You're Wrong About - The O.J. Simpson Trial: Nicole Brown Simpson Part 1

Episode Date: October 3, 2019

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.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

They were known as like the sort of series and Bacchus of LA, that's the first thing I think of. I was so clearly once a 12 year old with no friends. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where the trials of the century become the podcasts of the next. Whoa, that is ballsy, my dude. You paused way too long. That makes me think it's not that good.

No, I guess I was absorbing it like that's a big podcast energy. You're saying we're one of the podcasts of the century. I love how like I explain the subject matter in our episodes relatively rarely because when I start researching something, I tend to hang onto it. 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. Right. I'm like, I'm not ready yet.

And with this one, we have been trying to record this for like 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 like personally responsible for communicating like the trauma of Nicole Brown Simpson's life to our listeners and like 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 your 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. Yes. And my name is Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer working on a book about the satanic. And I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post and we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're

wrong about. Today we're talking about Nicole Brown Simpson. Yes. Epic, huge podcast of the century. Stop it. I've just been like nonstop reading for about three days now and also researching this case for the past two, three months. Yes.

And much of your adult life too. Cause you've written about this before and you've been obsessed with this off and on for ages. The first time I researched the O.K. Simpson trial was in 2014 and I went in knowing almost only when 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.

Because trial of the century is like literally the biggest event of the 90s basically. However, you measure public attention. I think definitely the biggest event of the 90s in the United States and like, of course there have been probably like 20 trials of the sanctuary. Maybe you could call it the trial of the turn of the sanctuary because I think it really did say in many important ways where America was at the period that it took place. Yeah. In regards to race, with regards to class, to celebrities who are expectations about

our legal system, to Americans understanding of justice or understanding of gender and domestic abuse and so many other things. Women in the workplace. Sure. Women as a general concept and so anyway, I got really into it and the first thing that I focused on and that I was really amazed by was like, oh my God, this was this horrible tragic murder. Yeah.

When I was a child, I had no sense of that. I remember asking my mom if she thought O.J. did it and my mom to her credit was like, yes, I do. Yeah. And I was really taking, I remember being taken aback and I was like, well, I think he's innocent. Okay. 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 like have the O.J. Simpson trial on like very quietly in the background as I'm working and like glance at it occasionally and turn it up when something interesting happens, which I think is how people watched it like in the workplace in 1995. And as I've had it on, like you see a lot of O.J. Simpson's face because that was the only way he could communicate in the trial, he never testified. He really was a master of projecting geniality and this impression of like genuine happiness and calm and like, I'm so happy to see you, you know, he knew how to project charm basically.

And I think as a kid, I had seen his face and just been like, that doesn't look like a murderer. Right. Right? Like that looks a nice, 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 like aside from all the other issues that were part of this and that made it, you know, 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 like, well, he's a, no, he's a nice man, he doesn't look like a murderer. He looks like a nice man. Right. And how much we struggled with that. I mean, it is amazing how many of these things that purport to be fact finding exercises

are really these qualitative experiences of like, is this person nice or not? Is this person human or not? Yeah. 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 MacDonald. Really? Do you remember Norm MacDonald?

As a person? Yeah. I don't remember his jokes about this. 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, O.J. is Guilty and God Told Me. Oh, okay.

Where there would just be like what seemed like kind of an innocuous late night joke about like, Johnny Cochran and Robert Shapiro mended their feud today after O.J. Simpson threatened to cut both of their heads off. Oh, right. Yeah. 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. Oh, fuck.

