If I Did It

by O. J. Simpson

We spent the night together, and the next day I took her to the airport. We were happy, like a pair of kids, and I drove home wondering why I’d ever put her through such hell. I was also grateful – she was being incredibly understanding. When I reached her in Honolulu later that day, however, she sounded a little less happy. “I’m still hurt,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I did what I had to do. If I hadn’t made an effort to keep the family together, I would have wondered about it for the rest of my life.”

  “It was a long year,” she said.

  “It was long for me, too.”

  “I don’t honestly know what I want from you,” she said. “All I know is that I want to take it real slow.”

  I was game for anything, and I told her so. I wanted Paula back in my life and I made it clear that I’d jump through hoops for her. On the other hand, to be completely honest, I wasn’t sure we could make it work. Paula was looking to settle down and start making babies, and I was done with that part of my life. I figured we could have that conversation when she returned to Los Angeles, but it never happened. A few weeks later, Nicole and Ron Goldman were dead, and I was being charged with the murders.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  Less than a week after Paula left for Honolulu, I was in New York on business, and I got a call from Gigi, my housekeeper. She was upset. She said Nicole had just been by the house, and that she’d asked her to take care of the kids that weekend.

  “What are you crying about?” I asked. “That’s no reason to cry.”

  “Nicole got mad at me,” Gigi said.

  “What do you mean she got mad? What right does she have to get mad? You work for me, and you’re off on weekends. If you want to babysit the kids, that’s between you and Nicole, but she can’t be coming by making demands.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what I tried to tell her, but she said I’d better be here when she came by to drop off the kids.”

  “That’s crazy! She’s got no right even coming by the house when I’m not there. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of it right away.”

  I called Nicole the moment we got off the phone. I was pissed, but I kept it civilized. “Gigi works for me, and she has the weekends off,” I said. “You can’t be hasslin’ her. You ran Michele off. Please don’t do the same with Gigi.”

  Nicole didn’t apologize, but she didn’t come by the house that weekend, either. Two days later, however, when I was back, she stopped by to drop off the kids, and I thought I heard her having words with Kato. I looked out the window but couldn’t see her, and I couldn’t see Kato, either. He was probably running for the hills. I went downstairs as the kids came through the front door, and Nicole was right behind them, walking in like she owned the place. “I thought I told you to get rid of Kato,” she barked.

  “I don’t want to talk about Kato,” I said. “Not now, not ever.”

  “I never want to see him again,” she said.

  “Nic, come on – back off. The guy told me he found a place, but it fell out.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I ignored her. I took the kids out to the pool and we jumped into the water. Nicole watched us for a few minutes, scowling. “I’m leaving,” she said.

  I looked at her, as if to say, So fucking what? Leave already. She got the message. She turned and left.

  I hung out with the kids and tried not to think about her, but it was hard. She was clearly deteriorating. Maybe she was upset because we were over. Maybe she was having a hard time facing the future. I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it wasn’t good. I found myself thinking of that old cliché about divorce: If you’ve got kids, you’re stuck with that person for the rest of your life. It was not a pleasant thought.

  After the kids got out of the pool, I called Cathy Randa. I told her I thought Nicole was getting worse, and that I didn’t want to be around her anymore. It wasn’t good for me, I said, and it sure as hell wasn’t good for the kids. I asked her to please review the schedule, and to help me arrange all future pick-ups and drop-offs.

  “You okay?” Cathy asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. And if we can get Nicole handled, I’ll be better than fine.”

  I went back to New York on business and returned a few days later, and the next morning – before I was even out of bed – the phone rang. It was Nicole. “I’m sick,” she said. “I’ve got pneumonia. Could you come by and take the kids to school?”

  I got dressed and hurried over. She looked like hell. I changed the bed linens and tucked her back into bed and took the kids to school, then I stopped at Fromin’s, a Santa Monica deli, to pick up some chicken soup. I took it back to the house and sat with her, watching her eat it. I didn’t understand why she was sick. This was mid-May. Who catches pneumonia in mid-May? I just knew this had to be connected to the drugs. “You’re not doing anything you’re not supposed to be doing, are you?”

