The O.J. Simpson Trial: Nicole Brown Simpson Part 1

Mike and Sarah begin their epic journey into O.J. Simpson's trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, beginning with the story of Nicole's life with O.J. until their marriage in 1985. This episode contains descriptions of violence and domestic abuse. Like so many of the women we talk about, Nicole deserved better.

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Transcript

Sarah: They were known as the sort of Sergius and Bacchus of LA. That's the first thing I think of. I was so clearly once a 12 year old with no friends.

Mike: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the podcast where the trials of the century become the podcasts of the next. 

Sarah: Whoa, that is ballsy, my dude. 

Mike: You paused way too long. That makes me think it's not that good.

Sarah: No, I was just absorbing it. That's big podcast energy. You're saying we're one of the podcasts of the century. I love how I explain the subject matter in our episodes relatively rarely, because when I start researching something, I tend to hang on to it.

Mike: It’s like a dog fetching a bone and you're like, give it back, give it back, give it back. And it doesn't actually want to. 

Sarah: Right. And I'm like, I'm not ready yet. And with this one, we have been trying to record this for two months and every week, God bless you, I am like, it's not ready yet. Don’t come in. Everything’s fine. I feel personally responsible for communicating the trauma of Nicole Brown Simpson's life to our listeners and get it all totally, factually accurate and just do a great job for Nicole. And it's like , calm down, Sarah, just calm down. 

So welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where, calm down Sarah. But I also love how whenever you get me into the hot seat, you're like, this is going to be the best podcast in the whole world. No pressure. It's fine. And it's great. 

And my name is Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer working on a book about the Satanic Panic.

Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post and we are on Patreon at patreon.com/yourewrongabout 

Sarah: And today we're talking about Nicole Brown Simpson. 

Mike: Yes. Epic, huge podcast of the century.

Sarah: Stop it. I've just been non-stop reading for about three days now and also researching this case for the past two or three months. 

Mike: Yes. And much of your adult life too, because you've written about this before. You've been obsessed with this off and on for ages. 

Sarah: The first time I researched the OJ Simpson trial was in 2014, and I went in knowing almost only what I had learned when I was a child. Because I was six and seven years old when this was going on. 

What shocked me most, and what I therefore wanted to talk about first, because we were going to do more than one episode on this because we have to.

Mike: Because trial of the century. It’s literally the biggest event of the nineties, basically. However you measure public attention.

Sarah:  Definitely the biggest event of the nineties in the United States. And of course there have been probably like 20 trials of the century. Maybe you could call it the ‘trial of the turn of the century’ because I think it really did say in many important ways where America was at the period that it took place with regards to race, with regards to class, to celebrity, to our expectations about our legal system, to American's understanding of justice or understanding of gender, and domestic abuse, and so many other things. Women in the workplace, women as a general concept. 

And so anyway, I got really into it. And the first thing that I focused on, and then I was really amazed by was like, oh my God this was this horrible, tragic murder. And when I was a child, I had no sense of that. I remember asking my mom if she thought OJ did it. And my mom, to her credit, was like, yes, I do. And I remember being taken aback and I was like, well, I think he's innocent. And I think that I said that because, I mean, I initially didn't remember why. And then as I was reading and watching all this footage of the trial, because lately I'll have the OJ Simpson trial on very quietly in the background as I'm working and glance at it occasionally and turn it up when something interesting happens. Which I think is how people watched it in the workplace in 1995. And as I've had it on you see a lot of OJ Simpson's face, because that was the only way he could communicate in the trial. He never testified. And he really was a master of projecting geniality and this impression of genuine happiness and calm, and I'm so happy to see you. He knew how to project charm, basically. 

And I think as a kid I had seen his face and just been like, oh, that doesn't look like a murderer. That looks like a nice man. And so as a little kid, I think maybe I got the essential thing that many Americans were really struggling with. Which was aside from all the other issues that were part of this and that made us see this case from wildly different viewpoints, depending on where we were in terms of race and class and gender and so many other factors in America. There was also this sense I think of well, he's a nice man. He doesn't look like a murderer. He looks like a nice man. And how much we struggled with that.

Mike: I mean, it is amazing how many of these things that purport to be fact finding exercises are really these qualitative experiences of, is this person nice or not?

Sarah: Is this person human or not? And so my first memory of it is seeing it covered on the news as a little kid. And then I remember watching the Saturday Night Live sketches. The only person on SNL who really expressed the gravity of the situation was Norm McDonald. Do you remember Norm MacDonald?

Mike:  As a person, yeah. I don't remember his jokes about this. 

Sarah: He was the host of Weekend Update at the time. And so it was a running thing that he would have a completely seemingly unrelated piece that would be like, the Pope is coming out with a new book next month, it's called, OJ is Guilty and God Told Me. Or they would just be like, what seemed like kind of an innocuous late night joke about Johnny Cochran and Robert Shapiro mended their feud today after OJ Simpson threatened to cut both of their heads off. Because one of the things about the murder that I didn't know until I started researching it as an adult was that Nicole Brown Simpson had been almost beheaded. 

Mike: Oh, fuck. Jesus.

Sarah:  I was like, oh my God, everyone's forgotten that there's a woman in this story who was killed in this horrible way. And who had, what was in many ways, a wonderful and enviable life by many of the standards that we use in America. But also a life of pain and terror. And that all of that had been forgotten. 

I had grown up just thinking about the OJ Simpson trial as just a spectacle. It was a thing that took over media for about a year and a half. And everyone had opinions about it, and everyone watched it. And at the end of it we moved on. And in this interesting way, we lost track of it being about a person while making the trial such a big spectacle.

Mike: My main memory of Nicole Brown Simpson was that every once in a while, you'd get these stories that are like, we've forgotten about Nicole Brown Simpson or forgotten in the midst of this circus as Nicole Brown Simpson, the victim. And then I've always thought of it the way that we cover Africa in the media, technically. The tone of the coverage about those countries is sort of hectoring. No one's paying attention to this economic crash. Why aren't you looking at what's happening?

Sarah: No one is reporting on this thing.