Jesus. I was like, oh my God, like everyone's forgotten that there's a woman in this story who was killed in this horrible way and who had, you know, 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. Right. And then all of that had been forgotten. I had grown, I'm just thinking about the O.J. Simpson's trial as just, oh, you know,

it was a spectacle. It was this, it was a thing that took over media for about a year and a half. Yeah. And everyone had opinions about it and everyone watched it and at the end of it, you know, we moved on. And in this interesting way, we lost track of it being about a person just making the trial such a big spectacle. Well, this is 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 like 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 like no one's paying attention to this economic crash. Why aren't you looking at what's happening? No one is reporting on this thing. 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. Right. Like make me interested in Zimbabwe and I feel like there was a lot of the same sort of thing 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 like if you choose to, you can just do tonight's coverage of the trial from her perspective. Like that's that's a choice that you've made. There's not. Yeah. This inevitable thing. 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 like, well, you control media. It's like, hey guys. That is my, I mean, I also feel like I have like, I know basically nothing about her. I think that she was a model, I guess she, I know that OJ was like an abusive guy. I know that they had a terrible, like he had an unbelievable temper and was incredibly violent and this really terrible human being. I mean, I wouldn't call anyone a terrible human being, but terrible husband.

Terrible, terrible, terrible husband. But where, where should we start with actually telling her stories here? Where do you want us to start? I want to tell the story of her life to until right before the murder. And then I want to pick up with the murder when we start talking about the investigation and trial. Okay. But anything before that, let's talk about that.

So yeah, what's, what's her upbringing? Where was she born? What's her deal? Nicole Brown Simpson was born in Germany. Okay. She's the second of four daughters born to Lou and Yudita 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 and 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. Wow. What a time capsule. I know. Isn't that, isn't that wild?

And the stories about Nicole, she's growing up in Sheila Weller's book and from other people who knew her is that she was just this very active, headstrong, kind of diving headfirst into life kind of person. There's two separate stories about her being terribly injured and not really caring as a child. Like 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 it's like, it's fine. I had my fun. And then another word, 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 like 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, you know, Nicole recovers and immediately gets back on her horse and keeps riding around.

Oh, shit. Okay. That feels like the way people remember her that she like was known for not being scared of life. She's a knockabout kid. She's like an 80s kid. Like we don't have kids like this anymore. Like their parents just let them go and like get in a bunch of accidents and like scrape

their knees and stuff. And we're just like, no big deal. Whereas now I feel like we'd all be calling CPS. Yeah. She's an outdoor girl. Okay. 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, as a child would say her nightly prayers in

German. Oh. Her sister Denise, who's two years older than her, is known as kind of the pretty one. What? Really? Yes. What the fuck family is this? This is a family where Nicole is not the pretty one.

How fucking pretty is Denise? Jesus Christ. Yeah, I think it's just like she's two years older so she has a head start and she gets through the awkwardness a little bit faster. Oh my God. That's like me having a brother who's the short one. Like how tiny would this human being be? Jesus Christ.

Okay. Yeah. This is a good time for us to do my favorite feature where you look up a picture of Nicole Brown Simpson. What? Which one am I looking at? Which one am I looking at? Just like general pictures of her alive.

I'm googling Nicole Brown Simpson alive. Okay, 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 like her midriff is showing. It's more of a Melrose Place blouse maybe. Yeah. I don't know.

And she's got Daisy Dukes like super short jean shorts on and she looks like Linda Hamilton in The Terminator or like Terminator 2 where she's like buff. Yes, exactly. Yes, that's the comparison that's been 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? Yes. She was jacked.

She looked super athletic. She ran nine miles a fucking day. Did she really? Yeah, that is a lot of miles. Oh wow. I mean that's in my opinion too many. But yeah, in any other family she would be the pretty one. Tell me about her face.

Like what does she look like? Imagine yourself a straight male if you will. I mean this is like the hardest. This is the hardest like avatar species for me to jack myself into. She has a really sharp jawline. She has almond eyes. She has a sort of frowning kind of countenance that a lot of the photos of her, she looks sort of serious in them.

She doesn't have a sort of Ann and Nicole Smith always smiling bubbliness. She looks sort of serious and in a couple of them she has her brows furrowed. She has really like a serious beauty, right? I guess is what people would call like icy or something or like sort of distant and perfect. Yeah, people use that word about her and it's often something to the effect of, you know, 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. 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 really aware of their beauty or sort of thinking like I'm too hot for this, which I think women are conditioned to never believe about themselves. Right, 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 like things will happen to you. Yeah, yeah. Things will get started that you do not have the strength to stop. There's also the thing too that if you're super smiley, if you're kind of in that role and you're super smiley and bubbly, people are going to call you an airhead or a dits, right? And if you're not, then people are going to call you an ice queen. Like those are your two options.

