The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Still, Douglas continued to flog Shipp. He suggested that Simpson in fact went to bed at 8:00 or 8:15 on the night of June 13. Shipp denied it. Douglas said other family members would confirm the early bedtime.

  Shipp did something extraordinary at that point. Instead of answering Douglas, he started directing his testimony directly to the defendant. “Is that what they are going testify to?” he implored his former patron. As Douglas continued to press the issue, Shipp started shaking his head. After a long pause, he stared again at Simpson and said simply, “This is sad, O.J.”

  Simpson wasn’t used to this kind of confrontation from the likes of Ron Shipp. O.J. looked shaken, rubbing his hands nervously. Shapiro noticed this and put his arm around him, as if in protection.

  Douglas moved to his big finish for the day. “Were you and he close friends?”

  “I would say we were pretty good friends,” Shipp said. “We didn’t—never went out to dinner like on a regular basis and stuff like that.”

  Douglas seized on the phrase “regular basis.” He pointed out that Shipp and O.J. almost never ate meals together. Shipp readily agreed. In contrast to Douglas’s insinuations, Shipp was not trying to project any false intimacy with O.J. The power of his testimony came from the fact that Shipp knew what a toady he was. He knew he adored and looked up to O.J., and he knew—ultimately—that O.J. couldn’t have cared less about him.

  “O.J. Simpson is a football fan, isn’t he?” Douglas asked.

  “Yeah, he loves football, yes, he does.”

  “He goes to games a lot.”

  “Yes, he does,” Shipp replied.

  “You and O.J. Simpson have never attended a football game together—”

  “Never.”

  “—in the twenty-six years that he’s been your supposed friend, have you?”

  “Not one.”

  “You and your wife have never gone on a double date with Nicole and O.J. Simpson in the entire time that you’ve known them, have you?” Douglas sneered.

  “You’re absolutely correct.…” said Shipp.

  “All the times that you claim that you were over his house playing tennis, you have never in your entire life played tennis on the same court with O.J. Simpson, have you?”

  “Never.”

  Then, finally, with disgust: “You’re not really this man’s friend, are you, sir?”

  Shipp sighed. “Well, okay. All right. If you want me to explain it, I guess you can say I was like everybody else, one of his servants. I did police stuff for him all the time. I ran license plates. That’s what I was. I mean, like I said, I loved the guy.”

  Thank you, Carl.

  15. A DIRTY, FILTHY WORD

  The voice of a victim from beyond the grave, lawyers always say, never loses its emotional power. Nicole calling 911 on October 25, 1993: “He’s back. Please.… He’s O.J. Simpson. I think you know his record. Could you just send somebody over here?” Weeping: “Could you please send somebody over?”

  When Darden played the tape for the jury, the courtroom went absolutely still. Most people who listened to it on that day, including several jurors, had heard portions of the tape at one time or another, so many of Nicole’s words had a familiar sound to them. Yet the playing of the tape in its entirety gave it a fresh meaning—and horror. Nicole could not have feigned the terror in her voice, the trembling, the weeping, as she alternated between beseeching the dispatcher and pacifying her ex-husband.

  “Okay, just stay on the line,” the dispatcher said.

  “I don’t want to stay on the line. He’s going to beat the shit out of me,” Nicole said, then she drew a long breath to try to calm herself.

  There was a simple barometer of Simpson’s reaction to testimony during his trial: The more it hurt, the more he talked. During innocuous testimony, O.J. would sit quietly, doodling or listening in a casual way. But incriminating testimony set him to responding, although he only had Shapiro to his left and Cochran to his right to lobby. Though ultimately unpersuasive to the jury, the domestic-violence evidence particularly set Simpson off. It hit him in the ego, and he played his favorite themes in response: But she wanted to get back together with me. The backdoor to Nicole’s house on Gretna Green, which Simpson damaged during his October 1993 tirade, was already broken. Simpson yammered through almost the entire playing of the tape. Cochran nodded vacantly at his client; Shapiro winced and tried to ignore him. O.J., oblivious to either reaction, talked on.

