It was inevitable, I suppose, that the easy give-and-take I enjoyed with Johnnie should be misinterpreted as a flirtation. There was one very amusing incident that occurred a few weeks after the trial started in earnest. One of the tabloids published a sequence of still photos of Johnnie and me at a public hearing. The jury wasn’t present and I’d been at the podium arguing to introduce some evidence that might have established Ron Goldman’s time of death. This caught Johnnie off guard, and he rushed to argue against in. In the process he put his hands on my elbows and gently moved me away from the microphone.
The gesture took all of three seconds. The camera caught me looking surprised, which I was. It is unusual for lawyers—particularly men and women—to touch each other in court. My guess, if I know Johnnie, is that he did it solely to throw me off my game. Good lawyers sometimes use guerrilla tactics. Okay, fair enough. I can roll with it.
CAR TAPE.
October 1994. I don’t see how we can ever get a decent jury on this case. Every misstep in the world that could be made is being made, because all the judge and the defense attorneys care about is looking good in the press
.
I’m really appalled at what’s going on, at the deepest level. I really fear for our system of justice. I don’t know how the jury system can continue without some serious revamping. It’s hopeless
—
we cannot rest easy with the knowledge that a jury will use its common sense and follow the law and the evidence to come to the right verdict. If popular opinion and celebrity and fame and the politically correct view is going to be what really sways the jury, if the jury will disregard the law, disregard the evidence, and everyone expects it to happen, then why bother?
Have you ever had a dream where you try to run but your feet are weights? That was what voir dire was like. Jogging through molasses. Lance had hoped to get through twenty jurors on the first day. We managed only four. We tried to move faster, but Lance, Johnnie, me, everybody seemed to have fallen under some kind of malaise.
On October 18, we were jolted out of our dream state by a bulletin from the real world. That morning on my way into court, I bumped into Ito’s clerk. Deirdre Robertson, a tall, stylish black woman in her thirties, was a classy lady. She had a young daughter and we used to talk about our kids a lot. Deirdre thought that O. J. Simpson was guilty and told me so. She was somebody I’d end up going to a lot for encouragement and solace during the trial.
“You put on the evidence,” she’d tell me. “All you can do is put it in front of them.”
I could tell by her face this morning that something ominous was afoot. We’d be starting late, she told me. Something had come up. When I asked her what, she just shrugged. A few minutes later, Ito huffed in, looking very agitated.
A tell-all had just hit the newsstands. The author, a friend of Nicole’s named Faye Resnick, had written some very damaging things about O. J. Simpson. Ito had worked himself into a lather over the possibility that our jurors might have seen the book. He sent Deirdre out to buy copies for each of us. Then he suspended the voir dire until we could all read it and assess the damage.
I’d already talked to Faye—or at least I’d tried. Early on in the case I’d hooked up with some of Nicole’s buddies, notably Kris Jenner, the former wife of Robert Kardashian, who had since married Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner. Kris was an absolute gem, and she didn’t seem to care much for her ex. She had the strange habit of referring to him as “Kardashian.” I got the feeling they stayed on speaking terms only because they had four children in common. Kris and her friend Candace Garvey put me in touch with several of the Brentwood crowd. Among these was Cynthia “Cici” Shahian, who, coincidentally, was a cousin of Kardashian’s. She’d been elusive at first: I’d leave messages that were never returned. But after a couple of months, she showed up in my office, flanked by Kris and Candace. Cici was extremely valuable. She’d been standing next to Nicole when Nicole got Simpson’s letter threatening to turn her in to the IRS. Cici had been able not only to identify the letter, but to describe Nicole’s furious reaction to it.
During the first few weeks of the case, Kris and Candace had been working on my behalf to reel in Resnick. Faye, a wealthy divorcée and, as she was most often described, a “West Side socialite,” was a friend of the Jenners. Kris had introduced her to Nicole about two years earlier. Faye, too, was elusive, but Kris managed to coax her into my office late one night in July.
During that first encounter Faye Resnick came across as childlike and wary. She was a thin, waifish woman with an enormous mane of dark-blond hair. There was certainly nothing about her to prefigure the self-possessed siren who would eventually hit the talk-show circuit, to say nothing of the cover of
Playboy
. In fact, she sat almost curled up in a ball, staring at the floor.