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, the whole thing, the whole shebang, there is especially in contemporary media this just like patina of casual, unself-aware misogyny. Yeah, against Nicole. Against Nicole and against her ilk, because she's always depicted as like kind of a party girl, which I don't know, to find party girl, we'll get into that.

But one of Geoffrey Tubin's lines and the run of his life, which is a book that the Ryan Murphy show is based on, and is like a very good soup to nuts account of like 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 there's like, he just makes remarks occasionally like, and, like he's like, all of the Brown sisters had breast implants and none of them had college degrees, and you're like, okay, so what, are you making an argument, counselor? Right.

What's your point? Right, like how are those facts directly related to each other? And like, and they were vegetarians and one was left-handed, like, he's clearly trying to turn those into a trail of breadcrumbs that's going to lead you to a particular conclusion. Well, like saying that one thing has to do with the other, it's like, they all drank decaf and liked Bobby Sherman, and it's like, okay, there's just this sense of like, 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 high life, and Nicole goes and visits her in Europe and kind of gets a taste of that. And is writing her family and friends, these like 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 like, who knows, like if she, if the modeling life would have been for her, like what she would have done, she left 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.

Wow, so she's fresh out of high school. She's dabbled very lightly in modeling sort of through her sister. Oh, and another great story about like 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.

Oh my God, sweet and plain. Yeah, it's plain old Michelle Pfeiffer. So she's like in this group that is just, it's like rich kids, they're all super attractive. They're all kind of on this upward trajectory into becoming like their parents. Yeah, it's an environment of sheltered prosperity. And so out of that shelter, she moves to real LA.

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 is very exclusive and celebrities come there like Jack Lemon. Oh my God. So after two weeks of the boutique,

she gets a job at the Daisy. I can't think of a less cool celebrity than Jack Lemon. It's like I'm going to be like moving to LA and hobnobbing with Gene Hackman or something. That's not a quote. He didn't sell her on it that way. That's apparently how I would sell someone. Oh, that's you.

No, he wasn't like, hey Nicole, come work at my club. Maybe you'll see Jack Lemon. Okay, so she gets a job at this club. She's super into Jack Lemon. This is what I'm gathering so far. She gets a job at this cool night spot 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 saw this 18-year-old waitress and said, I'm going to marry that girl. Oh, man. And then he did. This is bad.

How old is he at that point? OJ Simpson is at the age of 30. Okay. His 30th birthday is going to be in July of that year. Okay. He's nearing the end of his first marriage, which he will say later on was basically over and he claims that his wife tricked him

into getting her pregnant again, which 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. You can't say since day one because that's probably not literally true, but it could be true. So he's already established a pattern

of being a bad husband, basically. 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 talk to the media after his arrest to talk about his first wife, Marguerite, being known for wearing dark glasses a lot indoors.

Okay. So that marriage is drawing to a conclusion. Okay. And at the same time, his NFL career is nearing its end and he's trying to figure out what is his life going to be about. Oh, right. Because in the NFL, you're gone by age 30. This is not a mid-career thing.

Okay. Simpson did an interview with Playboy in 1976 and he speaks very openly about that and about how much he 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 like, you matter one day and the next day you don't. 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. I feel very sorry for him. I feel bad for everyone in this. I mean, I think it's a real, like it's a real human thing. Losing the purpose of your life hurts.

So at the time he was also, 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 Cole House Walker in the film adaptation of Yael Drows Ragtime. Because he was like America's sweetheart, right? I mean, as an NFL player, he had like an American poster boy image, 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 like 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 that sounds good for him, you know, which is 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, like tell me your impressions of like, who is OJ Simpson?

Who was he? How was he known before he was charged with murder? I mean, I have seen that documentary, but not for since it came out however many years ago that was. And you've been tased a lot since then. So no spoilers. True. But I mean, he was born in San Francisco, I believe.