Mike:  Yeah. And so it's almost like it's sort of shaming you at the same time they're sort of ignoring their own choices. And it always feels to me like, well, if you want to tell me about the economic crisis in Zimbabwe, just tell me about it. But make me interested in Zimbabwe. And I feel like there was a lot of the stuff with Nicole Brown Simpson that they're like, she's invisible at the heart of this scandal. And it's like, well you can just make her not invisible. Like you can just do a show about her or if you choose to, you can just do tonight's coverage of the trial from her perspective. That's a choice that you've made. It's not this inevitable thing.

Sarah:  You're right. I didn't even think of it that way before. But you have all these major networks and occasionally one coughs out a little piece. It's like, shame on you for not thinking about Nicole. And it's well, you control media.

Mike:  I also feel like I know basically nothing about her. I think that she was a model, I guess. I know that OJ was an abusive guy. I know that they had a terrible, he had an unbelievable temper and was incredibly violent, and this really terrible human being.

Sarah:  I mean, I wouldn't call anyone a terrible human being, but terrible husband. Terrible, terrible, terrible husband.

Mike: But where should we start with actually telling her stories here? Where do you want us to start?

Sarah:  I want to tell the story of her life until right before the murder. And then I want to pick up with the murder when we start talking about the investigation and trial. But anything before that, let's talk about that.

Mike: So, yeah. What's her upbringing? Where was she born? What’s her deal?

Sarah: Nicole Brown Simpson was born in Germany. She's the second of four daughters born to Lou and Juditha Brown. Her mom's German, her dad was an American living in Germany. So she lived in Germany until she was four and then the family moved to Southern California. 

So one of my main sources for my information about her is Raging Heart, by Sheila Weller, that comes out in February 1995, which is basically right as the OJ Simpson trial is starting. Marcia Clark, the prosecutor, has been trying to get information, and insight, and materials from the Brown family. And they have been, according to Marcia Clark in her memoir, reluctant to help her, slow to help her, kind of non-communicative in many ways. But it turns out they've been working on this book at the same time that Marcia Clark has had a hard time communicating with them. Which is a theme in the OJ Simpson trial. There was a lot of money in books in 1994 and 1995. And there were several books or book deals that directly affected the course of this trial. 

Mike: Wow. What a time capsule. 

Sarah: I know. Isn't that wild? And the stories about Nicole as that she's growing up, in Sheila Weller's book and from other people who knew her, is that she was just this just very active, headstrong, kind of diving headfirst into life kind of person. There are two separate stories about her being terribly injured and not really caring as a child. One where she's riding her bike as fast as she can to get home after going to the skating rink, when she wasn't supposed to, and then goes head over handlebars and gets a ride home and is, “It's fine. Everything's fine. I had my fun.” 

And then another where she and her sister, Denise, get really into horseback riding. And one day the horse throws her off. She hits her head on the ground, she has blood coming out of a head wound, and her sister has to ride her horse down to a gas station to call to get help. And at the end of it, Nicole recovers and immediately gets back on her horse and keeps riding around. That feels like the way people remember her, that she was known for not being scared of life.

Mike: She's a knockabout kid. She's like an eighties kid. We don't have kids like this anymore. Their parents just let them go and get in a bunch of accidents and scrape their knees and stuff. And we're just like, no big deal. Whereas now I feel like we'd all be calling CPS. 

Sarah: Yeah. She's an outdoor girl. And she's also raised Catholic because her mom is Catholic, and so she prays every night for her grandparents, and as a child would say her nightly prayers in German. Her sister, Denise, who's two years older than her, is known as kind of the pretty one.

Mike: Really? 

Sarah: Yes. This is a family where Nicole is not the pretty one.

Mike: How fucking pretty is Denise? Jesus Christ.

Sarah: I think it’s just that she's two years older, so she has a head start and she got to the, through the awkwardness a little bit faster.

Mike:  It's like me having a brother who's the short one. Like how tiny would this human being be? Jesus Christ. Okay. 

Sarah: Yeah. This is a good time for us to do my favorite feature, where you look up a picture of Nicole Brown Simpson. 

Mike: Which one am I looking up?

Sarah:  Just like general pictures of her alive.

Mike:  I'm Googling Nicole Brown Simpson alive. 

Sarah: Oh, okay. 

Mike: There's one. It's like a paparazzi photo and she's got like one of those Beverly Hills 90210 blouses on, where it's a button up blouse, but she's tied it around her waist, so her midriff is showing.

Sarah: It's more of a Melrose Place blouse. Yeah. I don't know. 

Mike: And she's got Daisy Dukes, super short jean shorts on, and she looks like Linda Hamilton in the Terminator, or like Terminator 2 where she's buff. 

Sarah: Yes, exactly. Yes. That's the comparison to spell alluding me this whole time. She does, because everyone mentions that she was a great beauty, which is absolutely true, but you know what else? She was jacked. 

Mike: She looked super athletic.

Sarah:  She ran nine miles a fucking day. Yeah. That is a lot of miles. I mean that's, in my opinion, too many.

Mike:  But yeah. In any other family, she would be the pretty one.

Sarah: Tell me about her. What is, what does she look like? Imagine yourself a straight male, if you will.

Mike: This is the hardest Avatar species for me to jack myself into. She has a really sharp jawline. She has almond eyes. She has this frowning kind of countenance, that a lot of the photos of her she looked sort of serious in them. She doesn't have an Anna Nicole Smith, always smiling, bubbliness. She looks sort of serious. And in a couple of them, she has her brows furrowed.

Sarah: She has a really serious beauty, right.

Mike:  I guess  what people would call it is like icy or something, or like sort of distant and perfect.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. People use that word about her and it's often saying something to the effect of like, “When I first met Nicole, she seemed icy and distant to me, but then I realized that was just because she's shy and very symmetrical.” 

Mike: Right, right. I mean, there are many groups in society that, of course we should have perhaps more sympathy for, but I also think that attractive women who are shy probably get like the short end of the stick, because they always come off as being kind of ‘better than’ right? Even if they're not aware of their beauty or sort of thinking like I'm too hot for this, I think women are conditioned to never believe about themselves, right?

Sarah: Yes. And also if you're beautiful or conventionally attractive, whatever the fuck that means, and if you are inclined to be maybe on the passive side or on the people pleasing side, then things will happen to you. Things will get started that you do not have the strength to stop.

Mike: There is also the thing too, that if you're super smiley, if you're kind of in that role and you're super smiling and bubbly, your people are going to call you an airhead or a ditz, right? And if you're not, then people are going to call you an ice queen. Like those are your two options.

