Harassing? Even allowing for the translation, this smacked of coaching.
She began to weep. Someone gave her a Kleenex.
“Do you have any present plans to return to El Salvador?” Johnnie asked her.
“I would like to go tomorrow.”
Since I was on witness fifteen and counting, Chris had agreed to question Rosa. “You made [a reservation] today?” he asked her. “. . . Prior to coming to court this morning?”
“
Sí
,” she assured him.
He asked her whether anyone had told her to do so. No, she said, she had decided to do it. She would stay away for a long time.
I passed a note to Chris:
“Ask her what airline and under what name.”
He did. She replied that her reservation was booked under her own name. And then he asked her the airline.
“Taca. Taca International. T-A-C-A.”
Cheri ran out to check. What a surprise: Rosa had no reservation.
Chris bored into her: “Miss Lopez, we just called the airline. They don’t have a reservation for you. Can you explain to the court why it is that you just told us you have a reservation?”
“Because I am going to reserve it, sir. As soon as I reserve it, I will buy my ticket and I will leave. If you want to, the cameras can follow me.”
Rosa was not as dull-witted as she seemed.
But Chris had nailed her. Wasn’t it true that she told us she had actually made the reservation? he wanted to know. She avoided the question, but finally had to answer.
“No,” she said.
Not only was she lying, but now she was lying
about lying
.
To me, the issue seemed clear-cut. Lopez had no reservation; there was no immediate threat that she’d flee. Ergo, no need for a conditional exam. Johnnie, however, argued that this woman was a salt-o’-the-earth heroine who was risking her personal safety by even showing up. It would be an insult to every citizen who comes forward in a trial, he explained, if we were going to doubt this fine woman’s word that she was about to leave.
Chris was astounded. “Are we talking about the same Rosa Lopez?”
But Ito was simply not willing to take the chance that she would skip the country—in that case, he reasoned, Simpson would be denied an important witness. The only question that remained was whether the hearing would be held in the presence of the jury or recorded on videotape. We were pushing for the latter. From what I’d seen of Rosa, there was an excellent chance that she would self-destruct so spectacularly that the defense wouldn’t dare introduce the tape.
It was our understanding that Ito wouldn’t make his final determination until Monday and I’d told everyone—including the judge—that I had to leave early that day. Late that Friday, Chris, Frank, and I were in a conference upstairs—I was about to leave, in fact—when a law clerk delivered the news. Ito was calling in the jury! He intended to start the hearing immediately. He would keep court in session until midnight if he had to.
The news nearly sent me into a panic. I’d given Lance notice at least twice that I couldn’t stay any later than four o’clock. He assured me in chambers that it wouldn’t be a problem; we should be done by noon. Now, it was already getting near six.
I raced downstairs and asked to be heard.
“I have informed the court I cannot be present tonight because I do have to take care of my children…” I said. “And I do not want proceedings to go before a jury when I can’t be here.”
I reminded Lance that we had talked about this earlier. As I spoke I began feeling self-conscious and very alone. I looked Lance in the eye. “I can’t be here, Your Honor.”
My voice was quavering. Oh, God. I was like a six-year-old whose daddy had backed down on a promise to take her to the park. “But you promised me, Daddy!”
Get a grip!
“Miss Clark,” Lance replied, “I’m sorry. I apologize to you. I had forgotten that problem.” He explained to the court that he had made “adjustments” for my children problems. “I just plain forgot,” he apologized.
Johnnie saw an opportunity here and he grabbed it.
Let’s do it without Marcia!
“This is Mr. Darden’s witness,” he said. “As the court has seen, Mr. Darden is absolutely capable of conducting this examination… . It seems to me we should be able to proceed ahead.”
Johnnie, I knew, would be delighted to do Lopez without me. He could push Chris’s buttons in a way he couldn’t push mine.
Ito cut him off, reminding him that I was the lead prosecutor, and that if it were Johnnie who’d requested an early departure, he’d call a recess for him as well. He would call the jury back in and tell them we were through for the weekend.
Over the next four court days, Chris annihilated Rosa Lopez. The D.A. investigators had turned up Sylvia Guerra, a maid who worked for neighbors of Rosa’s employers. Sylvia told how Rosa had approached her and offered her $5,000 to corroborate the Bronco story. She’d also tried to sell her tale to the
National Enquirer
, but even that purveyor of grotesqueries wouldn’t go for it.