And like you said, he was like 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. Like he was at the peak of the sport. Yes. He was one of those people. I mean, like Tanya, I think he was a lot like Tanya,

because watching OJ run is like watching Tanya 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 end state. Let me actually just read you OJ on OJ. Okay. 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've got to be able to recognize certain things that are happening out there and react without thinking.

To do that, you have to daydream about running. 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 much I 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 because putting yourself out there beforehand and imagining everything that's supposed to happen on every play. You've got to 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. I mean, what do you take away from that? What do you take away from that? No, I want to hear yours first. 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 like kind of adorably named West Side Story sounding gangs. But he got in fight. He spent a lot of time fighting as a teenager, fighting and stealing other guy's girlfriends. Those were like his main hobbies. And then track, and he like 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. I mean, the thing is like people loved him, and they did so for many reasons. And one was that he was kind of this community tentpole that everyone likes to have.

You know, he loved to be generous. And of course it was often generosity that was like for a purpose. Like he set Nicole's mom up with a travel agency. He set Nicole's dad up with a Hertz dealership because he, O.J., famously was a spokesman for Hertz. He put one of Nicole's sisters through college. Like 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 were, you know, maybe talked 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

and what it's historically known for is being a private, very white, very wealthy college. It's not part of the UC system. It's, you know, one letter away. And it's on the edge of Watts. Yeah, it's like this little bubble of privilege in the middle of this bigger, messier city around it. And a very 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 given a very lucrative contract. But the problem is he has to live in Buffalo and also he's underutilized by the team the first couple of years he's 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 at this around this time as saying, you know, I want to walk down the street and be known. And he's like the Elizabeth Warren of his time in a way because he will sign autographs for hours. Oh, yeah.

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. Oh, really? 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 that documentary does that I love is really like interspersed 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. Right. 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 shows. He did sort of choose the America's sweetheart fork in the road. Yeah. And he knew that like 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 like an apolitical, eternally smiling Black man. Right. 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, you know, the story that you hear so often in cases of domestic violence where it's compartmentalized.

Everyone knows him as like this calm, happy, friendly guy. But, you know, Nicole is for a long time the only one who really sees. Right. That he can be this other way. Right. Also, the public doesn't like it when we construct somebody as this kind of apolitical, smiling, flag and apple pie type of figure. And then we have to deal with the messy complexity of them as a person.

And this happens over and over again. Right. And that's exactly what goes on with him. And to jump forward a little bit. There's an incident with O.J. 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 in the 1970s based on his career in the NFL. And that's like this huge, long running commercial partnership. There's so many Hertz commercials with O.J. Simpson running through an airport. And the people who made those commercials

and O.J. made in America talk about like we always positioned him with like old white people or like little white children waving at him to show that like he's safe, like he's friendly. And he's always wearing a three piece suit. Right. You know, and they talk about like doing this like my fair lady thing with him with like, he would say like get instead of get. And they would like really insist on like white sounding enunciation.

Wow. So it's like trying to make him as unthreatening as possible. And where the Venn diagram for the word threatening in the word black is like just one circle by itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and he passed the test. Like he was able to be that. And it's very sad to think about someone who is dancing as fast

as they can for their entire life. Right, right. All of his friendships except for a few exceptions as he continued to rise were with like middle aged wealthy white men like Bob Kardashian immortalized by David Schwimmer and the Ryan Murphy show is a great example of this. Robert Kardashian is like an Armenian millionaire who has a house that I believe Jeffrey tube and describes I hope lovingly looking

like a, I think he said brothel. And the issue with him, you know, so he's finishing his football career and he talks candidly in the Playboy interview about like I want to go out when I'm on top. I want people to remember me at my best and like I'm already defining I can feel it, you know. And I think reading the interview, you just feel this palpable anxiety about like everything's going to be fine.