Sarah: Yeah. If you're a beautiful woman, you're fucked in America, too. It's just, maybe you're fucked nicely more often. But you know, everyone's fucked. That doesn't mean other people are less fucked. I think. There is, as you research the OJ Simpson whole thing, shebang, there is, especially in contemporary media, this just patina of casual self-aware misogyny.

Mike:  Against Nicole.

Sarah: Against Nicole and against her ilk, because she's always depicted as kind of a party girl, which I don't know, define party girl, we'll get into that. But one of Jeffrey Toobin's lines in The Run of His Life, which is the book that the Ryan Murphy show is based on. And it is a very good soup to nuts account of this happened and then this happened, and this happened, and here's what I think, and here's how I would have done a better job than all the lawyers. Like I recommend it, but he just makes remarks occasionally and he's like, all of the Brown sisters had breast implants and none of them had college degrees. And you're like, okay? So are you making an argument, Counselor? What's your point? 

Mike: How are those facts directly related to each other? And they were vegetarians. And one was left-handed. He’s clearly trying to turn those into a trail of breadcrumbs that's going to lead you to a particular conclusion.

Sarah: It’s like he’s saying that one thing has to do with the other. They all drank decaf and liked Bobby Sherman. And it's okay. There's just this sense of well, she wasn't a serious person and I think her appearance has something to do with it. 

And so Denise Brown graduates high school and goes off and becomes a fancy model in New York City and briefly lives the modeling highlife. And Nicole goes and visits her in Europe and kind of gets a taste of that and is writing to her family and friends these postcards from Greece. But pretty soon Denise gets called on another modeling job and Nicole is kind of alone in a far off country. And she's like, I really want to go back to Orange County. And who knows if the modeling life would have been for her, what she would have done. She loved photography and the guy who she eventually lived with when she moved to Los Angeles after she finished high school, they had become friends partly because they were both interested in photography and he was encouraging her to apply to go to school for it. But she moved to LA right after she turned 18. Her 18th birthday was May 19th, 1977. And she met OJ Simpson five weeks later. 

Mike: Wow. So she's fresh out of high school. She's dabbled very lightly in modeling, sort of through her sister. 

Sarah: Another great story about the extreme beauty of this crowd is that there's kind of a group of friends, Nicole and Denise among them, who hang out in Huntington Beach and are just like these beach pals that are seen a lot together. And Denise describes one of them to Sheila Weller as a nice, sweet, plain, normal girl named Michelle Pfeiffer. 

Mike: ‘Sweet and plain’.

Sarah: Just plain old Michelle Pfeiffer. 

Mike: So she's like in this group that is just rich kids. They're all super attractive. They're all kind of on this upward trajectory into becoming like their parents.

Sarah: Yeah. It's an environment of sheltered prosperity. 

Mike: And so out of that shelter, she moves to real LA. 

Sarah: Yeah. So she goes to real LA. She gets her first ever job at a boutique where she works for two weeks and the owner is like, why don't I give you a job at my club, The Daisy, as a waitress? It's very exclusive and celebrities come there like Jack Lemmon. So after two weeks at the boutique, she gets a job at The Daisy. 

Mike: I can't think of a less cool celebrity than Jack Lemmon. I'm going to be moving to LA and hobnobbing with Gene Hackman or something. 

Sarah: That’s not a quote, he didn't sell her on it that way. That's apparently how I would sell someone on that.

Mike: Oh that’s you. That’s a Sarah detail.

Sarah: Well I couldn’t be like, “Hey Nicole, come work at my club. Maybe you’ll see Jack Lemmon.” 

Mike: Okay. So she gets a job at this club. She's super into Jack Lemmon. This is what I'm gathering so far. 

Sarah: She got some job at this cool nightspot that has also just started doing lunch, which is very exciting. That is where she meets OJ Simpson, when he comes in within five weeks of her turning 18. And according to people who were with him that day, he saw this 18 year old waitress and said, I'm going to marry that girl.

Mike: Oh man. And then he did bad. How old is he at that point?

Sarah: OJ Simpson is at the edge of 30. His 30th birthday is going to be at the beginning of July of that year. He’s nearing the end of his first marriage, which he will say later on was like basically over and he claims that his wife tricked him into getting her pregnant again. Who knows how seriously to take that claim. But the marriage has been in bad shape for a long time because he's been a philanderer. He can't say since day one, because that's probably not literally true, but it could be true. 

Mike: So he's already established a pattern of being a bad husband, basically.

Sarah: He’s established a pattern of being a bad husband in terms of cheating constantly. Definitely. And arguably, he's established a bad pattern in terms of abuse because there's also people who talked to the media after his arrest to talk about his first wife, Margarite, being known for wearing dark glasses a lot indoors. So that marriage is drawing to a conclusion. And at the same time, his NFL career is nearing its end. And he's trying to figure out what his life is going to be about? 

Mike: Oh, right. Because in the NFL, you're gone by age 30. This is not a mid-career thing. 

Sarah: OJ Simpson did an interview with Playboy in 1976, and he speaks very openly about that and about how much she has been strategizing what to do about the end of his football career and his relationship to fame. And basically his fear of experiencing what so many other stars of the sport have experienced, which is you matter one day and the next day you don’t.

 Mike: I mean, if this was a podcast about a different person, we would talk about how sorry we feel for him, but we all kind of know how he manifested this anxiety. 

Sarah: I feel very sorry for him. I feel bad for everyone in this.

Mike: I think it’s a real human thing. Losing the purpose of your life hurts. 

Sarah: So at the time he really wanted to seize a role that would make his acting career gel. And he was lobbying very hard to play the role of Coalhouse Walker and the film adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.

Mike: Because he was America's sweetheart. Right? I mean, as an NFL player, he had an American poster boy image. 

Sarah: Right. He did. And we'll get much deeper into this as we talk more about him later. But I mean, first of all, I didn't feel like I had a grasp on why American men were so attached to OJ Simpson until I watched the first episode of the OJ: Made in America documentary. You can read OJ Simpson gained this many yards in a season and it was great and everyone was happy. And you're like, okay, I barely know what football is, so good for him. Because that’s what I had done before. And then when you see footage of him, you start to get it. 

