Nicole Brown Simpson's Family Breaks Silence on O.J. Simpson's Death
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Originally appeared on E! Online
Nicole Brown Simpson's family is speaking out.
Ahead of the 30th anniversary of her murder, her sisters Denise Brown, Dominique Brown and Tanya Brown shared their reaction to the death of her ex-husband O.J. Simpson, who was accused of killing Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman, last month.
"This is a person who's been in our life for a very long time, who wreaked havoc on our family," Tanya told People in an article published May 22. "It's like the end of a chapter."
As she put it, "It's very complicated."
Nicole—who along with Ron was found stabbed to death in June 1994 outside her Brentwood, Calif. home—divorced O.J. in 1992 following an allegedly physically and emotionally abusive seven-year marriage. And for her sisters, they found some peace in knowing how different her life was after their split.
"What no one knows she experienced before her death is freedom," Dominique reflected. "There was this levity about her. She was glowing."
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And Tanya couldn't agree more. "I'm so glad that she had a good time the last two years of her life," she added. "I can't bring her back, so why not try to look at it like that?"
When they first met O.J.—with whom Nicole shared children Sydney, 38, and Justin, 35 —Dominique explained that he was "just her boyfriend to us." But when the aspiring model invited them to see him play for the Buffalo Bills, she admitted, "I was like, ‘Wow, look at this guy. He's amazing.'"
But things eventually took a dark turn. And Nicole's sisters further share insight into the alleged abuse she faced at the hands of O.J, who died at 76 in April of prostate cancer, in the docuseries—The Life and Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson—set to air June 1 and 2—Nicole's loved ones recalled her living in fear of him, even allegedly keeping track of the times he harmed her.
"She always thought he was going to hurt her," one of her sisters noted in the clip. "She always knew it."
The upcoming project is meant to retell Nicole's story, which her family believes was overlooked amid O.J.'s infamous trial, which saw him acquitted of murder. (He was later found responsible for Nicole and Ron's deaths in a civil trial.)
"Her life was stolen from her and while her abuser is finally gone, it doesn't take away the anguish we feel or the pain of her children who lost their mother," the Brown sisters told The Hollywood Reporter May 2. "We hope that by sharing Nicole's story, it will help others recognize the signs and get the help they need and her legacy will continue to live on."
Now, read on to learn everything about the trial of O.J. Simpson.
Close Watch
O.J. Simpson met Nicole Brown in 1977 and divorced his first wife, Marguerite, in 1979. He married Nicole on Feb. 2, 1985; their daughter Sydney was born eight months later, and son Justin was born in 1988.
"You guys never do anything," Nicole told police when they arrived at the Simpson home at 360 N. Rockingham Ave. in L.A.'s posh Brentwood neighborhood, responding to a domestic abuse call in the the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 1989, according to reports about that night. "You never do anything. You come out. You've been here eight times. And you never do anything about him."
Simpson insisted he didn't beat Nicole, only pushed her out of bed. Then, told he needed to go with the officers to the police station, he drove off instead. A few days later, Nicole went to the station and said she didn't really want them to proceed with a prosecution, but she consented to out-of-court mediation.
On May 24, 1989, Simpson was sentenced to 24 months of probation, ordered to perform 120 hours of community service and pay fines totaling $470, and was told to attend counseling twice a week (he was allowed to do it by phone) after pleading no contest to misdemeanor domestic violence.
Nicole eventually moved out with Justin and Sydney and filed for divorce in February 1992. They settled that October, with O.J. agreeing to pay her a lump sum of $433,750, plus $10,000 a month in child support, and she retained the title of a rental property. She eventually bought a condo at 875 S. Bundy Drive in Brentwood and moved there in January 1994.
All the while, Simpson was alternately threatening her and trying to get back together. According to prosecutors and witnesses, O.J. had stood outside and looked through her window on multiple occasions, including one time when she was having sex with a boyfriend. Per Jeffrey Toobin's 1996 book The Run of His Life, in a diary entry from June 3, 1994, Nicole detailed a recent threat from Simpson: "'You hang up on me last nite, you're gonna pay for this bitch...You think you can do any f--king thing you want, you've got it comming [sic]..." and so on.