Like I'm just concentrating on picturing myself succeeding and like getting the ball and just going, you know. Right, right. But he had, it was hard for him to get his his post football career off the ground. So these are like the anxious waters that he's in when he meets Nicole. 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, if that happens, then he will gradually cease to exist. Okay, okay. And into this walks Nicole, who is only 18. Yeah. And five weeks old. So yeah, how does, how does the courtship work? He keeps coming back to the restaurant and asking her out for two days.

Why does she say no at first? Because she's playing hard to get. And also because she doesn't know who he is. Right. Because she's only 18. Hey, well, no, I mean, he's, he's still playing in the NFL at this time. This is in 1977. They were in each other's lives for more than half her life.

Wow. Yeah. She had lived a long and terrifying life. Yeah. By the time she died. But no, she just like didn't give a shit about football. Okay. She like was talking to her friends and she was like, which one is okay?

Some said again. Who is that? What do we do? Ariana Grande hit on you at a restaurant. But after two days, she agrees to go out with him. And she's living in LA with her friend, David Laban. He's sleeping on the floor and she's sleeping in the bed and their platonic besties. So she comes home from her first date with OJ to 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 Laban is like, Jesus fucking Christ, what happening? She was like, he ripped my pants off, but I really like him. Jesus. That's the first date. They went to make out point and he ripped her pants off.

Wow. So it's like this perfect literary foreboding of the life that she's about to have. Yes. It's a very literary situation. And OJ very quickly is like, I don't like you living with some guy. All right. Fuck. So like even like within a couple of dates, he's already doing this.

Yeah. And so he's like, I'm going to put you up in an apartment because this is unacceptable. Okay. What I keep thinking about is that her experience of adulthood lasts for like five weeks. Yeah. Because she's out of her parents' house for five weeks. She's in David Laban's house. Right.

And then she goes into OJ's house, like the house that OJ makes buys for her. And also depending on him financially very quickly too. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because she immediately stops working. You know, probably she doesn't feel like it because he's rich and he's taking care of her, but I'm sure he also isn't, you know, he's perfectly fine with her not being on

display to other men. Right. Right. She only had five weeks. And then the rest of her life is dominated by this force. And then the rest of her life belongs to him. Yeah. 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 quote, various white fat cats. And the first time I read that for several seconds, several wonderful seconds, I thought OJ Simpson had a lot of pictures of himself with like fat white cats. Holding them. Just hand them large blobs of fur just all over the house.

Yeah. Like one of those versions that looks like Wilford Brimley. But following that, she lays out pictures of Nicole and she's also like, it's very interesting that these people who are divorced and this man who maintains that he's 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 mannish 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 skinned 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 you describe it, a thousand-yard stare. Wow. I mean, that's the aloofness again, right?

She doesn't seem present in any of the photos of herself. Yes. 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 marshal rights. 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. Oh, wow. The box also contains several letters, one written by Nicole to O.J. 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 beat her because she refused to have sex with him. Jesus. 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 O.J., part of Nicole accepted that she would never really escape, that O.J. Simpson might murder her.

The message in the box was clear. In the event of my death, look for 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 compared 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 stair.

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 told many people that she was afraid that O.J. would kill her and get away with it because he would O.J. his way out of it. These pictures indicate that the abuse started very early and was very severe early on. Yeah. On her 19th birthday, she's staying at her parents' house.

This is a year after she and O.J. have gotten together. He has possibly been physically violent with her for the first time ever and given her a black eye. To apologize, he has a brand new Porsche with a big bow on it delivered to her parents' house. Has anyone given anyone else a car with a bow on it not to apologize for something terrible? That move seems tailor-made for like, I did something that I really need to cover it up. 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. The worst part is that this is how Nicole's dad finds out that she and O.J. are dating because she's been keeping it a secret from him for this whole year because he's, 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 and glad it's someone who's not a bum. Holy shit.

