye in a fit of distraction. “If… I find out she’s with any other man before August,” he allegedly told Faye, “I’ll kill her.”
If Faye herself had indeed heard Simpson make this explicit death threat, it would be admissible. I believed she had. I just didn’t know whether Faye Resnick had sufficient credibility to testify for the People.
The drug problem that Faye had alluded to during our first interview was only the first of several difficulties a jury would have with her. I could work with the drug history, maybe even turn it to our advantage by pointing out that it was Nicole who arranged for the intervention that finally got Faye into a rehab clinic. Our victim was a compassionate woman. A caring and responsible friend. The fact that she had intervened to stop Faye’s downward spiral also seemed to indicate that Nicole was not some wild-eyed cocaine freak.
But Faye gave the defense more ammunition as well. I knew they would zero in on chapter 18, where Resnick wrote, “How can I describe the intensity of my relationship with Nicole, particularly toward the end? We had become more than friends. Call it what you will, bonded sisters, soulmates, confidantes…” Yes, they were lovers, if Faye was to be believed. Resnick laid out a fairly graphic-and, she claimed, one-time-episode in which she and Nicole made love while listening to Madonna’s Erotica.
Airing this stuff in court would be disastrous-the defense would use it not only to attack Resnick’s credibility, but to damage Nicole Brown Simpson’s own image in the eyes of the jury. By the time the defense was through with Resnick, the jury would be writing off Nicole as one of those West L.A. cocaine bitches, who probably got what was coming to her.
Still, that was no excuse for Faye’s not telling us what she knew. It could have put us way ahead on the domestic violence part of the investigation. But what did she do? She squirreled away her nuts to sell in a confessional memoir. Didn’t she feel some kind of real duty to Nicole? Didn’t anyone in this case feel a duty to justice?
While the Resnick shock waves reverberated through the media, the Dream Team was going through the motions of a serious freak-out. Shapiro sputtered to the court that he’d been blindsided. He wanted the trial postponed for a year to let some of the frenzy around Resnick’s book subside.
Blindsided, my ass. I learned from a conversation with Resnick’s own publisher, Michael Viner of Dove Books, that Viner had run into Shapiro at a party over a month earlier. Viner claimed to have told Shapiro that the book was coming out the week of October 17; he told me the lawyer had not appeared particularly concerned. Now that the book was out, however, Shapiro was weeping and moaning that his client couldn’t get a fair trial. He not only wanted the case held over for a year, but he wanted Simpson to spend that time free on bail, his activities monitored by “private security” that Mr. Simpson himself would provide.