“I don’t remember anything about that at all,” Juditha told me.
I was flabbergasted.
“You were there,” I reminded her. “And he was calling her a fat liar.”
“Yes,” Juditha acknowledged, “but, you see-the problem with all these things is that all this stuff happened so many times, it… didn’t mean anything anymore after a while.”
It didn’t mean anything?
The thing that seemed to upset Juditha most was her son-in-law’s treatment of his children. After Nicole and O.J. fought, she would go often to a beach house they owned. “That was always her refuge,” Juditha explained. “And then when she left him, that was the first lock that he changed. So she couldn’t go down to the beach house anymore. That’s how much he loves his kids. You know, all this circus about ‘I love my kids.’ That was their favorite place!”
Juditha was warming to the subject. It seemed curious to me that she could work up more outrage over the ill-treatment of her grandchildren than over the very obvious abuse of her own daughter.
“And another thing that upset me about him was, when she once said she cannot afford the school anymore, it’s just so much money. And he says, ‘Then put ‘em in regular school. Other kids survive.’ So there was no consideration to the kids as long as he could get to her. This is something I hold against him, and I always have. Just out to hurt Nicole. If Nicole didn’t do how O.J wanted, it was always money and it was how to get to her then.”
After the murder, the Browns received a call from Simpson’s lawyer. “Don’t expect Nicole’s alimony check,” Juditha recalled hearing, “because the children just have to get used to a lower lifestyle.”
This would have appalled me if I had not already formed an opinion as to what a selfish, unfeeling creep Orenthal James Simpson really was.
Lou promised to give Phil and Tom permission to search the storage facility where he had put the contents of Nicole’s condo. Before we left, I showed him one of the photos taken from the lockbox. As he looked at it, his expression did not change.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
“Well, they’d had a fight,” he replied.
Inside I was screaming: Why didn’t you encourage her to leave? Why didn’t you say to her, “Baby, you shouldn’t be with this monster?” But I didn’t. I’m sure in his own way, Lou Brown was suffering terribly. Maybe he was saying those same things to himself. Maybe. But I had to keep my mouth shut. You cannot afford to alienate a witness.
CAR TAPE. December 16, 1994. We have to go out and see the Browns again this Sunday. This case is kicking all my personal issues… That little girl, Nicole, never had a chance. What a tortured life she led. I don’t think she ever had much peace.
I can’t talk about this anymore…
I was dashing around Glendale trying to run a month’s worth of errands in two hours and log a few minutes of car tape in the process, when the earth seemed to give way under me. I felt queer and shaky. I had to pull into a parking lot.
That little girl, Nicole, never had a chance… I shut off the tape and rested my head on the steering wheel. I really couldn’t talk about it anymore.
The case was taking its toll on me. The stress. The long hours. That’s the punishment you expect as a prosecutor. But the type of battering this case was giving me was of a more hurtful, insidious order. It had come to the point where the mention of Nicole’s name caused me pain.
On the face of things, there were not many points of similarity between Nicole and me. She’d been a WASP goddess in a white Ferrari. I was a scrappy Jewish civil servant with a swamp for a bedroom. What are the odds that two such dissimilar women could experience anything close to the same kind of misery? And yet, so many details from her brief and tormented life seemed to resonate with my own.
In early December, Nicole’s divorce lawyers at had messengered us a packet of documents. These included a deposition Nicole had given Simpson’s attorneys in the interest of establishing her own inability to support herself. Within its pages, Nicole’s true helplessness showed through with painful clarity.
She told how she’d tried her hand at interior decorating, but her only “clients” had been her husband and his friends. She’d thought about going into the restaurant business or starting up a coffee bar with Faye Resnick. You could see her turning over and over in her mind the alternatives that would reduce her dependence upon O. J. Simpson’s money. She was looking not only for a job, but tor a career-one that would support her and give a sense of purpose to her life.
“I’m sure I’ll get a goal someday,” she’d told them. That plaintive line struck me to the heart.
Nicole had the right instincts. She knew the way to save herself was to find a career. She just couldn’t connect, somehow. Lack of talent? Lack of drive? I don’t know. When all is said and done, not enough of Nicole was revealed in these documents to answer those questions. Whenever I was tempted to fault her for having stayed in that awful relationship for fifteen years-seventeen if you count the fitful two years after the divorce-I took stock and realized that my own first marriage had lasted for five, eight if you count the time Gaby and I lived together. What tricks do we play on ourselves, to linger so long in hell?
These were not thoughts I shared with anyone at the office. At least not directly. Whenever I met with our domestic violence experts, Lydia Bodin and Scott Gordon, I’d ply them with questions.
“Why the hell didn’t she cut and run?” I’d ask Scott.
“Minimizing” was what he called it. He told me, “Women who are in abusive relationships downplay the seriousness of their own circumstances. They deny it to themselves. They present a brave front to others, trying to hold things together. It’s a coping mechanism.”
Minimizing. That certainly hit me where I lived. Nothings wrong here. I can get this thing back under control. Just don’t admit that there’s a problem.
Scott, of course, was delighted by my newfound interest in DV. Since the beginning, he’d been arguing to me and anyone else who’d listen that domestic violence was the cornerstone of this case. I’d remained aloof, but through sheer persistence, he’d picked up advocates. When, in early October, I finally assigned Chris Darden to this detail, the domestic violence movement within our office gained even more momentum.
Chris, Scott, Lydia, and Hank Goldberg, a fellow D.A. who was terrific at writing motions, worked like Trojans to document incidences of O. J. Simpson’s brutality toward Nicole. This was not easy to do. As I’ve said, an abuser does not normally hit his victim in the presence of others. So, as a starting point, they turned to an inventory Nicole had compiled at the suggestion of her divorce lawyers. According to this document, she’d gotten her first beating right after she started to live with O. J. Simpson. A year or so later, while they were staying at the Sherry Netherland in New York City, Simpson beat Nicole for hours as she crawled for the door. From her diaries we had Nicole’s own description of how he “hit me while he fucked me.” How he called her mother a “whore.” These violent episodes continued throughout the eighties.
Chris, it turned out, had an excellent way with the domestic violence witnesses. He was calm, reassuring, patient. He managed to get Denise Brown to recall an upsetting episode. The scene was Rockingham, where Denise and her date were hanging out after an evening with O.J. and Nicole. Everybody was drunk. Denise blurted that she thought O.J. took Nicole for granted-and Simpson blew. He grabbed his guests and his wife and flung them, one by one, onto the lawn.