A Focal Point of Racism, Domestic Violence, Injustice, and History

Update: thanks again to Driftglass for sharing this at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. P.S. suck it trump, your Trial of the Century begins Monday!

News broke today on the passing of O.J. Simpson.

A sports celebrity from the early 1970s - a running back at a time when such players were icons - Simpson converted that fame into an acting career by the 1980s defined by his natural charisma. Right up until June 1994 when his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were found murdered at her place.

At that moment, the United States - indeed the world - was falling into a strange new territory of instant media craving for stories, alongside the collapse of the Cold War shifting historical trends in unknown directions. We'd just had CNN and cable news gaining acceptance through its coverage of the First Persian Gulf War where the U.S. pounded Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait. We were getting more cable networks springing up filling niche interests including criminal justice and true crime scandals. Syndicated celebrity shows and daytime tabloid talk shows were filling the airwaves. We were just barely getting the Internet up to speed to fill in all the rumors and speculation among the masses.

It was also a time of massive racial upheaval, not just in the Los Angeles metro where the Brown Simpson and Goldman murders took place. The Rodney King police brutality trial two years earlier had shocked the nation when the jury acquitted four police officers - even with them caught on tape pummeling King to near-death - and the city of L.A. erupted into riots. The violence exposed a raw nerve, the racial divide of the United States re-emerging in a post-Civil Rights Era and reminding us just how embedded racism is in our nation's psyche.

All of these factors were in play as the media coverage went into hyperactive as OJ became a prime suspect in the murders, as the narrative consumed everyone's attention right up to the point where OJ tried to flee the police in a suicidal fugue. The Bronco Chase - broadcast live by helicopter reporters - entered memetic folklore.

I know. I saw it. I watched the madness on television as it happened, and I - like millions of others - couldn't look away. It became An Event: akin to the JFK assassination, the Moon Landing, Nixon's Resignation, the Challenger disaster, the Fall of the Berlin Wall. (It would echo in later events like the night Princess Diana died) History as it happened. 

With my background in journalism, I watched with a mixture of contempt, alarm, and bemusement as it all exploded into a "Trial Of the Century", more three-ring circus than an attempt to uphold justice for grisly murders. Everybody covered it: Even Doonesbury got into the act. It permeated every layer of our nation.

What the trial revealed were lessons our nation and our legal system never seemed to learn from. For all the evidence of Simpson's involvement in the deaths - the history of domestic violence towards Nicole that exposed a deeply jealous and violent man - Simpson was able to use his wealth to hire lawyers who knew how to game the system and cast doubt on forensics, and played his celebrity status to sway a jury. The acquittal revealed a nation divided by race where White communities were certain that OJ would be found guilty, and Black communities bought into the defense's argument that the LAPD - staffed with racist detectives - tampered with evidence in order to send "another Black man" to prison.

We're still coping with a legal system that still doesn't take domestic violence serious enough to protect women, and a legal system that still creates distrust of law enforcement every time an unarmed Black person gets gunned down or beaten up by cops.

I read a Vox article by Constance Grady that covers the impact of what the OJ Trial wrought:

The trial of the century was a lightning rod for sociopolitical commentary. Feminists argued that it was a matter of public record that Simpson had stalked and beaten his ex-wife, and that if law enforcement had taken the problem seriously and made the proper interventions, Brown would still be alive. Simpson’s lawyers argued that he was being unjustly targeted because the police could not stand to see a Black man be successful, and they wanted to tear him down. The argument was potent enough that support for Simpson fell strongly along racial lines. A Los Angeles Times poll found that Black people were more than four times more likely than white people to think Simpson was not guilty...

Simpson’s celebrity was, perhaps, able to protect him from a guilty sentence in criminal court. Yet the act of cashing in his social capital in such a way seems to have transformed fame into infamy. There was a kind of hole in the fabric of American culture where a hero used to be, and it was hard to know what stood in its place now. After the long run of trials, Simpson was no longer the kind of figure that rental car companies wanted promoting their product. He had lived off his reputation for a long time, and now that reputation had changed...

The story of O.J. Simpson has become an American morality tale, a myth. It is the story of how all our national sins converged into a single terrible crime. Even after the man at the center is gone, the sins persist...

Even with the acquittal, Simpson could not return to the celebrity life, too toxic for film/television and for the sports world that once feted him. The criminal trial led into a civil trial for wrongful death by the victims' families, and in that OJ was found liable, forcing him to sell whatever he could to pay the legal bills. It led to an infamous attempt to publish his side of the story If I Did It, an act that even his staunchest defenders flinched away from: It ended up under the editorial control of Goldman's parents who made sure the subtitle of the book read Confessions of the Killer.

In the meantime, the media circus that consumed the world back in 1994-95 heralded a new world dominated by immediate information. With the advent of cell phone cameras, the ability to record a moment - even a snapshot - as it happened and sending it across the globe became possible. Smartphones became news cameras on the front lines. The impact - no, the hype - of the OJ sensationalism seems so quaint now.

And speaking of Trials of the Century...

You're next, trump. Welcome to history as it happens.