She was happy. Sort of. The fact is, we still weren’t married, and I couldn’t go a week without hearing about it: Didn’t I love her? Didn’t we have a future? Couldn’t we have children now, while she was still young enough to enjoy them? These little discussions often ended in arguments, and I absolutely dreaded them. Nicole had a real temper on her, and I’d seen her get physical when she was angry, so sometimes I just left the house and waited for the storm to blow over.
Finally, in 1983, we got engaged. We had a big party, and Nicole seemed very happy, but it didn’t last. Within a few weeks she was pushing me to set a date for the wedding. “I’m tired of being your girlfriend,” she kept saying. “I want to get married and have children. I’ve been helping you raise your own kids all this time, and I love them, but I think it’d be nice to have a few of our own.”
The woman had a point, but I just wasn’t ready to commit, and it wore her down.
One night in 1984, we were in the middle of another argument, and I went outside to get away from her. There was a tether ball hanging from one of the trees, and a baseball bat lying nearby, and I picked up the bat and took a few hard swings at the ball. Nicole came out of the house and watched me for a few moments, still angry, glaring, and I crossed into the driveway, sat on the hood of her convertible Mercedes, and glared right back. I still had the bat in my hand, and I remember flipping it into the air and accidentally hitting one of the rims.
“You going to pay for that?” she snapped.
“Yeah,” I snapped back, then took the bat and whacked the hood. “And I guess I’ll pay for that, too, since it’s my car—and since I pay for everything around here.”
She shook her head, disgusted with me, and went into the house, and I wandered back into the yard and took a few more swings at the tether ball. It was crazy. It seemed all we did lately was argue. People say a lot of marriages get into trouble at the seven-year mark, and we weren’t married, but we’d been together seven years, and maybe that was the problem.
As I was trying to make sense of this, a Westec patrol car pulled up to the gate. Nicole came out of the house to meet it, and I realized it wasn’t there by accident. The guy got out of the patrol car and addressed us from beyond the gate. “We folks having a problem here?”
“He just hit my car,” Nicole said. She turned to look at me, still glaring, her arms folded across her chest.
“You want to file a complaint?”
Nicole was still staring at me, but I could see she was feeling a little foolish.
“Ma’am?”
She turned to face the guy and apologized for summoning him, and he got back into his patrol car and left. Nicole looked at me again. I smiled and she smiled. A few weeks later, we set a date for the marriage.
We got married on February 2, 1985, right there at the Rockingham house. We had a private ceremony in the late afternoon, with close friends and family, and followed it up with a seven-course dinner for three hundred people. We had put a big tent over the tennis court, and hired a band, and people danced into the morning hours. Just before dawn, we had a second sit-down meal, kind of breakfast-themed. We didn’t think there’d be more than a hundred people left at the party, but most everyone was having such a good time that they had refused to go home.
Nicole and I went to bed long after the sun came up. We were happy. Maybe marriage is just a piece of paper, but it carries a lot of weight.
A few days later, we flew down to Manzanilla, Mexico, for our honeymoon. We stayed in a beautiful place called Las Hadas and made love three times a day. That’s why we were there, right? To give Nicole a family of her own.
Six weeks after we got back to L.A., Nicole found out that she was pregnant. She was so happy she was glowing—she looked lit up from inside. She read just about every book ever written on pregnancy and motherhood, then went back and reread the ones she liked, underlining the parts she found most interesting. I don’t remember her being sick once, or even feeling sick, and she was never even in a bad mood, which was kind of weird, given all the clichés about raging hormones and stuff. But I wasn’t complaining.
Throughout the entire pregnancy, the only big issue—for her, not for me—was food. She became obsessed about her weight, and when her friends were around she was very vocal about the subject. “A woman doesn’t need to gain more than twenty-four pounds in the course of the nine months,” she’d say, repeating it tirelessly. I guess she thought she was a big pregnancy expert or something, having read all those books, but things didn’t turn out exactly as she’d planned. She gained twice that, if not more, and pretty soon decided to stop weighing herself altogether. That was a relief, to be honest. I had no problem with the weight. My kid was in there. I thought my kid deserved a nice big home.
On October 17, we were in the hospital for the birth of our first child, Sydney Brooke. Nicole was over the moon. She cried when we took her home, but I guess all new mothers cry. I don’t know if it’s from being happy or from being terrified, but I figure it’s probably a combination of the two.
Nicole had nothing to be afraid of, though. Right from the start, she was a terrific mother, and in fact she was a little too terrific. She wouldn’t let anyone near Sydney. Not the housekeeper. Not her mother. Not even me at times. This was her baby, and her baby needed her and only her, and nothing anyone could say or do was gong to change her mind. Only Nicole knew how to feed her baby. Only Nicole could bathe her. Only Nicole knew how to swaddle that little girl and hold her just right against her shoulder.
It got to be a pain in the ass, frankly. I couldn’t get her to leave the house.
“Why don’t you let your mother take care of her for one night?” I’d say. “She’s been volunteering from the day we got back from the hospital.”
“No,” she’d say. “Sydney needs me.”