“If it’s Simpson you’re afraid of,” I told her, “the best thing to do is come forward.” Even as I said it I was aware of the half-truths I am often forced to tell. Sure, she might be safer physically. But I had a feeling that if the defense got her on the stand, they’d cut her up pretty good. Clearly, this had occurred to Faye as well.
“You don’t want me for a witness,” she told me. “The defense will trash me for my drug habit. They’ll make me out to be so bad it will ruin your case.”
Faye’s “drug habit” was supposedly a thing of the past, but Simpson’s attorneys were already floating stories, claiming that she and Nicole had borrowed money from Colombian drug lords to open a coffee bar. Supposedly, that led to Nicole’s being murdered.
“Let me worry about that,” I told her.
If all she had to offer was hearsay, she’d never make it to the stand anyway. But any information at all was helpful.
“Faye, if you have anything that could help our case, please share it with us,” I said. “Do it for Nicole’s sake.”
Faye said she’d think about it. I didn’t put too much pressure on her that night. Kris had warned me that it would probably take at least one more meeting to draw her out. This meeting, at least, had served as an icebreaker. Before she left, I gave her a supportive embrace.
But now this! Deirdre handed me my own personal copy of
Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted
.
I took the slender volume back to my office and began to read. To my surprise, Faye devoted her first chapter to our interview. Her version wasn’t exactly as I remembered it, but was impressively accurate. She even described how I’d hugged her “warmly” before she left.
I read on, intending to underline and annotate the book for future reference, and as I did, my eyes grew wide. Faye asserted (as the defense team would later) that Nicole had been carrying on a secret affair with football star Marcus Allen, who was O. J. Simpson’s best friend. (Allen denied any romantic connection with Nicole.) This was not, strictly speaking, news. The rumors about Marcus Allen were out there from day one. I was just shocked that she came out and said it. I figured that O. J. Simpson would be way pissed off about that.
Faye wrote that she’d begged Nicole to cut off the affair with Marcus and warned her, “You may be signing your death warrant.” During the weeks before her death, Nicole apparently told her about beatings and abuse that had never come to the attention of our investigators. Once while they were staying at a Las Vegas hotel, Simpson allegedly flipped out, grabbed Nicole by the hair, and flung her into a corridor. She lay in the hallway sobbing, mostly naked, until a security guard found and rescued her. But the worst beating, Faye claimed, occurred about a year before their son, Justin, was born. Nicole had found a jewelry box in one of her husband’s drawers. It contained a pair of diamond stud earrings. Assuming he had bought them for her birthday, she put the box back. But the birthday came and went; no diamonds. Later, according to Faye, Nicole learned that one of Simpson’s steady mistresses, a former Miss New York named Tawny Kitaen, had been wearing them around town. When she confronted him about it, he punched and kicked her, and then locked her in a closet. For hours after that, she lay quivering. And what was O. J. Simpson, American hero, doing? Lounging in the other room, watching some sports special. Every so often he would come back to the closet, open it, and kick her some more.
I thought Faye’s book would be tabloid nonsense—
Life and Times in the Brentwood Fast Lane
—but it wasn’t. It impressed me. I believed she was speaking honestly; the book had the ring of truth. From a prosecutorial point of view, however, it was frustrating. Much of the information it contained, unfortunately,
was
hearsay. We’d have trouble getting it admitted at trial unless we could get independent corroboration. I began to focus my reading, trying to find isolate things that could be introduced as evidence. And about three-quarters of the way through the book, I found something. Around April 1994, Simpson and Nicole were on the rocks again. He’d extracted some bizarre promise from her that she wouldn’t see other men until August, when he was due to leave for New York to start a new sportscasting contract with NBC. Even though they’d broken up, he simply couldn’t bear the humiliation of seeing her, or others seeing her, with other men, at least when they were on the same side of the Mississippi.
Simpson had called Faye in a fit of distraction. “If… I find out she’s with any other man before August,” he allegedly told Faye, “I’ll kill her.”