  It was almost impossible to make out most of what O.J. was saying on the tape, but his voice conveyed astonishing rage, in both the intensity of his tirade and its duration. For the full thirteen and a half minutes of the telephone call, Simpson’s screaming just went on and on, with no diminishment of fury.

  Nicole pleaded, “O.J., O.J. The kids. O.J., O.J., the kids are sleeping.” O.J.’s response was one of the few times his words could be made out clearly: “You didn’t give a shit about the kids when you was sucking his dick in the living room. They were here. Didn’t care about the kids then.”

  The dispatcher jumped in: “Is he upset with something that you did?”

  “A long time ago,” Nicole sighed. “It always comes back.” The reference was to Nicole’s encounter with Keith Zlomsowitch in 1992, which O.J. had observed from his stalking post outside her front windows.

  Nicole: “Could you just please, O.J., O.J., O.J., O.J. Could you please leave? Please leave. Please leave.”

  “I’m leaving with my two fists is when I’m leaving.”

  For all the power of the tape, the next two witnesses demonstrated the limits of Darden’s domestic-violence presentation. Carl Colby and Catherine Boe, husband and wife, had lived next door to Nicole on Gretna Green. They testified that they sometimes saw Simpson standing on the sidewalk looking into Nicole’s house. But it was all pretty vague, especially because O.J.’s children lived there and their father had a right to visit them. Boe was especially spacey. At a sidebar conference, after Darden said, chuckling, “You just never really know what you are going to get from Mrs. Colby,” Cochran chimed in, “She is an alien from another planet.” At one point, when Boe began an exegesis on which varieties of trees around her house shed berries and why O.J. might not have wanted to park his white car beneath them, Darden had to turn his face away from the jury box because he was laughing so hard.

  Denise Brown was supposed to be different. She had extensive firsthand exposure to O.J. and Nicole’s relationship, including its darker sides. Since the moment Detective Tom Lange called her parents’ home on the morning after the murders, Denise was convinced that O.J. had murdered her sister. If anyone could explain how this had happened, it would be Nicole’s older sister. When Denise walked to the witness stand on Friday afternoon, February 3, she did not so much as glance at her former brother-in-law.

  The four Brown sisters all looked and sounded alike, and they reflected the values of their moneyed Orange County upbringing. All four had breast implants, but not one had a college degree. The two oldest sisters, Denise and Nicole, the brunette and the blonde, came closest to embodying a certain California ideal: lithe, athletic, out for a good time, each a homecoming princess at Dana Point High School. Denise graduated in 1975 and became, briefly, a New York model. Nicole graduated on May 20, 1977, and met O.J. Simpson three weeks later.

  Denise circulated on the periphery of Nicole’s life for many years, alternately competitive and supportive, combative and loving. She dated many of Simpson’s friends, including Al Cowlings, boutique owner Alan Austin, and advertising executive Ed McCabe. Married briefly in 1984, Denise had a child with another man several years later. In 1994, she and her son were living in her parents’ home. The month before Nicole’s murder, Denise spent eight days—from May 9 to May 17, 1994—as an inmate in the Huntington Beach jail, after pleading guilty for the second time to drunk-driving charges. (She had pleaded guilty to the same crime in 1992 but was not sentenced to jail.)

  Though still beautiful,
Denise Brown had an unmistakable hard edge. Taking the stand in a black pantsuit and a large gold cross, she obviously wanted this jury to convict.

  “Miss Brown,” Darden began. “You are Nicole Brown’s oldest—older sister?”

  “Yes.…”

  “Do you have other sisters?”

  “Yes.…”

  “How many?”

  “There’s Dominique and Tanya and of course Nicole.”

  Darden began by asking when Denise first met “the defendant.” She said that Nicole had invited her to travel to Buffalo in 1977, to see a Bills game with her. She said that at the game, “a friend of O.J.’s was there. He came over and said hello to us, and Nicole said hello, kissed him on both cheeks.”

  Darden asked if anything unusual then happened.

  “Yeah,” Denise said. “O.J. got real upset and he started screaming at Nicole.”