I know he thought that because that's how he thinks. Oh my God. I mean, the intersection of race and class is really interesting. It's like, I will put aside my negative prejudice of black people if you suit my positive prejudice of rich people. Yeah. And also that this extravagant gift that he's gotten her to apologize for assaulting her is what proves to her racist dad that he's solvent and therefore respectful enough

to be her boyfriend slash husband. Jesus. There's an anecdote at the start of Sheila Weller's book and one of the things that Marsha Clark also talks about a lot in her book and is really struck by she gets to know the Brown family is that it's not that they didn't know that O.J. was a controlling husband or in 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 O.J. did that became like a joke in the Brown family was that when he was raging at Nicole, but wasn't necessarily physically violent, he would, she had a wall of photos like 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 repaired and hang them back up again. And this happened so many times that it became a joke and it was seen as like, that's what O.J. does. He's blowing off steam, that's who he is.

And so Nicole's mom said later that she would say, oh, is O.J. angry at you and therefore the family is my portrait on the lawn again. Oh my God. I know it was because it was something that they just talked about and they didn't take it very seriously, which I think is pretty common. Yeah. I mean, I guess if anything happens enough times, it's just like LOL, gotta go to Bartels again.

Like it just becomes normalized, I guess. 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 O.J. is 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 O.J. separate, Nicole's like, yeah, 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. Shit. Are you surprised at that degree of abuse on the marriage? No, it's just always like 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. Yeah.

The extreme and violent and intolerable nature of it becomes hidden somehow after like, oh no, I gotta get some more makeup. Yeah. Right? It just becomes like another errand that you have to run somehow. Yeah. It's really dark to think about. And then later on, he apologized by giving her a Ferrari.

Oh, fuck. So as the abuse gets worse, the cars get better and the jewelry gets more expensive. So yeah, it begins early and then I'm gonna jump. Well, let me ask before I go, what do you think so far? She's like the perfect victim of abuse almost or like the perfect vulnerable person to this sort of behavior because she doesn't have any other support systems in place that she doesn't have like a group of friends that can be like, hey, this guy really seems like bad news or her own money to just move away and move to Fresno and be away from him.

She doesn't have any other options. And she also because she's so young, she doesn't know how like adult life works that she wouldn't know what sort of what one does in these situations and like what the signs to look for are. Right. Well, 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 O.J. Simpson, you know, and one of the things that various observers talk about later is that like even the cops who investigated him immediately after his wife's murder were like very sweet and deferential to him considering the circumstances. You know that they were star struck 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 could screw up their situation because it's power versus power. You know, if you investigate a powerful person, like you need to be on your best behavior unlike all of the other times.

Right. Right. So yeah. So what are the first couple of years of their courtship like because they don't get married for a while. Right. Yeah. They don't get married until 1985.

Okay. So there's seven years when they're dating. I did that math wrong. There's eight years when they're dating. Yeah. Okay. So in June, in 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 who he's still married to. Oh, wow. Okay. Big summer for OJ. Yeah. 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. Okay.

And it's a beautiful day and there's in Sheila Weller's book along quote from the Simpsons friend, Mike Militello, who talks about OJ running out of 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, Nicole. She said, really? Oh, it was great. So incredibly pure.

And then the way Denise picks up the story is that OJ, you know, he plays this amazing game. He's like, he's showing this woman whose heart he has captured in spectacular fashion, this thing that he's great at, you know, 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 he's like 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 like 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 just gets randomly like really jealous, but like we have this amazing connection.

I'm like head over heels in love with him. Everyone says like there was a love connection there and there was a sexual connection there. And they were like very much in love when they met and for a long time after and when things worked, they really worked. But then increasingly, you know, they didn't. And I think there's something that happens in any relationship where you get put on a pedestal, right? Right.

Because the way Nicole talked about it later was that OJ had molded her and decided who she would become. And like, 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. It always feels like there's this thing of like there's this form 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 like anecdotally in a lot of relationships that it's like 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 like maybe she has some health issues or like maybe she has a mental health stuff. Like all these messy complications that come with every single human being, it's like there's almost like this anger of like, no, no, you're supposed to be my trophy. You're supposed to be this one dimensional perfect figure in my life. And like you're making it hard. And I'm supposed to be able to shape you.

