The gloves were lying on the defense table. I picked them up to study them. They were size small—not extra large, like the gloves in evidence. The defense was obviously afraid that if it used gloves of actual size, either they wouldn’t fit in the bag or the bag would make a conspicuous bulge in the sock.
“This is ridiculous,” I told the court. “There is no connection to this case. A leather glove of a different size, a different color, a different make, a different style, that has no relevance to this case… . This is a fantasy concocted by the defense for which there is no evidentiary basis, no logical or factual connection to this case.”
Ito tried to sort this out for himself. There was a disparity between the sizes of the two sets of gloves… .
“They are out of extra large, Your Honor,” Bailey explained lamely.
“Not only that,” I continued, turning the gloves over in my hands. “but the glove in issue is an Aris… . I can’t even tell if [this] is a man’s or a woman’s glove.” Then some mischief came to me. “Size small,” I noted. “I guess it is Mr. Bailey’s.”
Talk about a cheap shot. No sooner did the words slip from my lips than I regretted them. Guess you can’t take the street out of the girl.
To be honest, Ito would have been within his rights to sanction me. Instead, he just looked at me and shook his head. He knew that everyone’s nerves were strained to the breaking point. Besides, the cold fact was, he hadn’t held Bailey in contempt for outright lying to the court; so how was he going to justify sending me to the slammer for one gibe, uh, below the belt?
Ito, thank God, did not punish me by allowing the defense to perform Bailey’s specious experiment. He shut Bailey down cold.
You want to know the funny thing about my tasteless jab? Bailey never got it. He would walk around saying to anyone who would listen, “Look. Anyone can see my hands are at least a medium, if not a large.” He’d spread his hands out for viewing. On the day we called Richard Rubin, our glove expert, Bailey raced over to him to get an expert opinion on the size of his hands. After Rubin confirmed that they did, indeed, appear to be a size large, Bailey looked at me as if to say, “You see?”
I nearly lost it.
CAR TAPE.
March 15. Mark Fuhrman’s been on the stand for almost a week now, but he’s holding his own pretty well We may have gotten to the end of cross, and I think right now Chris and I are at odds about whether or not to do redirect. I wanted to not do any, which would really kind of send a nice message that he hasn’t been hurt. I’m really torn about this…
In the meantime, I get all these outrageous offers to be on all these television shows. I think I’ll just quit the case and do it. Oh, God. I really hate this. I feel so alone. I feel like I have three feet of vacuum around me everywhere I go. I don’t feel like anybody can penetrate it
.
When Mark Fuhrman finally stepped down after six days on the stand, he was almost universally hailed as the victor in a grudge match against Bailey. The press showered him with praise. Cops and civilians alike sent him flowers, gifts, and baskets of food. The LAPD ordered up a cake for him and they celebrated alongside the deputies and the law clerks in the War Room.
I was in no mood for rejoicing. The last place I wanted to be was at a party for Mark Fuhrman.
I sent my regrets. Mark Fuhrman’s testimony had taken its toll on my spirits. I’d always prided myself on my clinical focus. Even as I waded hip-deep through the mud and blood, I could count on my discipline and detachment to serve as barriers against the ugliness. But sitting for days in that courtroom hearing Bailey bellow “nigger” had driven my morale to an all-time low. Chris had been right when he argued against the admissibility of the N-word back in January. No decent person can hear that word without feeling a shock down the spine. If it inspired revulsion in me, I could only imagine what it inspired in the jury.
My mind ached. My muscles ached. Most of all, my heart ached. I realized, I guess we all did, that we were taking this battering in the service of a lost cause. I do believe it takes a special kind of courage to drag yourself up to the front day after day to fight a losing battle. I wanted to think I had that kind of courage. Every day I made a point of considering the plight of the Goldmans and the Browns, who had suffered the worst loss possible. I owed them. If this ordeal proved too much for me, if I allowed myself to collapse under the strain, I knew I would spend the rest of my life in a limbo of self-loathing. When the bell rang at the end of fifteen rounds, the decision might not go my way, but I wanted to be standing. Bloody, staggering, puking, maybe. But still standing.