  This was less than five minutes into her testimony, and it brought both Shapiro and Cochran flying out of their seats to object. When the lawyers approached Ito at the sidebar, Ito wondered what was going on. “Mr. Darden,” the judge said, “I thought we were just going to do a few more foundational things, not incidents, and my ruling on domestic violence doesn’t include anything in this era. What are we doing here?”

  “I’m not about to allege or solicit any testimony that the defendant beat Nicole in 1977, Your Honor,” Darden said. “I’m just trying to define and explain the nature of their relationship, how it developed over the years.” The judge didn’t even have to hear from the defense lawyers to reject Darden’s argument. The prosecutor was trying to pile on additional misdeeds by O.J. in front of the jury without having allowed the judge to rule on them first. Of course, the defense lawyers were wise to this game as soon as Darden started playing it, and Ito shut him down immediately.

  It was an amateurish mistake by Darden, and bad strategy to boot, putting Denise on the stand and immediately eliciting tales of O.J.’s misbehavior from her. Properly prepared, Denise could have given the jury some real understanding of Nicole and O.J.’s relationship, the good times as well as the bad. She could have helped explain why Nicole was so attracted to O.J., indeed why she loved him so much and why she stayed with him even though he abused her. An honest summary of their relationship would have given Denise that much more credibility when she started describing O.J.’s bad acts. Instead, Darden tried to present O.J. as simply a domestic-violence machine, which was untrue and, in any event, unlikely to be believed by a jury already sympathetic to him.

  Darden walked back to the podium still miffed at Ito’s ruling and said to the witness, “Miss Brown, we’re not going to talk about anything that occurred between 1977 and December 31, 1984, you understand that?” In other words, no context: Darden would just head straight to the first of the domestic-violence incidents. With just a question or two of introduction, Denise recalled a scene in 1987 at the Red Onion restaurant in Santa Ana. “At one point,” Denise said, “O.J. grabbed Nicole’s crotch and said, ‘This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.’ And Nicole just sort of wrote it off as if it was nothing, like—you know, like she was used to that kind of treatment and he was like—I thought it was really humiliating, if you ask me.”

  It was obvious that Denise was trying her best to bury O.J.—volunteering the additional (and inadmissible) details that Nicole was “used to” this treatment and that Denise found it “humiliating.” Cochran understood what was going on. Back at the sidebar, Cochran implored Ito, “Now, we may look back on this and smile when the jury verdict comes in May or June [sic]. But for right now, we can’t allow this to take place. I just don’t think it’s right.”

  Ito invited Darden’s response.

  “Your Honor,” said the prosecutor, “I don’t know what Mr. Cochran means by ‘we can’t allow.’ Is he wearing the robe in this courtroom today?” Cochran so flummoxed Darden that the prosecutor thought he could use personal attack in lieu of legal argument.

  Cochran responded as if he were speaking to a child: “I said we can’t allow this without objection. That’s all I said, Counsel.”

  Again, Ito directed Darden to take better control of his witness. Once more, with barely any introduction, Darden moved to another domestic-violence incident, a fight between O.J. and Nicole at the Rockingham house sometime in the mid-1980s. It started, Denise said, when she told O.J. he took Nicole for granted.

  “Why did you tell him that?”

  Shapiro objected, and Ito sustained it for the obvious reason: “Why this witness thinks that Miss Brown Simpson was taken for granted is not relevant.”

  Darden asked what happened next.

  “He started yelling at me, ‘I don’t take her for granted. I do everything for her. I give her everything.’ And he continued, and then a whole fight broke out, and pictures started flying off the walls, clothes started flying.” Denise seemed on the verge of tears at this point. “He ran upstairs, got clothes, started flying down the stairs, and grabbed Nicole, told her to get out of his house, wanted us all out of his house, picked her up, threw her against the wall, picked her up, threw her out of the house. She ended up on her—she ended up falling. She ended up on her elbows and on her butt.… We were all sitting there screaming and crying, and then he grabbed me and threw me out of the house.”

  “Are you okay, Miss Brown?” Darden asked.

