Nicole Brown Simpson’s cries for help are still hard to hear
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Nicole Brown Simpson dialed 911 in October of 1993 and told the dispatcher that her ex-husband had broken into her home. He wouldn’t leave the property, she explained: “He’s ranting and raving outside in the front yard.” The dispatcher wanted to know whether the man had been drinking. Nicole said no, “but he’s crazy.”
The call ended. Then, almost immediately, she called again, to ask the police to please hurry. Her ex was about to reenter the house.
“What does he look like?” the new dispatcher asked.
“It’s O.J. Simpson,” Nicole said. “I think you know his record.”
What’s remarkable, relistening to this call, is the resignation in Nicole’s voice when she offers this piece of information. The sense that she already knows that providing her famous husband’s name might change the treatment she receives, or doesn’t; the privacy she receives, or doesn’t; the credibility she is, or is not, believed to have.
“Is he the sportscaster or whatever?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yes,” Nicole said. By then she was crying. The sportscaster - who was also a former football star, who was also a famous actor, who was also a beloved cultural icon - was now back in the house, Nicole said. “He’s going to beat the s--- out of me.”
Along with reading the various obituaries, remembrances and essays published about O.J. Simpson, who died this week, it’s worth going back and listening to Nicole Brown Simpson’s 911 calls that night in October. What they told us about her. What they told us about us.
On the phone with the dispatcher, Nicole worries repeatedly about her children, who are asleep, and about how desperately she doesn’t want them to wake up.
She explains that O.J. had broken down her back door.
That he had taken her phone book.
That he was angry because he wanted to know why one of the bedroom doors was locked.
That he was refusing to leave. “Please leave, O.J.,” Nicole could be heard saying at one point. “Please, the kids.”
“So, basically, you guys have just been arguing,” the dispatcher asked, a question that would be repeated in various forms throughout the call, followed, a few beats later, by “Is he upset with something that you did?”
As if busting down your ex-wife’s door and stalking through the house while she begged you to leave was a run-of-the-mill couples squabble. As if the likeliest explanation for a man behaving this way was that the ex-wife did something to provoke it.
The country was so ignorant about domestic violence in 1993. Domestic violence committed by the handsome man from the Hertz commercials and the “Naked Gun” movies must have seemed particularly unfathomable. Nicole Brown Simpson must have known that.
By the time of those 911 calls, she had already been hospitalized once for injuries O.J. had given her. In 1989, police arrived at their house on New Year’s Eve to find her running toward them from the bushes. “He’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me,” she cried, according to the report of one officer, who added, “She kept saying: ‘You never do anything about him.’” She was wounded and bleeding, and slapped so hard that his handprint was still on her neck.
O.J. pleaded no contest to that assault. Prosecutors argued for jail time; O.J. was instead allowed to choose a psychiatrist and receive counseling over the phone. “The police have been out here eight times before, and now you’re going to arrest me for this?” he’d told officers upon his arrest.
Eight times.
At some point, Nicole began preserving evidence. She opened a safe-deposit box, and in it she kept photographs of her bruised and swollen face. She also kept a diary tracking O.J.’s alleged stalking, and letters of apology he had written her.
She wrote him letters, too. In one such letter, later obtained by law enforcement, Nicole referred to an incident in 1986: “You beat the holy hell out of me & we lied at the X-ray lab & said I fell off a bike.” In another, she tried to blame herself for everything that had happened. “I’m the one who was controlling,” she wrote. “Please let us be a family again and let me love you better than I ever have before.”
She told her mother, after the couple’s 1992 divorce, that O.J. was following her. “I go to the gas station, he’s there. I go to the Payless shoe store, and he’s there. I’m driving, and he’s behind me,” her mother remembered her saying, the New York Times reported in 1995.
Nicole called a battered women’s shelter in early June of 1994, a worker at the shelter later recalled. She asked for guidance and said her ex-husband had threatened to kill her.
O.J. Simpson went on to live 30 more years. He spent nearly nine of them in prison. Not for anything he’d done to Nicole, but for stealing sports memorabilia. The other two decades, he played a lot of golf. He bought a house in Florida and later lived in a gated community in Las Vegas. He was active on social media. He wrote a book. He was photographed attending professional football games. He told the Associated Press in 2019 that “life is fine.”
As for Nicole: Eight months after she’d called 911 in 1993, a few days after she had allegedly called the battered women’s shelter, five years after she was hospitalized, and 18 years after she met the celebrity who would become her husband, another phone call was placed to 911.
The callers had discovered Nicole Brown Simpson’s body. She was lying outside her house, in a fetal position, in a pool of blood. The body of her acquaintance Ronald Goldman was in the bushes nearby. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck and scalp. One wound was so severe, according to her autopsy report, as to be a near-decapitation. There were defensive wounds on her hands.
Her children were still asleep in their beds.
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