It took months to get Nicole out of the house. We had gone from hitting all the best places in town and jetting around the world to ordering in every night. And the weird part is, I kind of liked it. At first, anyway. Then I started getting antsy, and then food became an issue again. Nicole was having a tough time losing the weight she’d gained during the pregnancy, and it was making her crazy. She would get out of the shower, look at herself in the mirror, and burst into tears.
“So don’t look in the mirror,” I’d say.
“That’s not what I need to hear!” she’d holler.
“You know what? I’m sorry I said anything. But you’re the one that’s having a problem with your weight, not me.”
It’s funny, because suddenly I’m remembering what Nicole’s mother told me on the very day that we first met: “Don’t let Nicole gain weight,” she said. “She’s miserable when she gains weight.”
Eventually, most of the weight came off, and she mellowed out. And eventually she realized that Sydney could survive a night or two without her, and things slowly got back to normal. No, that’s wrong—they were better than normal. Motherhood had changed Nicole in wonderful ways. She was happier than she’d ever been, as if she’d found her place in the world, and every day she was more in love with Sydney. I think she also loved me a little more, too. After all, we’d created this little girl together. We were becoming a family.
On August 6, 1988, our son, Justin Ryan, came along. When we took him home, I looked at my little family—my second family—and I felt strangely complete. I don’t know how else to put it. All I know is that whenever I looked at them—Nicole, Sydney and Justin—I felt that I understood what life was all about.
I think we had pretty near a storybook marriage. We had a few arguments, sure, like most couples, but they never got out of hand. After Justin was born, though, Nicole started getting physical with me. She had that temper on her, as I said, and if something set her off she tended to come at me, fists and feet flying. Mostly I’d just try to get out of her way, but sometimes I had to hold her down till she got herself under control. So, yeah—we argued. And we could get pushy about it. And some
times the arguments ended with Nicole in tears. But more often than not they ended in laughter. It was crazy: I can’t count the number of times she’d turn to me in the middle of a fight, pausing to catch her breath, and say, “O.J., what the hell were we arguing about, anyway?”
Years later, during the trial, the prosecution tried to paint a picture of me as a violent, abusive husband. They said they’d found a safe-deposit box belonging to Nicole, and that it contained numerous handwritten allegations of abuse dating back to 1977. In the notes, Nicole reportedly said all sorts of ugly things about me: That I constantly told her she was fat; that when she got pregnant with Justin I said I didn’t want another kid; that I once locked her in our wine closet during an argument. I don’t know what all else I did, but the list was endless, and all of it was fiction. And if it’s true that those handwritten notes were from Nicole, and that they were really found in her safe-deposit box, and that she really was making those allegations, well—I still say it was fiction, still maintain that these incidents existed only in Nicole’s own mind. I honestly can’t make any sense of it. I’ve tried, though. At one point I wondered if she started working on those notes when the marriage began to go south. Maybe she thought she could use them against me if it ever came to divorce, which makes me wonder: Why didn’t she use them? I don’t know what she was thinking, frankly, but if any of those things happened I wasn’t around when they did. And, yeah, I know: It sounds cruel here, on the page, with Nicole gone and everything, unable to defend herself, but I said I would tell the truth, and that’s what I intend to do.
Did things get volatile from time to time? Yes. Do I regret it? Yes. I loved Nicole. She was the mother of two of my kids, and the last thing I wanted was to hurt her. I only ever got truly physical with her once, and that was in 1989—and the whole world heard about it.
Let me take you back. It was New Year’s Eve. Nicole and I were at a party early in the evening, at the home of a producer friend, hanging out with Marcus Allen, one of my old football buddies, and his girlfriend, Kathryn. Marcus had bought some expensive earrings for Kathryn, as a little New Year’s present, and I guess Nicole got a little jealous. Kathryn couldn’t see what she was jealous about, though, since Nicole was dripping in diamonds of her own, and she spelled it out for her: “Well, look what you got, girl!” I don’t know what Nicole was thinking, but for some reason she got it into her head that a pair of earrings—just like Kathryn’s—were waiting for her back at the house. And of course there were no earrings. We got home after the party, and we were in bed, making love, and suddenly Nicole sat up and looked at me.
“You have a little surprise for me?” she said, smiling coyly.
“What surprise?”
“Diamond earrings maybe?”
“What earrings?” I said, getting irritated.
“Like the ones Marcus got Kathryn,” she said.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Kathryn said you bought a pair of earrings just like the ones she was wearing. Where are they? If you didn’t get them for me, who’d you get them for?”
And I said, “You’re crazy! I didn’t get nobody no damn earrings. And I’m not about to, either.” I’m sure that was the wrong thing to say, but I was angry, and my anger set her off. She took a swing at me and I grabbed her arm and literally dragged her out of bed and pulled her toward the door.
“Where are the goddamn earrings?!” she hollered, still taking swings at me.
“There are no earrings!” I snapped back.
“Liar! Who’d you give the earrings to?!”
“I didn’t give any goddamn earrings to anybody!” I said. “There are no earrings! Now get out of here. I don’t want you in my bedroom.”