She called a battered women's shelter in Santa Monica on June 7, 1994, to lament that her ex was stalking her. Five days later she was dead.
Tinted Window
TIME came under fire for darkening O.J's complexion when the publication ran his mug shot on the cover in June 1994, with critics arguing it was cheaply playing up the Black-male-murder-suspect angle and pointing out that Newsweek had run the photo without altering the color.
Managing editor James R. Gaines relayed in a statement posted on an AOL message board (remember AOL Time Warner?) that "no racial implication was intended, by TIME or by the artist"—but that yes, the photo given out by the LAPD had specifically been handed to an artist to turn into cover art for the story, which would include interpreting it as he saw fit.
"It seems to me you could argue that it's racist to say that blacker is more sinister," Gaines said, "but be that as it may: To the extent that this caused offense to anyone, I obviously regret it."
The Publishing Industry
Dozens of books have been written about this case, including O.J.'s inexplicable 2007 tome If I Did It: Confessions of a Killer, but his first contribution to the canon was I Want to Tell You, which came out on Jan. 7, 1995, when the trial was barely underway.
The book purportedly comprised the defendant's answers to the thousands of letters he'd received since going to jail, an attempt to get ahead of the picture the prosecution planned to paint of a vicious abuser who had finally made good on all his threats. It sold more than 650,000 copies.
Ripped From the Headlines
Twenty-one years before the O.J. saga got the slick, Emmy-winning treatment in The People v O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story and Ezra Edelman won an Oscar for the epic documentary O.J.: Made in America, The O.J. Simpson Story, starring Bobby Hosea and Jessica Tuck, which was mainly about O.J. and Nicole's volatile relationship, was rushed to Fox.
The New York Times called it "not a movie the defense team would want the jury to see" and an accidental counterbalance to O.J.'s "self-serving" book.
Fox made a point of not airing the TV movie until the jury had been sequestered.
Missing Perspective
An over-confident Marcia Clark didn't put Jill Shively, who told a grand jury that she saw O.J., in his white Bronco, speeding down Bundy shortly after 10:45 on the night of the murders, on the stand during the trial. Moreover, Clark instructed the grand jury to dismiss Shively's testimony, saying she couldn't in good conscience have them consider information she didn't have full faith in.
Clark was actually pissed that Shively had sat down with Hard Copy before she was due to give testimony, and the prosecutor figured she had plenty of other witnesses and evidence to nail O.J. with. Who needed one more connecting him to the location in a time frame that fit the crime?
Facts vs. Fiction
O.J. bombed a lie detector test defense attorney Robert Shapiro arranged for him to take, registering a minus-24, according to The Run of His Life. Polygraph results aren't admissible in court, but can play a role in directing the course of an investigation—and in helping defense attorneys determine the best strategy.
Alan Dershowitz, who mainly advised the defense team from across the country while teaching at Harvard, told the New York Daily News in 2016, when FX's The People v. O.J. Simpson had everybody talking, that the fact the polygraph test results went public suggested there may have been a violation of attorney-client privilege.
"There were only four in the world who knew about the lie-detector test," Dershowitz said. "I was not one of them. The four people were [Robert] Kardashian, who died, Bob Shapiro, O.J. Simpson and the man who conducted the lie-detector test."
However, maybe there were more.
Defense team member F. Lee Bailey, no big fan of Shapiro then or now, told Huffington Post's Highline in 2019 about his co-counsel, "He f--ked up the case on day one by giving O.J. a polygraph test that was totally impossible. You never give those under the circumstances, and he called me immediately saying, 'What do I do next?' And I said, 'Well, first you stop being an a--hole. You call before you give the polygraph test, for Christ's sake!' I saw the charts before he tore them up, and they were nothing but junk." (Shapiro did not comment on Bailey's remarks.)