Yeah. 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, you know, first I'm 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.

Like I have to keep being more and more controlling and more and more scary to you because hopefully like if I get you like another step under my control, like 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. Is there like a honeymoon period or is it just already like conflict immediately? Around the time of the portion sedent, Nicole shows up at her parents house and is like,

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, quote, if you don't get back up here, I'm going to get another girlfriend and fuck the shit out of her. Oh my God.

At which Nicole got in her car and drove up to San Francisco. Really? Yeah. Jesus. That sucks. So he also starts cheating on her pretty early. Right. I mean, it's not just that he's sitting there obviously and women are like walking by like,

hey, OJ, like obviously that happens sometimes. But also like, he talks about this in the Playboy interview, like when he was growing up, he would like proposition any woman any time, you know, like he would especially hit on women who he knew to be taken because he kind of liked the challenge. Like this is one of the ways that he shows himself who he is. Right. Wow. Is by picking up women.

Women as conquest. Yeah. And through all of their relationship, Nicole from the beginning was like, please stop. Like could you please, please just be faithful to me. And he, they went through so many phases of this of like, no, I don't need to, you have no right to tell me to stop. Yes, I will. Everything will change.

You know, what you don't know doesn't hurt you. Like all of the different approaches to cheating on your wife for your girlfriend. But the point is that they, you know, this went on for, for 15 years. 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. Oh yeah.

And throughout again, this is the thing like he needs to be free to fuck anyone at any time, not neither snow nor rain or dark of night will, will keep him from fucking anyone he feels like, but Nicole cannot kiss someone on the cheek when he's looking or else he has license to, to do whatever he feels like. Cause it's all about him. And it's, and it's all about his sense of ownership. Yeah. Yeah.

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. Oh wow. Dominique Dunne was the daughter of Dominique Dunne, who was a writer for Vanity Fair, who 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 read you some of Dominique's letter to her boyfriend, John Sweeney, because I feel like it's, it's like a piece of literature about controlling behavior and like 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 a.m. 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 am the person who makes you angry, who you fight with sometimes. I think we only fight when immigrants with me fade away and you are faced with the real me. That is why arguments are wrapped out of nowhere.

Wow. I mean, this stuff is hard because jealous husbands, boyfriends are just such fucking cliches. It is like every boring fucking trope you have seen in 750 movies by this point, right? It is like... Yeah. We have seen all the tropes by now. Yeah.

There is something so generic about people that act like this. Because there is a lot of Hollywood movies, like my favorite movie enough starring Jennifer Lopez. Oh, yeah. Where it is like a villainous husband who is just cranked up to a degree that maybe mildly controlling American men can look at that and be like, I am not that guy. Maybe we have a lot of over-the-top husband villains to remind the normal husbands that it is fine to just lightly collude with a patriarchal sister.

That is the thought. I am just sitting here in my closet next to my summer clothes and it is also at this point in the relationship, their friends see her and many people who knew them describe her after her death as someone who gave as good as she got. They are like, you know, Nicole knew how to push O.J.'s buttons and she would make fun of him and be like, ah, fuck off, you know, or like taunt him for like being a bad actor or like slap him or whatever, which is like she wasn't totally passive, I guess is the point.

I feel like people, though, make that point with this implied argument of like, so you see, it is kind of understandable that he locked her in their wine cellar for hours and hours one time and so on. It is like, no, no. Yeah, I mean, it's 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. It's like I'm stating facts and I'm about to come to an argument, but like I don't

actually want to state the actual argument I'm making by listing those facts. I do think it's like, 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, you know, they affect the way that they act in those relationships. And like, I think people are complicated and people cope with these situations differently. And that's not an argument that like, of course, he killed her. Like she was sometimes snippy. Like that's clearly not the conclusion that you're reaching with this.

Clearly, like what man could withstand a woman being snippy to him, you know, or like putting up a fight about him cheating on her continually, like, you know, it's like, oh, I don't know. Right. So Nicole has been living with OJ. She's been living either in an apartment that he paid for 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's like, are you concerned about the fact that OJ is like starting to collect guns?