  “Yeah,” said Denise, pausing between tears. “It’s just so hard. I’ll be fine.”

  Darden turned to the judge. “Your Honor, if it pleases the Court, can we adjourn and continue this Monday morning?”

  It is classic courtroom strategy to end with a dramatic moment on Friday afternoon—something for the jury to think about all weekend—and Darden had chosen this closing with care. As usual, however, Cochran was about three steps in front of him. In a heated sidebar conference before they broke for the weekend, Cochran lectured Darden for staging Denise’s crying stunt at the end of a Friday. “They’re not fooling anybody with this stuff,” Cochran said. “I mean, I’m telling them it’s going to backfire on them. They keep doing it, and it’s not right.”

  Darden protested his innocence. “Mr. Cochran,” he lectured his counterpart, “how else do you expect her to react, especially given these circumstances, given her relationship to the defendant, given how long she’s known him? She is grieving, Mr. Cochran. It happens when people lose their loved ones. And I can’t control that. I can’t stop that. I didn’t wield the knife. I didn’t kill her.… Frankly, I’m touched by it. I feel bad about it. Maybe I’m a little slow to stop her, but I will attempt to do better. I will say, however, that Mr. Cochran has been my mentor for years, and I’ve learned—”

  His “mentor” cut him off.

  “Well, he’s going to see what effect it has on the jury,” Cochran said. “I don’t think it’s going to have the effect you think you are having.” Cochran was going with the focus groups—and his gut. “Watch them,” the defense lawyer urged. “See if they’re manipulated or not. You guys keep trying this and see how it ends up.… I’ll remind you about it.” (Cochran was right. Several jurors said after the trial that they were offended by Denise’s obvious bias and had discounted much of what she had to say.)

  Monday morning started with another Darden fiasco. Shortly after he started examining Denise Brown again, Darden placed a photograph of a battered Nicole on the courtroom overhead projector, which was known throughout the trial by its brand name: the Elmo. The prosecution had already shown the photographs taken by the police following the incident on January 1, 1989. This one showed similar, but not identical, bruises.

  Denise said she had seen this photograph in Nicole’s bathroom drawer. “Did you and she discuss the photograph?” Darden asked.

  “Yes, we did.”

  “What did she tell you about the photograph?”

  “Objection,” said Shapiro. “Hearsay, Your Honor.”

  Ito called the parties to the sidebar. Darden’s question,
quite obviously, did call for hearsay evidence in response. But that was not the worst of it. The judge asked Darden which incident of domestic violence this photograph involved.

  “I don’t know what the incident is that relates directly to this photograph,” Darden said.

  Ito sighed, asked the jury to return to the jury room, and demanded that Darden explain how this photograph might be admissible. Darden said only that it had been found in Nicole’s safe-deposit box after her death, with the photographs from the 1989 beating.

  “Counsel,” Ito said with mounting impatience, “you can’t just show horrible photographs without tying it to something relevant to this case.”

  For once, the defense histrionics that followed were justified. “I have been practicing for a long time,” said Shapiro, “and I have never seen anything quite this extraordinary where a photograph that is clearly inadmissible is just thrown up on a giant-screen television for the jury to see …”

  In legal terms, Darden had failed to establish the photograph’s “foundation”—this is, the time and place it was taken, along with the relevant surrounding circumstances. By showing the photograph to the jurors, Darden obviously intended for them to draw the inference that O.J. had caused the wounds. But he had no way of proving it. In shorter, less-publicized cases, this is the kind of error that results in convictions being overturned on appeal. As Ito put it, with characteristic restraint, “What concerns me is the rather inflammatory nature of that photograph, and to show it to the jury, without any foundation for it, is more than inappropriate.”

  Ito levied less of a sanction than some judges might have. He simply instructed the jury to disregard the photograph and asked Darden to move on. From there, Darden wrapped it up with Denise pretty quickly. He brought out that O.J. had called Nicole a “fat pig” when she was pregnant—loathsome behavior, to be sure, but not exactly wife beating, either. She concluded her testimony with a description of O.J.’s behavior at Sydney’s dance recital in the early evening of June 12, 1994.