I mean, what do you know about him? What do you know about him? Let's start with that actually. Tell me your impressions of who is OJ Simpson? Who was he? How was he known before he was charged with murder?

Mike:  I mean, I have seen that documentary, but not since it came out however many years ago.

Sarah: And you've been tased a lot since then, so that spoils it.

Mike: But I mean, he was just, he was born in San Francisco, I believe. And like you said, he was preternaturally gifted. He was like one of the stars of football. He wasn't just a football player, he was like the Mozart of football. He was at the peak of the sport. 

Sarah: Yes. He was one of those people like Tanya. I think he was a lot like Tanya, because watching OJ run is like watching Tonya jump. You're like, no one else in the fucking world can do it like that. And he talks about this in the Playboy interview. He compares it, I believe, to his own state. Let me actually, just you OJ on OJ. The Playboy interviewer says, “What do you think enabled you to become unique as a runner?” And OJ says, “That's hard to say. I never consciously tried to develop a running style or to imitate anybody else's. When they hand you the ball, you don't think because you don't have time to think. You just run and you react. You gotta be able to recognize certain things that are happening out there and react without thinking. To do that, you have to daydream about it. I can watch a million game films, but I do myself more good driving down the freeway, daydreaming about runs against various teams. Last season you wouldn't believe how my K daydreamed about running 90 yards against Pittsburgh, which is one reason I was able to do it. When you're really into it, incredible things can happen. Some of the guys call that transcendental meditation, but to me, it's just putting yourself out there beforehand and imagining everything that's supposed to happen on every play. You gotta be very receptive to that during a game, but that's not always easy. It calls for deep concentration.” 

And then the Playboy interviewer says, “At what point during a game does all this concentration become something like pleasure?” And OJ says - this is also sports or an excuse for straight men to sit around talking about pleasure. Let's add that. - and OJ says, “When I'm doing my thing, man, the rush part of a game for me is running. And the biggest rush is setting the cat down. When you're running with the ball and you put an unbelievable move on a guy, just about every fan watching the game feels the same thing you do. It's a rush and the whole stadium shares it with you.”

Mike:  What  do you take away from that?

Sarah: What do you take away from that?

Mike:  No, I want to hear yours first. 

Sarah: Ah, okay. Well, what I take away from that is that football has been his entire life. You know, he grew up poor. He grew up in the projects. His dad wasn't around because his dad was gay, which is something that OJ was also extremely sensitive and angry about. He was in a lot of gangs when he was growing up. Some kind of adorable named West Side Story, sounding gangs, but he got in fights. He spent a lot of time fighting as a teenager. Fighting and stealing other guy's girlfriends, those were his main hobbies. And then track. And he was a record breaking track star, initially. 

And then he got into football and football was what carried him into prosperity and stability, but it also allowed him to provide for his whole family. The thing is people loved him and they did so for many reasons. And one was that he was kind of this community tent pole that everyone likes to have. You know, he loved to be generous. And of course it was often generosity that was for a purpose. Such as he set Nicole's mom up with a travel agency. He gets Nicole's Dad a Hertz dealership, because OJ famously was a spokesman for Hertz. He put one of Nicole's sisters through college. He financially supported her family for many years, so that when she tried to leave him, many people have said that one of the reasons that they may have talked to her out of ending the relationship with him was because they were financially dependent on him. He took care of his friends in many ways, not some of the more crucial ways, but he was generous. And he was generous with people from the neighborhood that he'd grown up in, but football was his way out. 

He says in the Playboy interview, something I find really interesting, which is that he was like, “I want to play for USC”. Which is a very interesting school. It was one of the schools implicated in the college admissions scandal recently. It’s historically known for just being a private, very white, very wealthy college. That's not part of the UC system. It's one letter away. And it's on the edge of Watts.

Mike: It’s this little bubble of privilege in the middle of this bigger messier city around it.

Sarah: And a white bubble in a very non-white environment. So he's recruited by USC, and he becomes extremely famous as a college football player, and then is sent to the Buffalo Bills. And he’s given a very lucrative contract. But the problem is he has to live in Buffalo. And also, he is underutilized by the team the first couple of years he was there. And then eventually the team comes under new management, and he vaults into the kind of stardom that he's been trying to get. And he's known and beloved. And he's quoted around this time of saying, “I want to walk down the street and be known.” He's like the Elizabeth Warren of his time in a way, because he will sign autographs for hours. He loves crowds. He loves talking to random fans. Like he might, at times, like being in the presence of random fans, much more than he likes being with the people who actually know him.

Mike: Oh really?

Sarah: Yeah, because he's someone who people are very happy to see. So the first episode of OJ: Made in America, one of the things that documentary does that I love is really like intersperse clips of OJ at USC with the social changes that are happening at that time, that OJ is sort of conspicuously absent from. Because 1968 is the year that the runners on the Olympic podium do a black power salute, and they had been runners from San Jose State. And OJ, who is from that same region, the documentary shows him doing a sketch at USC with Bob Hope. I feel like that's a really interesting illustration of the life that he chose. 

Mike: He did sort of choose the America’s sweetheart fork in the road.

Sarah: Yeah. And he knew that he wanted to make a living his whole life, he wanted to get paid and to be loved by the public. And I think he knew he needed to do that as an apolitical, eternally smiling, black man. And that's really my mental image of him. And that's how a lot of people saw him. And I think that what comes up in this story is like the story that you hear so often in cases of domestic violence where it's compartmentalized. Everyone knows him as this calm, happy, friendly guy. But Nicole is, for a long time, the only one who really sees that he can be this other way. 

Mike: Right. Also the public doesn't like it when we construct somebody as this kind of a political smiling flag and apple pie type of figure. And then we have to deal with the messy complexity of them as a person. This happens over and over again.

Sarah: Right. And that's exactly what goes on with him. Looking forward a little bit there's an incident with OJ assaulting Nicole in 1989, that does end up coming to the media's attention. And Nicole, when deciding whether or not to file charges against him or to pursue the matter says, you know, she doesn't want him to lose his endorsements. And that's one of his greatest fears, because he becomes the spokesman for Hertz and the 1970s based on his career in the NFL. And that's like this huge, long running, commercial partnership. There are so many Hertz commercials with OJ Simpson running through an airport. The people who made those commercials and OJ: Made in America talk about, we always positioned him with old, white people or like little, white children waving at him to show that he's safe, he's friendly. And he's always wearing a three piece suit, you know? And they talk about I'm doing this, like My Fair Lady thing with him, he would say, ‘git’ instead of ‘get’. And they would really insist on white sounding annunciation. 