Search for an Accomplice
The prosecution was convinced that O.J. didn't pull it off alone, TIME later reported, and they assigned officers to keep an eye on O.J.'s childhood friend and confidante Al Cowlings and O.J.'s grown son Jason, from his first marriage, but never gathered evidence that proved the defendant had an accomplice.
Cost of Living
After leading police on a 50-mile chase that traversed multiple L.A. freeways, O.J. in the backseat and Cowlings behind the wheel of the former football star's white Ford Bronco, O.J. surrendered at his home and was taken into custody on June 17, 1994. He remained jailed without bail for the duration of the trial. The time he spent on suicide watch cost taxpayers $81,000, after which the price of incarceration averaged out to $55.69 a day.
According to the L.A. County auditor's office, the case cost the city about $800,000 a month.
Front Seat Driver
Before Marcia Clark invited Christopher Darden onto her team, he was in charge of investigating Cowlings, who was initially arrested on suspicion of aiding a fugitive. The DA's office ultimately opted not to charge him, citing a lack of evidence.
The Dream Team
Though some drew more attention than others and half of them didn't speak in court, there were at least 10 lawyers who worked on O.J.'s case: civil rights activist Johnnie Cochran; Robert Shapiro; F. Lee Bailey; DNA experts and founders of The Innocence Project Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld; Cochran's associates Carl Douglas and Shawn Holley; O.J.'s longtime friend Robert Kardashian; Gerald Uelmen, then the dean of Santa Clara University's law school; and Alan Dershowitz.
Kardashian died of esophageal cancer in 2003, and Cochran died of brain cancer in 2005. Shapiro steered his practice into civil litigation after the trial and co-founded Legal Zoom; he started the Brent Shapiro Foundation for drug abuse awareness after his son died of an overdose in 2005. Douglas and Holley are still practicing trial attorneys who have represented a slew of celebrity clients.
Uelmen was appointed executive director of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice in 2006. Scheck and Neufeld teach at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law. Bailey, later disbarred in the states of Florida and Massachusetts, died in 2021. Dershowitz retired from teaching in 2013 and made recent headlines as a former lawyer for Jeffrey Epstein and as an outspoken critic of the investigation into whether President Donald Trump colluded with Russia (which he insisted was not a defense of Trump but a defense of due process and civil liberties).
The World's Most Famous Houseguest
Brian "Kato" Kaelin, an aspiring actor who was staying in O.J's guest house, initially moved into Nicole's guest house in January 1993, a month after meeting her in Aspen. He planned on moving into the Bundy condo to help take care of the kids, he testified, but moved onto O.J.'s property instead because he didn't want Kaelin hanging around his ex-wife so much.
Kaelin testified that, on June 12, O.J. returned from daughter Sydney's dance recital and told him that Nicole was preventing him from spending time with Sydney, and he complained that the dress Nicole wore that night was too tight. He and O.J. went to McDonald's and got back at about 9:40 p.m., Kaelin remembered.
Then, at around 10:45 p.m., he heard three loud thumps against his wall. Kaelin went outside but didn't see anything other than a limo waiting. The driver, Allan Park, testified that he saw O.J. go into the house at 10:55 p.m.
O.J. came out at 11 p.m. and Kaelin helped him load his luggage into the limo, except for a backpack O.J. insisted on putting in the trunk himself, Kaelin testified. Park drove O.J. to LAX, where he had an 11:45 p.m. flight to Chicago. (He returned to L.A. on a 12:10 p.m. flight the next day.)
"I had a radio show and there would be constant death threats to me," Kaelin later said on OWN's Where Are They Now? "There'd be faxes [saying] 'Kato should be killed.'
Talking to Barbara Walters in 2015, Kaelin concluded about his old friend, "In my opinion, yes, I think he's guilty."
Man's Best Friend
Kato Kaelin was close enough to the family that Justin and Sydney Simpson named their dog Kato—and it was Kato the Akita's frantic barks that drew a neighbor, who was out walking his dog, toward Nicole's house at around 10:15 p.m. Not knowing who the Akita belonged to, the neighbor took it home with him, figuring he and his wife could keep it for the night before searching for his owner.