We also discovered that there was a tape recording that a defense investigator named Bill Pavelic had done with Rosa. The defense-team investigator told Chris that he’d “forgotten” all about it. Ito ordered him to bring the tape and notes to court. “I shall do my best to get those items,” Pavelic answered.
For once, Ito was firm. “No, don’t do your best,” Lance boomed. “Have them here tomorrow!”
The next morning, Chris, Johnnie, Carl, and I met in Lance’s chambers to listen to the tape. No wonder the defense had tried to conceal it from us—it was an absolute joke. When Rosa said she heard someone walking outside her window at nine, Pavelic quickly corrected her, adjusting the time to “nine-thirty or nine-forty-five.” When it came to the critical time when she spotted the Bronco, there was a long pause accompanied by a rustling of papers. Then Rosa comes back with a firm “Ten-twenty. Ten-fifteen, I’m takin’ my dog for a walk.”
It was clear to me that she’d been coached to within an inch of her life.
Afterward, during Chris’s cross, Rosa withdrew further and further from her original claims, repeatedly chanting “
No me recuerdo.” I don’t remember
. Johnnie wouldn’t leave it alone. He tried to float an explanation that in El Salvador “I don’t remember” is a colloquial expression for “I don’t know.” It was ridiculous. He was making a fool of himself over a witness who had taken a steep skid from defense linchpin to laughingstock.
In the end, even Lance Ito could not ignore the defense’s serious misconduct in deliberately hiding discovery for this witness and others. Ruling that Johnny had made “untrue representations” to the court in “reckless disregard of the truth,” Lance fined Johnnie and Carl Douglas a mere $950 each. (If Ito had made the fine $1,000, the sanction, by law, would have been reported to the state bar, and Lance Ito did not want to be the one to put a blot on Johnnie Cochran’s record.) The judge also promised to tell the jury that this was a violation of law and that they could consider the delay in disclosure when assessing the credibility of the witness. Of course, this was academic, since the defense prudently dropped Lopez from their witness list.
Days of court time wasted, the jury detained for no good reason, the People’s case disrupted—all because the defense wanted to float a trial balloon for a phony witness. In the end Rosa Lopez didn’t amount to a hill of beans. But I’ll always remember her for those humiliating moments when I was forced to tell the judge, on national television, that I had to leave to go home.
It turned out, that was only the beginning of my nightmare. To my utter dismay, my personal life was about to become a national issue.
Back in court Monday morning, I was arguing the motion to keep Rosa Lopez’s testimony from the jury, and Johnnie got ticked off at me. So he launched into a surprise attack. He accused me of using child care as a “ploy” to buy time. It was an outrageous allegation. I wasn’t going to let it pass.
“I’m offended as a woman, as a single parent, and as a prosecutor and an officer of the court to hear an argument posed by counsel like that of Mr. Cochran today,” I said. “Some of us have child-care issues, and they are serious and they are paramount. Obviously, Mr. Cochran cannot understand that, but he should not come before this court and impugn the integrity of someone who does have those considerations.”
At the moment when I loosed this little salvo, I was still under the impression that this child-care thing was a limited skirmish being waged between Johnnie and me, albeit in front of a national audience. The following day, however, when I was on my way back to my office during recess, Suzanne drew me aside in the foyer of the War Room. The expression on her face was pained, so I knew she was going to tell me something horrible. Well, what else was new?
“I can’t let you go back down to court without warning you,” she told me.
“Go ahead,” I told her. “I won’t shoot.”
“Gordon has filed for primary custody. His declaration is being carried all over the newses.”
I’d been bracing for another Simpson setback. This blow hit me like a two-by-four. My knees got wobbly. My throat grabbed up.
“Oh, my God, no. Oh no.” It was all I could say. I sank into a chair and put my face in my hands.
Suzanne broke into my misery. “They’re running excerpts from his declaration on all of the channels.”
“What is he saying?” I asked weakly.
She beckoned me to her office. There, all nine of her television screens were on. The talking heads on every single one were all covering the same thing: Gordon’s request for custody.