Mike: Wow. So it's like trying to make him as unthreatening as possible.

Sarah: The Venn diagram for the word ‘threatening’ and the word ‘black’ is just one circle by itself, you know? And he passed the test. He was able to be that. And it's very sad to think about someone who was dancing as fast as they could for their entire life. All of his friendships, except for a few exceptions, as he continued to rise were with middle-aged, wealthy, white men. Like Bob Kardashian, immortalized by David Schwimmer in the Ryan Murphy Show, is a great example of this. Robert Kardashian is an Armenian millionaire who has a house that I believe Jeffrey Toobin describes, I hope lovingly, looking like a, I think he said ‘brothel’. And the issue with him, so he's finishing his football career and he talks candidly in the Playboy interview about, “I want to go out when I'm on top. I want people to remember me at my best. I'm already declining, I can feel it.” You know? 

And I think reading the interview, you just feel this palpable anxiety about, everything's going to be fine. I'm just concentrating on picturing myself succeeding and getting the ball and just going. But it was hard for him to get his post football career off the ground. 

Mike: So these are like the anxious waters that he's in when he meets Nicole. 

Sarah: Yeah. His marriage is ending. His career is ending. And most importantly of all, I think he is potentially looking at a future where people, as in Coco, start to forget about him. And if that happens, then he will gradually cease to exist. And into this walks Nicole, who is only 18 and five weeks old.

Mike: How does the courtship work?

Sarah:  He keeps coming back to the restaurant and asking her out for two days.

Mike: Why did she say no at first? 

Sarah: Because she was playing hard to get and that's it, because she doesn't know who he is. 

Mike: She's only 18. 

Sarah: Well, no, I mean, he's still playing in the NFL at this time. This is 1977. They were in each other's lives for more than half her life. Yeah, she had lived a long and terrifying life by the time she died. But no, she just didn't give a shit about football. She was talking to her friends, and she was like, which one is OJ Simpson again?

Mike: It's as if Ariana Grande's hit on you at a restaurant. 

Sarah: But after two days, she agrees to go out with him. And she's living in LA with her friend, David LeBon, he's sleeping on the floor and she's sleeping in the bed and they're platonic besties. So she comes home from her first date with OJ at 2:00 in the morning and earlier she was like, what should I wear? And he was like, you should wear tight jeans and a cute top. And she comes home, and the zipper of her jeans has been ripped off of the fabric. And David LeBon is like, Jesus fucking Christ. What happened? She was like, he ripped my pants off, but I really like him.

Mike:  Jesus. 

Sarah: That's the first date. They went to make out point and he ripped her pants. 

Mike: Wow. So it's like this perfect literary foreboding of the life that she's about to have. 

Sarah: Yes, this is a very literary situation. And OJ, very quickly says, “I don't like you living with some guy.”

Mike: Oh fuck. So like even within a couple of dates, he's already doing that. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And so he's, “I'm going to put you up in an apartment because this is unacceptable.” What I keep thinking about is that her experience of adulthood lasts for five weeks. Because she's out of her parents' house for five weeks. She's in David LeBon's house and then she goes into OJ’s house, the house that OJ buys for her. 

Mike: And also depending on him financially very quickly, too. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Because she immediately stops working. Probably she doesn't feel like it because he's rich and he's taking care of her, but I'm sure he's perfectly fine with her not being on display to other men. She only had five weeks.

Mike:  And then the rest of her life is dominated by this force. 

Sarah: And then the rest of her life belongs to him. I'm going to jump ahead in time a little and read you a little excerpt from Marcia Clark's memoir, Without a Doubt where she talks about going to OJ Simpson's house immediately following the murder and looking at photos of Nicole. And first of all, I want to tell you that she mentions a lot of pictures of OJ with various white, fat cats. And the first time I read that for several seconds, several wonderful seconds, I thought that OJ Simpson had a lot of pictures of himself with fat, white cats. And he was holding them.

Mike:  Just him and large blobs of fur.

Sarah: Yeah, one of those Persians that looks like Wilford Brimley. But following that, she looks at pictures of Nicole. And she thinks it’s very interesting that these people who are divorced and this man who maintains it, he has completely moved on, has all these pictures of his ex-wife in his house. And Marcia says of the pictures of Nicole, “She was blonde with handsome, almost man-ish features. Her hair, teeth, and skin all had that gloss peculiar to the west side elite. In some of the photos, she was with a pair of lovely brown skin children, a boy and a girl. They all wore ski attire. Her face was difficult to read. The expression in all the photos was uniformly happy, but her eyes were glazed. She had, how would he describe it, “a thousand yard stare.”

Mike:  Wow. I mean, that's the aloofness again, right? She doesn't seem present in any of the photos of herself.

Sarah: And I didn't realize until I read that, but I was like, yeah, they do have that quality. Jumping ahead in December of 1994, the district attorney gets a call from Nicole's bank saying that she had been renting a safe deposit box that her father was trying to get into. And so some DA investigators go down and drill it. And Marcia writes, “The contents were more disturbing to me than anything I had seen to date. There were three Polaroid pictures of Nicole. The first looked like it was taken when she was very young, early in her relationship with Simpson when she was still a teenager. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel. Her eye was blackened, her face puffed up and reddened. 

The box also contains several letters. One written by Nicole to OJ very early in their relationship complaining that he neglected her. There were three others from him to her apologizing for having abused her and taking responsibility for having gone crazy. Implicitly acknowledged in one of those letters is the fact that he'd beat her because she refused to have sex with him. Why would a woman keep those things in a lock box? There was only one explanation. Even if she was trying to break free of OJ, part of Nicole accepted that she would never really escape. That OJ Simpson might murder her. The message in the box was clear – ‘In the event of my death, look this guy.’ I kept looking back to her eyes. She was so young at the time those pictures were taken that her eyes still reflected authentic emotion. I compare the photos mentally to those hanging by the stairs at Rockingham, a decade or more had passed between those two shots. The pain in her eyes had gelled into a glassy deadened stare. 17 years of denying terror and clinging to hope, only to have that hope destroyed time and again.” 