But Kato seemed so nervous, the couple took him outside and the dog led them back to Nicole's house, where they saw that on the path just behind the gate there was a woman lying in a pool of blood.
If the Shoe Fits
Italian shoemaker Bruno Magli got some free publicity when a bloody print at the murder scene was matched to a size-12 Bruno Magli Lorenzo boot.
O.J. denied owning a pair and said later in a deposition for the civil trial that he'd never wear "those ugly ass shoes," but photos were dug up much later showing him wearing the brand on two separate occasions.
"He was very nice," Sam Poser, an associate buyer at Bloomingdale's for men's shoes who testified about showing a pair of Lorenzos to O.J. but couldn't remember if the football star actually bought them, told Footwear News in 2016. "He bought a bunch of dress-casual stuff—he wanted something that was comfortable. But I remembered what he didn't buy more so than I remembered selling him that particular shoe... Eventually, after the [criminal] trial was over, they found the photograph of O.J. wearing the Bruno Magli shoe at a Bills game. In the civil case, which I was deposed for, they stipulated that he was indeed wearing those shoes. Had they found that photograph prior to the criminal trial, that could have been a game-changer."
Fixer Upper
Defense attorney Carl Douglas later told Dateline that his team switched up some of the decor in O.J.'s Rockingham Avenue home before the jury toured it to make it seem as if the tarnished football hero was more in touch with his cultural roots than he really was. Out went a half-naked picture of girlfriend Paula Barbieri, in came African art and a photo of O.J's mother.
Deputy District Attorney Cheri Lewis had argued that it would be inappropriate for jurors to see sentimental tokens in O.J.'s home, such as photos of him with his kids or his trophy room full of memorabilia from his glory days playing for USC and the Buffalo Bills. Especially, Lewis stressed, since Nicole's condo had been stripped of furniture, mementos and anything else that made it personal and warm, a place she had lived with her children.
The tour of the Bundy crime scene included O.J.'s house to help the jury get a sense of the distance between the two locations and whether or not O.J. could have killed Nicole and Goldman, then have returned to his place in time to get in a car with limo driver Allan Park and catch his 11:45 p.m. flight to Chicago.
Remote Control
Dershowitz made some appearances in court but mainly served as a member of O.J.'s defense team from afar while busy with his day job, teaching at Harvard Law School. During the trial, he simultaneously watched CNN and Court TV, which was televising all of it, and would fax his fellow attorneys memos in real time that they could read right there in the courtroom.
''This is the first trial of the 21st century in some respects,'' he told the Christian Science Monitor in February 1995. ''Having a lawyer outside the courtroom monitoring the case who has quick access to research is the wave of the future. I think more big law firms with complex litigation are going to move to this model."
Candid Camera
Judge Lance Ito considered pulling the plug on the cameras televising the trial (he prevented them from broadcasting the gory crime scene photos), but the defense was on the side of the public having the right to see the whole story play out and, as many remember, the proceedings turned into must-see TV.
At the same time, Ito was very conscious (and concerned) about his own press, and he delighted in the celebrity attention he got, such as in the form of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno's recurring bit featuring the "Dancing Itos."
"He had thought it was great and loved it and wanted all of us to see it in chambers," Peter Neufeld later told TIME. "You may find that amusing on a personal level, but I can assure you that on a professional level it is so unacceptable, for a judge who is presiding over a murder where two people lost their lives in the most gruesome and horrible fashion, and where a third person has his life on the line, to bring the lawyers into chambers to show them comic revues."
The Race Card
Chris Darden tried to argue that the jury shouldn't be allowed to hear the recording of Mark Fuhrman using the n-word because it would upset the Black jurors (who made up a majority on the panel) too much and therefore prove prejudicial against Fuhrman.
"If you allow Mr. Cochran to use this word and play the race card," he said, "the direction and focus of the case changes: it is a race case now."
Johnnie Cochran wasn't having it.