“How does this happen?” I asked Suzanne, incredulous. “How does the media get hold of a motion before
I
know it even exists?”
I had been a street fighter all my life, but this kind of warfare was all new to me. My divorce from Gaby had been uncontested. I hadn’t asked for anything except my freedom. And back then there was nothing to get from me. Now I was faced with the loss of my children. And because I was locked into this trial, I didn’t even have the freedom to devote the 110 percent I needed so badly to put into the fight.
I needed time to think what to do. I needed time to talk to a lawyer, I needed time to absorb the shock, but the demands of this case afforded me none. Clearly, especially after Johnnie’s attack, no one would understand if I asked Ito for a few days off to handle this personal crisis. Instead I’d probably be crucified both in court and in the press, and the stories would all have the same punch line: “See what happens when you let a girl do a man’s job?”
Would a judge really take my children away? Here I was with my life in overdrive. Never enough sleep. Constantly under the gun to do in one week what a prosecutor normally required six months to do. I’d been proud of the fact that I’d been able to meet
all
my commitments. That had meant putting in a full workday, rushing home, then, at the end of the evening, putting in another five hours of work before collapsing in an exhausted heap among my pillows.
I’d promised myself almost daily that once I got through with this damned trial, I’d never think about touching a high-profile case again. To paraphrase Jim Morrison, my ballroom days were over, baby. I wanted to try nothing but nice anonymous little cases where no camera would care to go. A year ago, when I’d come back to Special Trials, I’d planned to try one or two more big cases. Of course, when I thought “big,” I hadn’t foreseen the Simpson case. Nothing in my experience, or anyone else’s, could have prepared me for that.
Two months into the Simpson case, these ambitions had already lost their appeal. The total immersion I’d not only enjoyed but needed in years past was no longer attractive to me. When I’d been doing run-of-the-mill cases, work and home were not in constant conflict. But Simpson had rewritten the rulebook.
I couldn’t stop staring at the TV screens. My divorce was being treated like the news of a military coup or the latest election results. I felt that weird, disembodied sensation I’d suffered so many times throughout this case when I’d seen myself on television or in newspapers and magazines. Who was that woman? She looked like me, all right, but I had no sense of connection to her.
Suzanne’s phones were ringing off their hooks. The media wanted my response to the allegations. “We want to give you a chance to tell your side,” they said.
“No,” I told Suzanne. “Ms. Clark does not care to make a response.”
I didn’t need anyone to advise me on this one. You don’t wash your laundry, dirty or otherwise, in public.
That night, after everyone was asleep, I went into my own bedroom. From the top shelf of the closet I pulled out a photo album and I opened the embossed maroon cover. The very first photo was of Matt the day he was born. Why
do
all newborns look like Yoda? I was in my hospital gown, preparing to nurse him for the first time. I looked exhausted but happy. Very happy.
I’d always wanted to have children. But I didn’t want to do it until I’d set my life up well enough to give them a good home and a sense of permanence. That meant waiting until I was a Grade 4. During the seventies and eighties, it was an unspoken fact at the D.A.‘s office that if a woman took maternity leave, it could derail her efforts to advance. People just took you a lot less seriously when they saw you going off to make babies. The office is much better about that now, but back when I was a young deputy, it was a reality.
When I made Grade 4, I was thirty-five and pushing the edge of the maternity envelope. Hanging over me was my childhood premonition that I would die young. I really never expected to live beyond the age of forty-five. I suppose that some subrational part of my brain believed that if I had children I might get an extension on the deadline. A continuance, so to speak. It made sense to me that nature has an interest in keeping a mother alive, at least until her children are grown. And if I had children, I would
want
to live. I would fight to live. You don’t think about having kids unless you’re hungry for life.
I remember thinking that getting pregnant would be as easy as quitting birth control. But it wasn’t. After a year of no birth control and no baby, I’d consulted my gynecologist. He gave me a few shots, then a few pills. Then a more powerful fertility pill. Two months later, I was expecting. I was thrilled beyond words. But I was afraid to tell anyone at work. I wasn’t a teenager. Miscarriages at my age were not uncommon. And what if the amniocentesis showed my baby wasn’t okay? I couldn’t even bear to think about that. I decided to keep the news to myself.