In the time leading up to her death, she updated her will and she told many people that she was afraid that OJ would kill her and get away with it because he would ‘OJ his way out of it’.

Mike: These pictures indicate that the abuse started very early and was very severe early on.

Sarah: Yeah. On her 19th birthday she's staying at her parents' house. This is a year after she and he had gotten together. He has just possibly been physically violent with her for the first time ever and given her a black eye. And to apologize, he has a brand new Porsche with a big bow on it delivered to her parent’s house. 

Mike: Has anyone ever given anyone else a car with a bow on it not to apologize for something terrible? That move seems tailor made for ‘I did something that I really need to cover it up’. Right. It's not like I'm going to buy you a ticket to a matinee. I really fucked up if I'm giving you the Porsche with the bow on it.

Sarah: The best part - or the worst part - worst, is that this is how Nicole's dad finds out that she and OJ are dating, because she's been keeping it a secret from him for this whole year, because according to the sources Sheila Weller talks to, a little bit racist. He sees the Porsche, and according to Denise Brown, Nicole's older sister, she says, “I think my father's reaction was, well, I guess if it's going to be a black guy, I’m glad it’s someone who's not a bum.”

Mike:  Holy shit. 

Sarah: “I know he thought that because that's how he thinks.”

Mike: Oh my God. I mean, the intersection of race and class is really interesting. I will put aside my negative prejudice of black people if you suit my positive prejudice of rich people. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. And also that this gift, this extravagant gift that he has gotten her to apologize for assaulting her, is what proves to her racist dad that he's solvent and therefore responsible enough to be her boyfriend/husband. 

There's an anecdote at the start of Sheila Weller's book. And one of the things that Marcia Clark also talks about a lot in her book and is really struck by as she gets to know the Brown family, is that it's not that they didn't know that OJ was a controlling husband, or a very angry husband, or even a violent husband at times. But they didn't really see it as violence. They didn't really see it as abuse. 

One of the things that OJ did that became like a joke in the Brown family was that when he was raging at Nicole, but wasn't necessarily physically violent, she had a wall of family photos, and he would throw them down the stairs, throw them on the floor, throw them out on the yard and break the glass. And she would go and take them and have them repair it and hang them back up again. And this happened so many times that it became a joke ,and it was seen as that's what he does. He's blowing off steam. That’s who he is. And so Nicole's mom said later that she would say, “Is OJ angry at you - and therefore the family - is my portrait on the lawn again?”

Mike: Oh my God. 

Sarah: You know, it was just, it was something that they just talked about, and they didn't take it very seriously, which I think is pretty common.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I guess if anything happens enough times, it's just, LOL got to go to Bartell's again. Like it just becomes normalized, I guess.

Sarah: Yeah. And there's other stuff that she actively conceals. There's a time when one of Nicole's friends comes over and wants to see her ,and OJ’s like, ”No, she can't come down. She's not feeling well. She doesn't want to see anybody.” And much later after she and OJ separate, Nicole says, “I couldn't come down that day because I was out of makeup to cover up the bruises on my face, so I couldn’t be seen by anybody.” Are you surprised at that degree of abuse in the marriage? 

Mike: No, just always the specifics of these things are always so sort of like, the everyday adaptations that people make to these extreme situations are always the most tragic somehow, right. That it has become normal and it's something that you just have to cope with. The extreme and violent and intolerable nature of it becomes hidden somehow after, oh no, I got to get some more makeup. It just becomes like another errand that you have to run somehow.  It's really dark to think about it.

Sarah: And then later on, he apologized by giving her a Ferrari.

Mike: Oh fuck. So as the abuse gets worse, the cars get better, and the jewelry gets more expensive. 

Sarah: So yeah, it begins early and then I'm going to jump. Well, let me ask before I go, what do you think so far?

Mike: She’s the perfect victim of abuse almost, or the perfect vulnerable person to this sort of behavior, because she doesn't have any other support systems in place. She doesn't have a group of friends that can be like, hey this guy really seems like news or her own money to just move away and move to Fresno and from him. She doesn't have any other options. Also, because she's so young, she doesn't know how adult life works. She wouldn't know what one does in these situations and what the signs to look for.

Sarah: I mean, think about how much confirmation bias any man gets in a domestic abuse claim. You know, it's like women are not listened to very much in this arena if they make claims or file charges against anyone. And then think about it being OJ Simpson, you know, and one of the things that various observers talk about later is that even the cops who investigated him immediately after his wife's murder were very sweet and deferential to him, considering the circumstances. You know, they were starstruck around him, I'm sure to a degree. And also because they didn't want to fuck things up with a celebrity who was like rich and powerful and can screw up their situation because it's power versus power. You know, if you investigate a powerful person, you need to be on your best behavior, unlike all of the other times.

Mike: Right. Right. So, yeah. So what are the first couple years of their courtship? Because they don't get married for a while, right? 

Sarah: Yeah. They don't get married until 1985. 

Mike: Okay. So there's seven years when they're dating. I did that math wrong. There's eight years when they're dating. 

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So they meet in June and July of 1977, shortly after his 30th birthday. OJ  goes to Buffalo for Bill's training camp and comes to LA the next month for the birth of his daughter with Marguerite still married to. Big summer for OJ. And then in September, Nicole flies to Buffalo to be with him. And her sister, Denise, flies in and they both go see OJ in a game. And it's a beautiful day. 

And in Sheila Weller's book, the long quote from Simpson's friend, Mike Militello, who talks about OJ running out onto the field as the women are watching. And he says, “As he came running out, he looked up and winked at her”, says Militello. “She was amazed. She couldn't believe he could even see her. Then the game started and what a game. He ran over 200 yards and scored two touchdowns. And don't forget he was 30. He'd been talking about retiring for a year. I knew what was happening. The guy was in love. I turned to her and hugged her a little and said, ‘Those touchdowns were for you. He's doing this for you.’ And Nicole said, ‘Really?’ Oh, it was great. So incredibly pure.” 

