“And do you and the defendant remain friends today?” Chris asked him.
“I still love the guy. But-um… This is a weird situation,” Ron allowed.
Leading up to the dream episode, Chris asked Ron, “Did he [Simpson] ask you any questions about the investigation that night?”
“After he told me about what they found at his house,” Ron replied, “he asked me, ‘How long does it take DNA to come back?’ “
“And at that time, did you know the correct answer to that question?”
“I just off-the-cuff said two months.”
“And what did he say in response?”
“He kind of jokingly just said, you know, ‘To be honest, Shipp… I’ve had some dreams of killing her.’ “
I winced a little. The defendant’s dream comments had originally been made in the context of his having been asked to take a lie-detector test. But that couldn’t be said in court, because testimony relating to polygraphs is inadmissible under California law. So while the jury heard that Simpson had dreamed of killing his ex-wife, that comment now seemed to come out of nowhere. They couldn’t be told that it was part of a scheme to give himself an excuse for failing a lie-detector test.
What followed was one of the meanest cross-examinations I’ve ever seen. It was intended, I think, to send a message that no traitors from the Simpson camp would be tolerated; the defense was determined to destroy Shipp. Johnnie, it came out, was related in some distant way to Ron, and he couldn’t bring himself to make the kill. Carl Douglas was the designated hit man.
First, Carl tried to establish that Shipp didn’t know the defendant as well as he’d claimed. After all, they never double-dated with their wives. O.J. had never played a single game of tennis with him.
“I guess you can say,” Ron said slowly, “I was like everybody else, one of his servants.”
Far from compromising himself, Ron’s reply served to make him appear both humble and self-aware.
Carl hammered away at Shipp, trying to get him to admit that the dream story was nothing more than an attempt to call attention to himself and advance his own acting career.
“I’m doing this for my conscience and my peace of mind,” Ron replied calmly. “I will not have the blood of Nicole on Ron Shipp. I can sleep at night, unlike a lot of others.”
As Ron looked better and better, Carl’s jabs got meaner.
“Isn’t it true that you were never alone with O. J. Simpson that night at Rockingham? Isn’t it true that the defendant’s sister, Shirley, was the one who accompanied him upstairs alone that night?” Carl even offered a veiled hint that Ron might have been in on the police conspiracy to plant evidence.
Ron looked right past Carl, straight into the face of his former hero.
“This is sad, O. J… This is really sad.”
Then Carl Douglas sank to a new low, even for the Dream Team. First he brought up Ron’s old drinking problem. We objected, of course-what was the relevance of a condition that ended years ago? Overruled.
Wasn’t it true, he asked, that a few days before the murders Ron brought a tall blond woman to Rockingham and asked to use the Jacuzzi? Objection, irrelevant. Overruled. Ron tried to explain that he and his wife were friends of hers. Didn’t matter. The message Carl intended to send to those five black women on the jury was perfectly clear:
Black man steps out on his black wife with a white bitch. Are you going to tolerate this, my sisters?
It was horrible.
I was unprepared for the reports that came back to me following Ron’s testimony. Black journalists in the newsroom below us were branding him a liar and a traitor. The next issue of the city’s black-owned newspaper, the Sentinel, ran a banner headline proclaiming Shipp a “drunk” and accusing him of joining “O.J.‘s Cast of ‘Addicts, Liars.’ ” For weeks thereafter, Ron received death threats against himself, his wife, and his children.
I had been aware, of course, of the deep racial schism in this case. But I’d held out some hope that a man of such obvious integrity as Ron Shipp might somehow bridge the divide. When I saw the trouble he’d bought upon himself and his family by speaking the truth, I felt both my ideals and my confidence crumbling. If Ron Shipp’s testimony could be flung away so cavalierly, there would never be enough evidence in this world to prove O. J. Simpson’s guilt.
Denise Brown was pretty much a law unto herself. And I had no illusions about how she would be received. She was the white girl’s white sister.
During the pretrial motions, she’d taken the defense to task on camera asking why, if they were trying so hard to find the truth, they were trying to get the evidence suppressed. On a personal level, I dug her gutsy style, but as a prosecutor I wasn’t thrilled with her penchant for publicity. One ill-considered remark to the press, I knew, could render her worthless as a witness. On top of it, Denise had had her own problems with alcohol. Shapiro was threatening a blistering cross in which he would exploit whatever information he had to taint her credibility.
“You’d better clamp down on her,” I told Chris. We needed to keep the testimony tidy and circumscribed. Understated sincerity. Easy on the tears. That was the ticket for this witness. Ito had ruled that we couldn’t bring up any violent incidents that occurred before 1981, so we had to be especially careful.
But Denise was not so easily reined in. On the morning of her testimony, she showed up in a black pantsuit with a large gold cross hanging from her neck. It was very stylish, but way too hip to make points with this jury.
During her first few minutes on the stand, Denise seemed in control of herself. Chris handled her well, leading her carefully through the early days of her sister’s relationship with O. J. Simpson.
“When did you first meet the defendant?” he asked her.
“Back in 1977,” she replied. “He was playing football for Buffalo.”
Nicole had invited Denise and Dominique out East for a game. While they were sitting in the stands, a friend of O.J.‘s came over to say hello to Nicole. She kissed him on both cheeks.
“And after the game, did you go to the defendant’s house? Chris asked.
What! I thought. Why is Chris giving her this opening? She’s not supposed to discuss anything that happened in 1977.
“You returned to the defendant’s home after the game, right?”
Yes, they did.
“Anything unusual happen then?”
Denise began to vent.
“O.J. got real upset and he started screaming at Nicole.”
Shapiro objected and asked for a sidebar. I couldn’t blame him. Ito dressed Chris down for letting his witness mention an incident that occurred before the ten-year time limit.
“You are to disregard the last… answer,” Ito told the jury. “Treat it as though you never heard it.”
Things got worse. Denise told about the night she and her boyfriend Dino had double-dated with Nicole and O.J. at a watering hole in Santa Ana. They were throwing back shots of tequila when Simpson grabbed Nicole’s crotch and proclaimed, “This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.”
“And Nicole just sort of wrote it off like it was nothing,” Denise said. “Like she was used to that kind of treatment.”
A quiver had crept into her voice. Oh no, I thought, no tears!
For some reason, Chris then asked Denise whether Simpson shied away when people came up to ask him for autographs. Denise, contempt in her voice, said, “Oh, no, not at all. He loves the attention. He loves it. He’s got a big ego. It feeds his ego.”
Another objection. Another sidebar. This time Ito directly instructed the witness to stick to relevant issues.
Denise then described that other double date after which they’d all returned to Rockingham, a little drunk on margaritas. They were sitting at the bar when she was moved to tell O.J. that she thought he “took Nicole for granted.” He “blew up,” she said, and started throwing things around: pictures; photos-then Nicole and the other guests. “She ended up… falling,” Denise said of her sister. “She ended up on her elbows and on her butt.”