Oh, God. 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. Jesus. 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 got her underwear and she's out there in the hall. Oh, God. All night. And this is again, like a story that she kind of tells is like, oh, I got locked out. It's what a night. Right. 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 boombox, which is like an objectively insane thing to do and like really, really bad to do to somebody else after they've told you they don't want to see you. But because it's like a romantic movie, we've spent two decades being like, what a cute thing that he did. Yeah, it's true. We really have normalized this idea of like, well, the grand romantic gesture is something you do probably after you fucked up.

Yeah. Yeah. And if they say no, they'll look like an asshole. Yeah, exactly. And Nicole really wants to get married. And O.K. is like, I've already been married. OK. But she also, you know, her friends are starting to have kids.

She really wants to have a baby. And she also feels that if O.K. marries her, he won't cheat on her anymore. Oh, man. Oh, sweetie. Oh. 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. Oh, my God.

And so it's like, it makes sense that you would hold on to this magical thinking of like, maybe once we're married, he'll respect that. Right. And to be fair, he's eventually is like, yes. Yeah. Yes. When we get married, it'll be different. God, it's like Brexit.

Yeah. And it's like, phase one, collect underpants. Phase two, phase three, Brexit. OK. So let's wrap up. We're going to get, I'm going to wrap up with the wedding. OK. So but Nicole gets increasingly pissed off about OJ seeing other women and also like

kind of doing it in her face. Oh, yeah. So one day she's driving through Beverly Hills and she passes OJ on the street being affectionate with a lady. No way. She just drives past and sees him with another woman. Yeah. She just sees him on the street and she had like at this time a list of like the license

plate numbers of women who he had been cheating on her with or who she suspected of him cheating on her with. Jesus. This was becoming kind of, it was taking up a lot of her life. And also being in a relationship with somebody who constantly cheated on you would make you kind of a paranoid weirdo in like having license plates of a bunch of other women is like kind of weird behavior. But it's also completely justified, right?

Like. Yeah. And also she's been surveilled for years at this point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's this ratcheting up of mutual surveillance and like your surveillance of him is justified and his surveillance of you is not. 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 friend's, the Shulman's house and is like, I'm done. It's over. Like I don't even want to go back home. Can I stay at your house? And they're like, yes. Yeah.

Please do. And they're like, you know what? This is great. Like please don't marry him. Please don't. Yeah. Like 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, Nicole has says, I think we need to let him in or else he'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. Wow. So it's kind of like him trying to get out of the doghouse for like one fight.

Yeah, it is. Because it's like he's already given her a Porsche. You know, he's given her all this other stuff. You have to also keep upping the ante in the way that you apologize. And Nicole is like willing to accept and willing to accept this as like, yes, like I'm committing to be different. Like things will be different. My heart is in it.

I will change. And what Linda Shulman says to Sheila Weller is that, you know, Nicole comes back and has this ring and is excited and says, but look how it had to happen. Yeah. 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 in part two. But before we go, can I just ask you one last question? Yes.

What is your just sort of narrative of why he killed her? Like, do you like in your head, what do you think actually happened? I think that he believed that she was really done with him. Yeah. And I think that she was really going to get away. And that's what did it was like the feeling of permanence. Hypothetically, you know, as I think through everything that I do and don't know, like when I think about, you know, if I imagine myself in what I imagine, OK,

state of mind was at that time, if I imagine what it would have done to him to see her seeming like she was really actually ready to move on. This woman who 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 I could see building to murder.

Because if you see it as like he was her ex-husband and they had a tempestuous relationship and then maybe he killed her, you're like, OK, I can see that happening or not happening. But if you follow like the breakdown of both of the relationship 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 built for him. And yeah, that's what we're going to talk about next time.

OK, I'm not going to lie. It's going to be rough. OK, like we've gotten through some really some hard stuff and we're going to get through some harder stuff next time. Some harder stuff. But I hope you come with us. Yes, not in a car that somebody gave you wrapped in a bow.