And then the way Denise picks up the story is that OJ plays this amazing game. He's showing this woman, whose heart he has captured in spectacular fashion, this thing that he's great at and she's like amazed and happy and dazzled, you know? And then after the game, he happens to look up and as she kisses Mike Militello on the cheek, and that night he loses his goddamn mind, and he screams at her and berates her. And she cries to Denise and says like why does he do this to me? Like, why is he yelling at me like this? And she's crying and upset. And then they go all out. They all go out and have a good time and they just move on, you know. Because that's what you do, right? You're like, there's this guy and he's great most of the time. And some of the time he gets randomly really jealous, but we have this amazing connection. I'm head over heels in love with him. Everyone says there was a love connection there. And there was a sexual connection there. And they were very much in love when they met and for a long time after. And when things worked, they really worked. But then increasingly they didn't. And I think there's something that happens in any relationship where you get put on a pedestal, right. Because the way Nicole talked about it later was that OJ had molded her and decided who she would become. And she didn't even know who she was because she had grown up in accordance with OJ’s wishes and made herself who he wanted her to be. So she was like, I don't know who I am. Like she got breast implants because he wanted her to get them. And she made choices that he approved of. 

Mike: There’s this thing of, I don't know if it's misogyny or just people being bad at knowing their own feelings, but this extent to which like you're quote unquote in love with somebody. But it’s more like an infatuation with their physical beauty, and you never really see them as three-dimensional people. It seems like a pattern, anecdotally, in a lot of relationships, that you sort of become enamored with them. You're like, she's so beautiful. She's so amazing. But then like, when anything about her as a person starts to come up, like her family is kind of complicated and maybe she has some health issues or maybe she has some mental health stuff. Like all these messy complications that come with every single human being, it's almost like there’s this anger of no, you're supposed to be my trophy. You're supposed to be this one dimensional, perfect figure in my life. And you're making it hard.

Sarah: And I'm supposed to be able to shape you. Yeah. If you define yourself as having any particular preference that hasn't been dictated to you, you know, that can be threatening. Like I think another thing that happens in abusive relationships is that if someone is like, first time just going to yell at you and then I'm going to psychologically control you. And then I'm going to physically abuse and intimidate you. As my real-world control of you gets worse and I don't feel better, I have to keep being more and more controlling and more and more scary to you because hopefully if I get you like another step under my control then, I'll feel better, then I'll feel powerful, then I'll feel complete. Right. But you never get there which is why you get this escalation.

Mike: Is there like a honeymoon period or is it just already like conflict immediately?

Sarah: Around the time of the Porsche incident, Nicole shows up at her parent’s house and says, “I’m through with him. I'm done. Fuck him.” And OJ is in San Francisco at the time because he was seeing other women, and they had a fight about it. And he apparently called her and said, “If you don't get back up here, I'm going to get another girlfriend and fuck the shit out of her.” At which point Nicole got in her car and drove up to San Francisco. 

Mike: Really? Jesus, that sucks. 

Sarah: So he also starts cheating on her pretty early. I mean, it's not just that he's sitting there, obviously. And women are like walking by “Hey, OJ”, obviously that happens sometimes. But also, he talks about this in the Playboy interview, when he was growing up he would proposition any woman, any time. He would especially hit on women who he knew to be taken because he kind of liked the challenge. This is one of the ways that he shows himself who he is. It's by picking up women.

Mike: Women as conquest. 

Sarah: Yeah. For all of their relationship, Nicole, from the beginning was like, please stop. Can you please be faithful to me? And they went through so many phases of this, no, I don't need to. You have no right to tell me to stop. Yes, I will. Everything will change. You know what? What you  don't know doesn't hurt you. All of the different approaches to cheating on your wife, or your girlfriend. But the point is that this went on for 15 years.

Mike:  Wow. This is just like next level shit. Cause we all know that if she was cheating on him, he would lose his mind. Right. The kiss on the cheek, he loses his mind. 

Sarah: And throughout again, this is the thing, like he needs to be free to fuck anyone at any time, neither snow nor rain or dark of night will keep him from fucking anyone he feels like. But Nicole cannot kiss someone on the cheek when he's looking because he has license to do whatever he feels like.

Mike: Because it's all about him.

Sarah:  And it's all about his sense of ownership. So toward the end of her life, Nicole said about OJ, he doesn't love me. He's obsessed with me. And that's the exact phrase that Dominique Dunne used in a letter that she wrote to her boyfriend right before he murdered her. Dominique Dunn was the daughter of Dominick Dunne, who's a writer for Vanity Fair, wrote about the trial of Dominique's boyfriend who was convicted of killing her and who would go on to cover the OJ Simpson trial for Vanity Fair. So he's going to be someone that we'll see more of later. 

But I want to review some of Dominique's letter to her boyfriend, John Sweeney, because I feel like it's like a piece of literature about controlling behavior and this kind of possessive abuse basically. And so she wrote, “We have to be two individuals to work as a couple. I am not permitted to do things on my own. Why must you be a part of everything I do? Why do you want to come to my writing lessons and my acting classes? Why are you jealous of every scene partner I have? Why must you recount word for word, everything I spoke to Dr. Black about? Why must I talk about every audition when you know it is bad luck for me? Why do we have discussions at 3:00 AM all the time, instead of during the day? Why must you know the name of every person I come into contact with? You go crazy over my rehearsals. You insist on going to work with me when I have told you it makes me nervous. Your paranoia is overboard. You do not love me. You are obsessed with me. The person you think you love is not me at all. It is someone you have made up in your head. I'm the person who makes you angry, who you fight with sometimes. I think we only fight when I'm in his with me, fade away and you are faced with the real me. That's why arguments erupt out of nowhere.” 

Mike: Wow. I mean, this stuff is hard because jealous husbands, boyfriends are just such fucking cliches. It's every boring fucking trope you've seen in 750 movies by this point. Right. 

Sarah: It's like we have seen all the tropes by now. Yeah.

Mike: There’s just something so generic about people that act like this.

Sarah: Well because there's a lot of Hollywood movies. My favorite movie, Enough starring Jennifer Lopez, where it's like a villainous husband who's just cranked up to a degree that like, maybe like mildly controlling American men can look at that and be like, I'm not that guy, you know? So maybe we have a lot of over the top husband villains to remind the normal husbands that it's fine to just lightly collude with a patriarchal system. It's a thought. I'm just sitting here in my closet next to my clothes. Because it's also at this point in the relationship, like their friends see her and many people who knew them, describe her after her death as like someone who gave as good as she got. They're like, Nicole knew how to push OJ’s buttons. And she would make fun of him and be like, ah, fuck off. You know? Or taunt him for being a bad actor or slap him or whatever, which is, she wasn't totally passive, I guess, is the point. I feel like people though make that point with this implied argument, so you see, it's kind of understandable that he locked her in their wine cellar for hours and hours one time and so on. It's no. 