I pushed her into the corridor and locked her out, then went back to bed, still fuming. I didn’t know what the hell was going on with Nicole. She was becoming increasingly erratic. Most of the time she was a loving wife and a perfect mother, but it seemed like lately any little thing could set her off. To be honest, it worried me. There we were, two in the goddamn morning, and she was standing out in the corridor, banging on the door, hollering. It was as if she had turned into a whole different person. Finally, she gave up, and I could hear her moving off. There were plenty of other bedrooms in the house. Nicole could sleep alone if she was going to be like that.
A minute later, she was back. Turned out she’d only gone to get the key, and there she was, coming at me all over again, fists and feet flying. So I grabbed her, again, and I threw her out, again, and this time I kept the key.
“Let me in, you bastard!”
“No! Go away!”
I went back to bed and rolled on my side and pulled the covers over my head, wondering if something was wrong with my wife. We’d been together for twelve years, and in many ways they’d been the twelve best years of my life, but it seemed like most of 1989 had been torture. You never knew what was going to piss her off, and when she was pissed off she could hold onto her anger for days. I wondered how long she was going to stay angry this time. She kept pounding on the door, swearing and calling me names, and I worried that she would wake the kids, but eventually the fight went out of her and she stormed off.
I don’t know how much time passed, because I dozed off, but suddenly she was at the door again. Only it wasn’t her. It was the housekeeper, Michele. “Mr. Simpson,” she said, trying to make herself heard through the door. “You have to come outside. The police are here.”
The police? What the hell?
I pulled on a pair of pants and went downstairs and out the front door and found Nicole sitting in a patrol car that was parked in front of the house. “What’s going on?” I asked.
I saw Nicole trying to get out of the car, and I could hear the cops telling her to sit still. Michele was standing right behind me, and she saw it, too. “Come on, Miss Nicole,” she called out. “Everything’s going to be all right. Come back inside.”
Suddenly Nicole was crying. “My baby’s in the house,” she said. “I want my baby back.”
“Well, come on,” I said. “What’s keeping you?”
Michele tried, too. “Please come in the house, Miss Nicole,” she said. “Everything’s fine now.”
One of the cops turned to look at Michele, scowling. “Why don’t you mind your own business,” he said.
“Hey,” I snapped. “You got no right to talk to my housekeeper that way!”
“She should mind her own business,” he said.
I couldn’t believe the guy. He was parked in front of my property, talking shit to my housekeeper, and telling me how to run my personal affairs. “Man, you don’t have a right to talk to either of us that way,” I said. I was seriously pissed by this time, and I was seriously tired, and I didn’t want to do anything stupid, so I turned to Michele and led her back into the house. I figured Nicole would come back when she was good and ready.
But Nicole didn’t come back for several hours. She went down to the precinct with the cops and they took a statement from her and had her pose for pictures. It was three in the morning by then. She was drunk, she’d been crying, and she was under fluorescent lights without any makeup. Ask me how bad she looked?
Then they took her to the hospital and the doctors gave her the once-over. In their report, which I only read much later, they noted that there were bruises on her face and arms. That was about it. I could have told them about the bruises. The ones on her arms—I put them there. Her face? I didn’t hit her, but it’s possible she hurt herself while we were scuffling.
Years later, during the murder trial, I found out that one of the officers who responded that night was a man by the name of John Edwards. He testified that Nicole had bruises on her forehead, cuts on her nose and cheek, and a handprint on her neck. I don’t remember any of that, and if it was there I didn’t see it. Edwards quoted Nicole as saying, “You guys come out here, you talk to him, you leave. You’ve been out here eight times, I want him arrested, and
I want my kids back.”
Eight times? What the hell was she talking about? And what was that about wanting her kids back? Back from what? From where? All I heard was, “My baby’s in the house. I want my baby back.” I wasn’t stopping her. From where I was standing, the only thing keeping her from getting out of the patrol car and marching back into the house were the damn cops.
Edwards also said I screamed at Nicole: “I got two other women! I don’t want that woman in my bed anymore!” I don’t remember saying anything about not wanting Nicole in my bed anymore, but at that moment it was sure as hell true. I didn’t want her anywhere near me. The part about the “two other women,” though—Edwards got that completely wrong. I was talking about the two women in the house—the nanny and the housekeeper—because Nicole seemed to be concerned about the baby, and I was just letting her know that the baby was in good hands.
I guess she got the message, because she split and didn’t come home till just before daybreak. When she walked through the front door, I looked at her and felt lousy. “I never meant to hurt you,” I said. “I just wanted you out of the bedroom.”
“I have a headache,” she said.
“You want me to take you to the hospital?”
“No. It’s probably just a hangover.”
“Maybe it’s a concussion,” I said. “I don’t mind taking you.”
“Just leave me alone,” she said. “I’m sick of this.”
I was sick of it too, frankly. I went off and spent what was left of the night at a friend’s house, and in the afternoon I went to the Rose Bowl and tried to put the bad feelings behind me.
When I got home that evening, long after the Rose Bowl ended, Nicole was there with the kids, and neither of us said a word about the incident. We kind of walked around each other, not saying much of anything, really, and I assumed that life at Rockingham would eventually get back to normal.
If I Did It Page 7