"I am ashamed that Mr. Darden would allow himself to become an apologist for this man," the seasoned activist and litigator said, among other things, in castigating opposing counsel. After which, Cochran hugged O.J. and left for a funeral.
"First of all, I had told Darden not to take Fuhrman," Cochran recalled to TIME in 2001. "But I was really disappointed with him. He came into the judge's chamber with a copy of Andrew Hacker's book, Two Nations. He gives Ito one of these things. I can't believe he's doing this. And basically, he's saying, if you allow these jurors to hear the word it's the most vile word in the dictionary; it'll turn this trial into whether these jurors believe that the brothers on the street think 'the man' is getting a fair trial. My first reaction was to say to Darden, 'N---er, please...'"
"I was so furious with him," the attorney continued. "I felt it was an insult to all Black people. When I got up and spoke, that was not scripted. That was just from my heart."
The Glove Debacle
The infamous extra-large leather gloves, one found at the crime scene, the other behind O.J.'s house, made for a matching set and were like a pair Nicole had bought for her then-husband in 1990 at Bloomingdale's. Only 200 pairs were sold in the whole country that year.
A trace of Goldman's DNA was on the glove found at Rockingham and fibers on that glove matched carpeting in O.J.'s Bronco. Traces of O.J's, Nicole's and Goldman's blood were all found in the Bronco. Also, a sock with drops of both O.J.'s and Nicole's blood on it was found in his bedroom.
O.J. said he must have left his blood behind at Bundy some time when he was over there playing with his kids. The story of how and when he cut his finger kept changing, at first saying it happened in Chicago, but then he said it happened in L.A. and he reopened the cut in Chicago.
When O.J. tried on the gloves in court, at Darden's insistence and much to Clark's dismay and the defense's amusement, he raised his hands and declared, "They don't fit."
"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," Cochran said in what became perhaps the most quoted—everyone can remember a rhyme—statement of the entire trial. One, incidentally, that Gerald Uelmen suggested, though Cochran's delivery was key.
"But what I was really proposing was that it would provide a good theme for the whole argument," Uelmen told TIME, "because so much of the other circumstantial evidence didn't fit into the prosecution's scenario."
Glove Slap
It ended up providing one of the most memorable moments of the whole trial and a real coup for the defense, but in a pretrial hearing O.J.'s lawyers initially tried to get the glove found at Rockingham thrown out, citing unwarranted search and seizure, a violation of O.J.'s Fourth Amendment rights.
"I thought we presented a very compelling case that the glove should have been suppressed," Uelmen said on Frontline in 2005. "And the ironic thing is that if the judge had granted that motion and thrown out the glove, I think the result in the O.J. case would have been different. Mark Fuhrman would have been out of the case. They had a pretty compelling case without the glove. The glove kind of opened the door to all of the questions about Mark Fuhrman's credibility and his racism. And when he then became such an important witness in the trial, that then opened the door to all of the problems that Mark Fuhrman created for their case.
"So ironically, if the judge had followed the law, and I think the law really required her to suppress that evidence..."
Ultimately, he said, "I thought we presented a very compelling case of reasonable doubt, and we had a great jury."
Under Attack
While Marcia Clark, a part of the L.A. County District Attorney's Office's special trials unit since 1989, was trying to prosecute O.J. for murder, she was also constantly put on the defensive. Her style was criticized, so she got a new hairdo and was criticized for that. Her ex-husband sued her for primary custody of their two sons during the trial, alleging she was working too much to properly take care of them. The National Enquirer published old topless photos of her taken on a vacation with her then-husband. Even a potential juror, a woman, when asked if there was anything she might hold against the prosecution, told Clark, "I think your skirts are too short, how about that?"
She was dismissed. But not before Judge Ito cracked, "I was wondering when someone was going to mention that."
But the families of the victims she was trying to get justice for had the utmost confidence in her, at least heading into the trial.
"She seems always to be concerned with our family, how we're doing, and at the same time there's never a doubt in my mind she's working 25 hours a day, 10 days a week, on this case," Fred Goldman, Ron's father, told the New York Times. "On a scale of 1 to 100, she easily gets 110."