  “O.J., please. How many times have I told you: I don’t want to talk about this.”

  The weird part was she didn’t deny it. She had always been a lousy liar, so she just avoided the topic. I wanted her to talk about it, though. So did her mother. So did anyone who cared about her. Hell, Cora Fishman had begged her to talk about it. We all wanted her to face this thing so she could begin to do something about it.

  “I wished we had tried harder,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “During the year we tried to reconcile. I know we could have done better.”

  Now this was something I didn’t want to talk about, so I said nothing. She set down her soup spoon and stared at me. She looked like all the hope had gone out of her. In the course of the previous year, while we were still working at reconciling, there were times when everything seemed to be going completely to hell – but Nicole never stopped hoping. Now that we weren’t even trying anymore, however, there was nothing to be hopeful about, and that’s what I saw in her eyes: A complete absence of hope.

  For the next few days, Nicole was pretty sick. I ended up shuttling the kids to and from school and to and from my house, and Cathy Randa pitched in, but mostly Nicole wanted me to take care of things. I went to the pharmacy to pick up her medicine, and I went back to Fromin’s for second and third helpings of chicken soup, and I helped her change the linens a couple more times. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to suggest that I was the perfect ex-husband. All I’m saying is that I was very worried about her, and that I wanted to help her find her way back. No matter what had gone wrong in our lives – and plenty of shit had gone wrong – she was still the mother of my kids. I was stuck with her, but for their sake I wanted to be stuck with her. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nicole was a great mother. Schoolwork. Manners. Appearance. She was all over those kids. The only thing I objected to was when she turned into the other Nicole, and that Nicole was still very much around, still lurking, ready to leap out and make more trouble.

  Meanwhile, Paula was back in town, and I was trying to keep that romance going. It was strange. Not all that long ago, I’d cheated on my girlfriend with my ex-wife. Now I was cheating again, in a manner of speaking: I was nursing my ex-wife back to health and trying to keep my girlfriend from finding out.

  “I still think separating was a good thing,” Nicole told me a couple of days later. We were standing in her kitchen at the Bundy place, and I was ladling hot soup into a clean bowl. “I just wish I’d made a little more progress in therapy.”

  “You don’t think the therapy helped?”

  “It helped, I guess. But it didn’t really change anything. I wanted to get stronger for us, so that we could have a stronger relationship, but that didn’t work out too well.”

  “Well, you know – that shit takes time.”

  “I already quit therapy,” she said. “I didn’t think I was making enough progress.”

  A few days later – this was in late May, less than a month before Nicole’s death – I was havin
g a party at my house for the kids and their classmates. It was a little fund-raiser for the school, and this was the third consecutive year I’d played host. I had clowns and magicians and those bouncy things for the little kids, and, of course, lots of good food for everyone.

  The day of the picnic, Kato was on his way out of the house to meet some friends, and he sopped by the party to say hello. I heard the kids giving him a hard time – they were repeating all the things they’d learned from Nicole: that he was a freeloader and a bum – and I went over and told them to cut it out. I wasn’t mean about it, though. I realized they didn’t know any better. Nicole had poisoned them with her anger.

  To tell you the truth, though, I was a little sick of Kato myself. I’d already told him to find a place of his own, on more than one occasion, and he kept assuring me that he was trying. It’s not like he was underfoot or anything, though, so I didn’t give it much thought, but that was one of the things that made it hard for me to understand the depth of Nicole’s rage: She saw him even less than I did, but the mention of his name could really set her off.

  About an hour after Kato left, Nicole showed up in the middle of the picnic. The first words out of her mouth were, “Where’s Kato? I sure hope I don’t see him.”

  “He left,” I said. I wondered what she was doing there, but since she had often co-hosted that little picnic with me, I wasn’t going to ask her to leave.