If Faye herself had indeed heard Simpson make this explicit death threat, it would be admissible. I believed she had. I just didn’t know whether Faye Resnick had sufficient credibility to testify for the People.
The drug problem that Faye had alluded to during our first interview was only the first of several difficulties a jury would have with her. I could work with the drug history, maybe even turn it to our advantage by pointing out that it was Nicole who arranged for the intervention that finally got Faye into a rehab clinic. Our victim was a compassionate woman. A caring and responsible friend. The fact that she had intervened to stop Faye’s downward spiral also seemed to indicate that Nicole was not some wild-eyed cocaine freak.
But Faye gave the defense more ammunition as well. I knew they would zero in on chapter 18, where Resnick wrote, “How can I describe the intensity of my relationship with Nicole, particularly toward the end? We had become more than friends. Call it what you will, bonded sisters, soulmates, confidantes…” Yes, they were lovers, if Faye was to be believed. Resnick laid out a fairly graphic—and, she claimed, one-time—episode in which she and Nicole made love while listening to Madonna’s
Erotica
.
Airing this stuff in court would be disastrous—the defense would use it not only to attack Resnick’s credibility, but to damage Nicole Brown Simpson’s own image in the eyes of the jury. By the time the defense was through with Resnick, the jury would be writing off Nicole as one of those West L.A. cocaine bitches, who probably got what was coming to her.
Still, that was no excuse for Faye’s not telling us what she knew. It could have put us way ahead on the domestic violence part of the investigation. But what did she do? She squirreled away her nuts to sell in a confessional memoir. Didn’t she feel some kind of real duty to Nicole? Didn’t anyone in this case feel a duty to justice?
While the Resnick shock waves reverberated through the media, the Dream Team was going through the motions of a serious freak-out. Shapiro sputtered to the court that he’d been blindsided. He wanted the trial postponed for a year to let some of the frenzy around Resnick’s book subside.
Blindsided, my ass. I learned from a conversation with Resnick’s own publisher, Michael Viner of Dove Books, that Viner had run into Shapiro at a party over a month earlier. Viner claimed to have told Shapiro that the book was coming out the week of October 17; he told me the lawyer had not appeared particularly concerned. Now that the book was out, however, Shapiro was weeping and moaning that his client couldn’t get a fair trial. He not only wanted the case held over for a year, but he wanted Simpson to spend that time free on bail, his activities monitored by “private security” that Mr. Simpson himself would provide.
Not a chance, Bobby. A defendant charged with a capital crime is ineligible for bail under state law—even if the D.A. has decided not to ask for the death penalty.
But we couldn’t look to Lance Ito for decisive action on such an obvious ruling. Resnick’s
Private Diary
had knocked the judge off his moorings. He called in the jurors one by one to ask what, if anything, they knew about the book. Nearly every one of them admitted, either voluntarily or after some strenuous questioning, to having some knowledge of it. Ito sent the jury pool home for two days—a particularly boneheaded move under the circumstances, since it sent the message that the book was a very big deal. Any of them who hadn’t read it, of course, were headed straight for Barnes and Noble.
The next day, Ito held the bail hearing, closed to the public and press. I got up and argued that the option put forward by defense counsel was “unacceptable to the People,” since what the defendant was asking for was impossible under state law. Even if it that hadn’t been so, O. J. Simpson had already demonstrated before about 95 million fellow citizens that he had a propensity to flee. I reminded the court about the pursuit up the 405. I reminded Ito about the cash, the passport, the disguise. This defendant had made one obvious attempt at flight. It showed his consciousness of guilt. What would stop him from making another one?
“If the defendant wants a continuance,” I said, “he should remain in custody as would any other defendant charged with a double homicide and special circumstances.”
As I turned to leave the podium, I caught Simpson out of the corner of my eye. He was shifting in his seat, his face contorted with—what was it? Rage? Frustration? Disbelief? His lawyers had probably told him that he had a good shot at making bail. And here I’d gone bringing up all that Bronco business. Being at the mercy of a woman had to be O. J. Simpson’s personal idea of hell. That gave me at least a moment of satisfaction. But as so often happened in TFC, even my smallest triumphs were short-lived. Johnnie did an end run around me, announcing that his client wanted to “address the court.”