Nicole's sister Denise Brown told The New Yorker, "I think Marcia is wonderful, a terrific woman, and I think my whole family will vouch for that one."
Reasonable Doubt
Aside from suggesting that detectives tried to frame O.J., the defense proposed the theory that the murders were drug-related, committed by dealers who came to the house looking for Nicole's friend and—up until the day before the murders—house guest Faye Resnick, an interior decorator who later became a familiar face on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Resnick co-wrote a couple of books stemming from the case, starting with Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted, which came out in 1994, right in the middle of jury selection. Thanks to all the salacious details she included about Nicole's purported sex life, Resnick became only a questionably helpful witness for the prosecution, despite her firm belief that O.J. had battered Nicole through the course of their relationship and ultimately killed her.
Shattered: In the Eye of the Storm, about how the trial affected Resnick, came out in 1996.
Battered Reputation
Bob Shapiro brought F. Lee Bailey on board for his extensive murder trial experience, of which Shapiro—a criminal defense attorney more inclined to cut deals—had none. Bailey was best known for defending Albert DeSalvo, who later confessed to being the "Boston Strangler" serial killer, on assault charges and heiress Patty Hearst when she went on trial for helping her kidnappers rob a bank. (Both convictions.)
Some of Bailey's key moments during the O.J. trial included him goading Darden into having O.J. try on the gloves in court and his cross-examination of Fuhrman.
After O.J. was acquitted, Bailey said on CNN that Shapiro initially wanted O.J. to plead guilty to manslaughter—a charge Shapiro denied, though it was widely reported that conversations about a possible plea were held at his office.
"We tried to fire Shapiro for being an a--hole," Bailey told Huffington Post's Highline in 2019. "O.J. told him, 'You're benched,' and Bob said, Fine. I'm going out to give the public my opinion of your guilt.' O.J. knew that would be devastating before the trial, so we kept Bob aboard."
Bailey was later disbarred in Florida and Massachusetts and set up a consulting firm in Maine, but wasn't able to acquire a license to practice law.
He told the ABA Journal in 2014 he believed his work on the case "hurt in Florida, Massachusetts and in Maine. There has been a strong wave of judicial resentment against me for my role in the O.J. Simpson trial."
Repercussions
Under cross-examination by Bailey, Fuhrman denied having ever having used the n-word, a statement that was handily proved untrue by the defense, which had a recording of him using the epithet in conversations he had with an aspiring screenwriter. Without the jury present, the detective then asserted his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself when asked whether he had planted or manufactured evidence in the O.J. case.
In a memorandum obtained by the New York Times, Dershowitz had puzzled over why the prosecution felt the need to have Fuhrman testify, since he had only spotted the glove at O.J.'s and pointed it out to fellow detectives. He wasn't the one who physically removed it from the scene and checked it into evidence, therefore he wasn't part of the chain of custody.
Before the trial concluded, Fuhrman, a 20-year veteran of the LAPD, had retired. He pleaded no contest to perjury in 1996 and in 1997 he released Murder in Brentwood, about the O.J. case, the first in a number of books he's since written about true crime, media and the justice system. He moved to Idaho and became a regular guest on Fox News
Throughout, Fuhrman has maintained that he went by the book in the O.J. case and the evidence proved his guilt. He told the New York Post in 2016, "There will be another O.J., and what we have learned is that political correctness and stupidity trump justice."
Alternate Takes
Over the course of the trial, 10 out of the 27 people seated—12 jurors and 15 alternates—were dismissed for various reasons. Only four of the original main jurors were left to decide the verdict.
Lionel Cryer was originally selected as an alternate but ended up ascending to the main panel. "I was not excited," he told E! News in 2017. "I looked around at all the people I was going to be making this decision with and I thought, this is going to be quite a ride."
In the end, 10 women and two men found O.J. not guilty. Nine of the jurors were Black, two white and one Hispanic.
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