Across the room, of course, the lawyers on the Dream Team were bright-eyed, starched, and perky. The defense had a policy of alternating cross-examination so that no single lawyer took on more than two or three witnesses in a row. That was a very good strategy to avoid burning out any one lawyer, but it simply wasn’t an option for us. For the first part of the case, at least, we didn’t want the jurors to see the People’s advocates as a blurred succession of suits. We wanted them to become familiar with Chris and me as human beings, and bond with us, if they could.
It fell to me to carry the burden of this strategy. After Chris’s opening volley with the domestic violence witnesses, I had twenty-rive witnesses straight. It was an agonizing grind. At the conclusion of Fuhrman, I would have given my eyeteeth to be able to sit down and rest for a bit. But I had three more witnesses to go before our physical-evidence guys—Woody Clarke, Rock Harmon, Brian Kelberg, and Hank Goldberg—relieved me. It doesn’t sound like so much. But one of those three remaining witnesses was Kato Kaelin.
Kato was driving me to an early grave. I knew that he had a lot he could tell me about the brutality of O. J. Simpson. He’d been an eyewitness to the door-smashing incident of 1993, when the 911 tape revealed Simpson going after Nicole like a madman. But the only thing Kato would admit to seeing was “maybe an argument.” Kaelin’s insistence on minimizing stood to make his testimony more damaging than helpful to us.
It both amused and infuriated me when, after the trial was over, Kato tried to float the story that he would have been happy to cooperate with me if only I hadn’t intimidated him. Give me a break, Junior. I spent over thirty hours with that guy—wheedling, cajoling, talking dude-speak. I’d done everything but offer him rent-free lodging in my toolshed to induce him to come out with the truth.
Kato was holding back because he couldn’t tell which way the wind was blowing. He was obviously afraid that dumping on O. J. Simpson might hurt his so-called career. I would have been at a loss to unlock the riddle that was Kato if it hadn’t been for Kato’s old friend Grant Cramer, an actor with whom Kato crashed during the days after the murder. Grant was a man of good character and conscience who came forward and confided in us with a candor Kato could never manage.
The best we’d been able to get out of Kato was that during the trip to McDonald’s on the night of the murders, O. J. Simpson had seemed “tired” and “rushed.” But Kaelin was much more forthcoming with Grant in the murder’s aftermath. Grant told us that after arriving at his pad the afternoon of June 13, an agitated Kato said that on that Sunday evening Simpson seemed “frazzled and out of breath.” He certainly had not looked like he’d just awakened from sleep when the limo driver arrived.
While still at Cramer’s house, Kato began receiving calls from the Simpson camp: Howard Weitzman, Simpson’s assistant, Cathy Randa, and even Simpson himself. All of them wanted to know what he’d told the cops. After the third call, Kato asked Grant to drive him over to Rockingham. Grant pleaded with his friend not to go, but Kato wouldn’t listen. Grant didn’t see Kato for three days.
When Kato turned up again, he was distraught. He told Cramer that Simpson’s family and friends were at the residence, along with some attorneys. Kato said that the defendant had hugged him. “Thank God you were here,” Simpson said, “and you can say I was at home when this thing happened.”
“No, O.J., I can’t,” Kato replied. “I didn’t see you after we got back. When I walked back to my room you were still standing by the Bentley.” And that was the last Simpson had spoken to Kato, although Kato remained in the house, sometimes sleeping on the floor, for three days.
Not once in all our interview had Kato mentioned going back to Rockingham. When I confronted him with Grant’s information, he suddenly “remembered” it.
When I heard this, it clicked into place why Kato felt he’d needed to bring his attorney along to the grand jury way back when. Simpson was making what was, most likely, a ham-handed attempt to manipulate his testimony. Kato must have felt himself caught between a rock and a hard place. Clearly, he still felt that way, because I had to struggle for every shred of information from him. He never volunteered anything, and when I forced him to describe something, he’d give the sketchiest possible rendition, always skewed toward protecting his friend. It was like interviewing a defense witness.
Which, of course, he was.
And that meant I had to develop a strategy for handling him on the witness stand.
First, I figured, I would get all I could the nice way. I wouldn’t alienate him before extracting everything he’d give me without a fight. Then I’d see how he did on cross. If he screwed up—tried to backpedal—it would actually make his direct testimony look more credible, because the jury would see how much he loved the defense. Then, on redirect, I’d hit him with the hard stuff. And I had an idea for how to do just that.