  “You feeling better?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, she reached up and gave me a little kiss, then she went around saying hello to the parents, most of whom she knew from school. She was acting very friendly, and behaving like the hostess, and even thanking people for coming. I thought that was pretty strange. Everyone knew we were no longer together. Everyone knew she didn’t live there anymore.

  I tried not to think about it. I went inside and joined some of the dads, who were watching the NBA playoffs. A few minutes later, Nicole came down and dropped onto the couch next to me and asked me to rub her feet. I rubbed her feet for a few minutes, mostly because I didn’t want to get into anything. She was pale and still looked pretty sick. “You okay?” I asked.

  “Uh huh,” she said. “Just tired.”

  I stopped rubbing her feet and told her to go upstairs and lie down, and I said I’d stop in later to check on her. She went, and I thought I’d gotten rid of her, but within a few minutes Gigi, my housekeeper, came by to tell me that Nicole was asking for me. I went upstairs, frustrated, and found her lying on my bed.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Why is Kato still here?”

  “Why is Kato still here? What the hell does that have to do with anything? He’s not here now.”

  “I hate him.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Nicole, you’re the one who asked me to put him up.”

  “I know,” she said. “But that was five months ago. He was supposed to work for his rent, and he’s not working. He’s not doing shit for me. I keep asking you to get rid of him, and you’re not getting rid of him.”

  “Why are we having this conversation now?” I said. “I’ve got people downstairs.”

  “We’re having this conversation now because I don’t want him around anymore. I don’t want to see him when I’m here.”

  I felt like saying, Nobody asked you to come by, but I didn’t. The whole thing was crazy. Nicole wasn’t making any sense on any level. “I don’t like Gigi either,” she said suddenly.

  “Gigi? What has she ever done to you? What is going on with you, Nicole? Are you on something besides antibiotics?”

  “Why are you still giving me shit about that?” she snapped.

  “Because I’m worried about you,” I said.

  “Isn’t that sweet?” she said, but she had an edge in her voice.

  Man, I didn’t need that shit. I turned around and left the room without another word. To be honest with you, Nicole’s behavior was beginning to scare me.

  The party wound down without incident, and Nicole went home, also without incident, but the next day I had Paula over, and we were watching a movie on TV, working on our relationship, taking it slow, when the phone rang. It was Nicole. She was screaming so loud that I had to take the phone into the kitchen.

  “Why are you trying to steal my friends?!” she shouted.

  “Steal your friends? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You invited them to the fund-raiser!”

  Jesus! I couldn’t believe it. She was talking about the sports banquet I was hosting to raise money for Cedars-Sinai, for children with birth defects. The previous fall, while Nicole and I were still together, or trying to be together, I had suggested that she ask some of her friends to join us at our table. I had my doubts about these so-called friends, but Nicole had told me, repeatedly, that I was wrong about them, and I wanted to give her an opportunity to show me I was wrong. She could bring them to the fund-raiser and maybe I’d find out that they were truly the good, decent people she was telling me they were.

  After Nicole and I split up, though, definitively this time, I’d asked Paula to come with me to the fund-raiser. I didn’t think she would be all that comfortable around Nicole’s friends, though, so I had to disinvite them. Ron Fishman and his son, Michael, were still welcome, as was Christian Reichardt, but I didn’t want to force Paula to deal with the girls – Cora or Faye or any of those people – because I didn’t think it would be fair to her, or even to Nicole, frankly.

  When I called Faye to tell her that the plans had changed, and that I didn’t think the evening was going to work out, she tried to set me straight. “I thought Christian and I were your friends,” she said.

  “Well, you are my friends,” I said. (What the hell was I going to say?)

  And she said, “Then why can’t we come?”

  I tried to explain it to her, suggesting that it might be hard on Paula, and she told me that that didn’t think make any sense at all. “O.J., we don’t play that game,” she said. “We don’t take sides. We want to be your friends, and we’d love to meet Paula.”