Mike: Yeah. Whenever you say things like that, it always feels like you're leading toward a conclusion, right? It's like the no college degree and breast implants thing. I'm stating facts and I’m about to come to an argument, but I don't actually want to state the actual argument I'm making by listing those facts. I do think it's worth thinking about the fact that living in an abusive relationship affects people in lots of ways. And some of them are the way they affect the way that they act in those relationships. And I think people are complicated and people cope with these situations differently. And that's not an argument that of course he killed her. Like she was sometimes snippy. That's clearly not the confusion that you're reaching with this.

Sarah:  Clearly, what man could withstand a woman being snippy to him and putting up a fight about him cheating on her continually You know, it's oh, I don't know. So Nicole has been living with OJ. She's been living either in an apartment that he paid for her or with him, for her entire adult life. And there's a conversation she has one day with her friend, Linda Schulman, who says, are you concerned about the fact that OJ is starting to collect guns? Or that he just got an Uzi as a gift? And Linda recalls Nicole saying, well, OJ said he would kill me if I left him or if I cheated on him. And then she tells her about OJ beating her with a wine bottle. And it is also before they get married that he, because he feels she embarrassed him in front of Frank Sinatra, locks her out of their hotel room. She’s in her underwear and she's out there in the hall all night. And this is again, like a story that she kind of tells as like, oh, I got locked out. It's ha ha ha, what a night.

Mike: Like the end of every romantic comedy where the man does something really obsessive and problematic, but we all tell ourselves that it's like a declaration of love. Like John Cusack with the fucking boom box, which is like an objectively insane thing to do. And really bad to do to somebody else after they've told you they don't want to see you. Because it's like a romantic movie, we've spent two decades being like, what a cute thing that he did.

Sarah: It's true. We really have normalized this idea of well, the grand romantic gesture is something you'd do probably after you fucked up. And if they say no, they'll look like an asshole. And Nicole really wants to get married and OJ is like, I have already been married, but her friends are starting to have kids. She really wants to have a baby. And she also feels that if OJ marries her, he won't cheat on her anymore. 

Mike: Oh man. Oh sweetie.

Sarah: One of the other things Denise tells Sheila Weller is that he invited three women he'd had affairs with to one of his birthday parties and they all showed up. And so it makes sense that you would hold on to this magical thinking of maybe once we're married, he'll respect that. And to be fair he eventually says, “Yes. When we get married, it'll be different”. 

Mike: God, it's like Brexit. 

Sarah: Yeah. And it's like phase one, collect underpants. Phase two, phase three. Okay. So let's wrap up. I'm going to wrap up with a wedding. But Nicole gets increasingly pissed off about OJ seeing other women and also kind of doing it in her face. So one day she's driving through Beverly Hills, and she passes OJ on the street being affectionate with a lady.

Mike: No way! She just drives past and sees him with another woman? 

Sarah: She just sees him on the street. She had, at this time, a list of the license plate numbers of women who he had been cheating on her with or who she suspected of him cheating on her with. This was taking up a lot of her life.

Mike: And also being in a relationship with somebody who constantly cheated on you would make you kind of a paranoid weirdo.  Having license plates of a bunch of other women is kind of weird behavior, but it's also completely justified. Right? 

Sarah: Yeah. And I'll say she has been surveilled for years at this point. 

Mike: So yeah, it's this ratcheting up of mutual surveillance. Your surveillance of him is justified and his surveillance of you is not.

Sarah:  Yeah, so she sees OJ on the street with this other woman, she drives up and starts screaming at him and then drives off and goes to her friends, the Schulman's house, and is like, I'm done. It's over. I don't even want to go back home. Can I stay at your house? And they're like, yes, please do. And they're like, you know what? This is great. Please don't marry him, please don't. This is great, good instinct. And the next morning, OJ comes over. And Nicole says not to let him in. And Linda, who has seen some of the damage that OJ has done to the family photos at Nicole’s says, I think we need to let them in or else who's going to break the door down. So they let him in. He goes in and talks to her and he asks her to marry him and they go shopping and buy a diamond.

Mike:  Wow. So it's kind of like him trying to get out of the doghouse for one fight.

Sarah: Yeah, it is. He's already given her a Porsche,  he's given her all this other stuff. You have to also keep upping the ante and the way that you apologize, and Nicole is like willing to accept and willing to accept this as yes, like I'm committing to be different. Like things will be different. My heart is in it. I will change. And what Linda Schulman says to Sheila Weller is, Nicole comes back and has this ring and is excited and says, but look how it had to happen. 

Mike: God, the worst thing I've ever done in that situation is go see the Eurovision song contest. So we're going to leave it there and we're going to cover the rest of the relationship and part two. But before we go, can I just ask you one last question? What is your sort of narrative of why he killed her? In your head, what do you think actually happened?

Sarah:  I think that he believed that she was really done with him. And I think that she was really going to get away. 

Mike: And that's what did, it was like the feeling of permanence.

Sarah:  Hypothetically, you know, as I think through everything that I do and don't know, when I think about if I imagined myself in what I imagine OJ’s state of mind was at that time, if I imagine what it would've done to him to see her seeming like she was really actually ready to move on, this woman who had been his entire life since football was his entire life. What was his entire life going to be now? I'll say this too, I think that it was only when I started concentrating on the domestic violence aspect of the relationship that the murder was something I could see in a narrative that I could see building to murder because if you see it as he was her ex-husband, and they had a tempestuous relationship and then maybe he killed her. You're like, okay, I can see that happening or not happening. But if you follow the breakdown of both of the relationships and then the end of the marriage and then their attempts at reconciliation, and then literally the last weeks and days of her life, you can see how it was built for him. And yeah, that's what we're going to talk about next time. I'm not going to lie. It's going to be rough. Like we've gotten through some really some hard stuff, and we're going to get through some harder stuff next time.

Mike: Some harder stuff.

Sarah: But I hope you come with us. 

Mike: Yes. Not in a car that somebody gave you wrapped in a bow, I hope.