Kato Kaelin took the stand the morning of March 21, wearing a fashionable blazer and black jeans. His direct testimony was every bit the struggle I’d anticipated. Every time I asked Kato how Simpson had behaved, looked, or spoken, Kato, running his hands through his hair and chopping up his sentences like a sushi chef, went out of his way to describe it as the picture of normalcy. Simpson was “tired, “rushed.” Perhaps a little “upset,” because Nicole hadn’t let him see Sydney. But never “frazzled” or “angry.”
One of the facts that Kato had let slip during our pretrial interviews was that Simpson and Paula Barbieri had had a blowup on the night before the murders. Paula wanted to attend Sydney’s dance recital the following day as a show of good faith on Simpson’s part. She apparently wanted him to announce to Nicole and his ex-in-laws that she was his woman now. Paula was stung at Simpson’s refusal, and she ended up skipping to Las Vegas, where she checked into the Mirage Hotel as one of a party on a reservation guaranteed by singer Michael Bolton. But if Simpson attended the recital unaccompanied, hoping to patch things up with Nicole, his own hopes were dashed. Nicole wouldn’t have him. To make it worse, she dissed him in front of everyone by pointedly excluding him from the family celebration at Mezzaluna.
When he returned home to Rockingham in the wake of that disappointment, he said something disparaging to Kato about the sexy little black dress Nicole wore to the recital. Kato recalled the remark to me as something like, “Man, I see Nicole and her friends in those little tight-ass dresses and I wonder what they’re going to do when they’re grandmas.” At the grand jury, however, Kato said Simpson had simply appeared to be “joking” about the dress.
Now, on the stand, Kato once again did his best to downplay the implications of Simpson’s remark. The matter came up late, after his halting direct testimony, and, as I suspected, a cross-exam where Bob Shapiro cuddled up to him like a buddy.
It was now my redirect, and I was ready. “Your Honor,” I said to Ito, “I am going to ask the Court to take this witness as a hostile witness.”
There were several advantages in doing this. For one thing, it would underscore that Kato was a
defense
witness. That would give the jury notice that any evidence he gave to incriminate Simpson was the real goods. But even more important, once a witness is declared to be hostile, you get to ask leading questions. Ordinarily, when a lawyer calls a witness, he has to ask open-ended questions that don’t suggest the answer—that’s what distinguishes direct examination from cross-exam. With a hostile witness, in effect, you get to cross-examine your own witness.
Only then, with the freedom to ask leading questions, did I get Kato to concede that Simpson’s comment about Nicole’s little black dress was spoken with a certain degree of “upsetness.”
“Now, is it your testimony today that he was more upset about [Nicole not letting him see] Sydney than he was about Nicole wearing the tight dresses?” I bore into him.
“Yes.”
“But that was not your testimony before, was it, Mr. Kaelin?”
“No.”
“Earlier you had testified that he was ‘relaxed’ and ‘nonchalant’ when he spoke about Sydney and the recital?”
“That’s what I remember.”
“Isn’t it also true that you testified previously in this trial that he was more upset about Nicole wearing the tight dresses than he was about not being able to see Sydney, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Now you are changing that testimony; is that what you are doing, sir?”
“Yes.”
After the verdict, when it became clear that Simpson’s acquittal would not restore his former status, Kato lost the surfer-boy stutter, bought a pair of specs and a blazer, and experienced a spell of enhanced memory. For the benefit of the plaintiffs in the Browns’ and Goldmans’ civil suits against Simpson, Kato could suddenly recall that Simpson had been upset and unsettled about Nicole since the day before the murders, when he’d watched
The World According to Garp
. The film’s oral-sex scene had reminded him of Nicole’s tryst on the couch with Keith Zlomsowitch. He’d been upset with Nicole at the recital and accused her of playing “hardball” by not letting him see Sydney. Kato Kaelin certainly wasn’t the only one to remember the truth by the time the civil trial came around. But he typified the appalling, self-absorbed popularity junkies with no moral compass who came creeping out of the woodwork to offer information that they’d shamefully refused to give
us
.