  At that point, what could I do? “Fine,” I said. “You can come.”

  So there I was in the kitchen, with Nicole screaming at me about the fund-raiser, demanding an explanation. “I didn’t invite Faye!” I hollered back. “Faye invited herself!”

  “Liar!” she yelled. “You’re a goddamn liar!”

  My God! This woman was crazy. One day I was an angel, the best thing that ever happened to her, and the next day I was Satan himself.

  I hung up and called Faye’s house. Christian Reichardt answered the phone. I told him what was happening, and he put Faye on the phone, and I explained how Nicole had just gone ballistic over the fund-raiser. “Come on, O.J.,” she said. “You know what this is about.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know what this is about!”

  “This has nothing to do with the fund-raiser. Nicole still loves you, and she’s upset because you’re already back with Paula.”

  “Who cares about that?” I snapped. “It’s over between us. I can be with whoever I want, and so can she. I don’t tell her who to go out with and I don’t care, and I wish to hell she’d move on already.”

  “Well that’s the problem,” Faye said. “She can’t move on. She loves you. It’s easy for you to move on because you don’t love her, but she’s still crazy about you and can’t let go.”

  I didn’t want to get into a long, philosophical conversation. “Faye,” I said, “I don’t have time for this shit. I just need a favor from you. I need you to call Nicole and tell her that you invited yourself to this thing. You just do that one favor for me, okay? And while you’re at it, please tell her I don’t give a shit who she dates or anything else.”

  I know that wasn’t the nicest thing to say, but I didn’t really care at that point. I was sick of dealing with Nicole’s crap. And I had Paula in the other room, waiting.

  The rest of the evening went pretty well, and that’s
all I’m going to say about that.

  The next day, as I was heading into town in my car, I saw Nicole and Cora jogging through the neighborhood. I didn’t sop, but I called Nicole’s house – knowing she wouldn’t be there to answer the phone – and left a message on her machine: “I hope Faye explained all the fund-raiser bullshit to you yesterday,” I said. “If she didn’t, you need to talk to her. I purposely did not invite her and Faye because I didn’t feel comfortable having them around Paula. That’s the truth. Other than that, please do not call me for anything. If it’s not about the kids, I don’t want to hear from you.”

  That was the truth. It was also definitely true that I didn’t want to hear from her. And that right there is the reason we weren’t talking at the time of her death. Not because I’d threatened her, but because I’d had my goddamn fill of her. She was poisoning me with her anger, and I needed to get away from it.

  The next day, not even two weeks before Nicole’s death, Cora Fishman called and asked if she could stop by the house. She lived a couple of blocks away, and she came over, and she was crying before she even started talking.

  “‘What’s wrong?” I said.

  “You’ve got to do something about Nicole,” she said. “You’ve got to get her away from these people.”

  “Hey – don’t you think I’ve tried?!”

  “Then do it by force if you have to,” she said. “Run an intervention. But do something. I’m begging you.”

  “I’m sick of trying.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “We had a big fight yesterday, after we went jogging. Nicole is one of my best friends. We’ve never had a fight like that. She just refuses to accept that she’s in serious trouble, and in my heart I know something had is going to happen.”

  I’ll be honest with you: I liked Cora, but I wasn’t moved by her tears. “Don’t tell me.” I said. “Tell her mother. Tell another friend. I’m finished with her.”

  “O.J., please!”

  “Hey,” I snapped. “It ain’t my problem!”

  That was the end of the conversation.

  Much later, of course, during the trial, and during those many months behind bars, I often thought back to that moment, and I felt pretty guilty about it. But at the time I was completely done with Nicole, and I was responding as I saw fit. It seemed like no matter how much I tried to do for her, no matter how patient and reasonable I was, my good intentions always came back to bite me in the ass. So I was pretty angry at that point, yeah. I didn’t want to see her, I didn’t want to hear from her, and I didn’t want to deal with any of her shit. I had done the best I could, and it wasn’t good enough, and at that point I wanted to put some miles between us.