It took prosecutor Marcia Clark seven months to collect her "evidence";
in the nine months trial that followed this was all proved planted, fabricated,
made up or just nonsense. The police had picked up one of a pair of gloves from
the crime scene and thrown that in his garden; those gloves didn't even fit
him ... They fabricated a pair of blood-stained socks and said they found those in
his house ... and so on and so forth. Moreover, it was shown that Mr. Simpson had had
no opportunity to commit those crimes. The prosecution couldn't produce a story
that fitted the facts in which he did it; without such a story you don't really
have evidence ...
Since then thousands of people have tried to make up such a story; no one
succeeded. It makes you wonder whether it would be possible to scientifically
prove it impossible. To prove a hypothesis you must work out the alternative ...
After he was finally acquitted it took him another fifteen months to get his children back, who were living with the Browns. Right after that he was held liable for the murders in a civil case and sentenced to pay $32 million to the Brown's and the Goldman's.
For ten years he spent most of his time looking after his children. The witch-hunt went on, and time and again people tried to walk him into a trap and frame him for all kinds of crimes.
Then he was robbed. When he found out the robbers were people he had been treating as friends he went to their place with four other guys to retrieve his property. Of course no violence or threat was involved but this led to a show trial in which he was accused of armed robbery. The jury-candidates were carefully selected by the judge as to make a conviction sure and in December 2008 he was sent to prison for life.
September 2009
Now, if you haven't read the book yet, you might want to stop reading this review here and start reading the book.
Part II
In every interview O.J. Simpson plays a different character, each with his own views and opinions. All these characters have two things in common: they share Mr. Simpson's biography and they don't lie. The same goes for the hero of "If I did it". So, at the surface, you get some information about what really went on between Mr. Simpson and Nicole Brown.
On a deeper level it is the story of the Fall. In a common interpretation of the bible, original sin happened a long time ago and since then people are born with it. I don't think that is what the author of Genesis meant. Original sin is passed on to every new generation; it is done to children and the Fall is the effect it has on them. The hero, whom I will call "O.J." to tell him apart from the author, plays the part of such a child. Therefore he has some of the characteristics of a child, including a child's tendency to take people's behavior as it comes without putting much effort into analyzing it. This has the great advantage that we don't need references to scenes and arguments that would be far too personal and none of our business. It's all nothing but the truth but not, by far, the whole truth.
So at the superficial level this is autobiography. On the deeper level it is fiction.
The real story
In 1989 Mr. Simpson could probably have proved that he was innocent of abuse. All he did was pulling Nicole Brown out of the room in a way that he later considered too violent. That police officer John Edwards lied about her alleged injuries was proved by a hospital report. But I think that if the truth would have come out people would have wondered if Nicole Brown was a bit crazy ... She called 911 because she was in a state of fury and he locked her out of the room, not because of abuse. He sacrificed his own reputation for the sake of protecting hers. I don't get the impression she ever realized that. When any authority asked her "Did he ever hit you?" she said "once" referring to 1989. Mr. Simpson never explicitly denied that, as he didn't want to contradict her. So in the civil court they asked "Did you hit her?" and he said "You mean punched her? No". Of course everybody took that as a confession that he did hit her. He didn't. He couldn't deliberately hurt anybody and has always gone out of his way to avoid unintentionally hurting somebody. Maybe she thought he did, that time. "O.J." takes that "once" as a simplification of what happened, but I don't know if that really is what she meant. I suppose Mr. Simpson does know, but he won't tell us.
So she was a bit crazy and a bit out of touch with reality. This is something that has been obvious for a long time to everyone who tries to make sense out of things. Time and again Mr. Simpson has made huge sacrifices to protect her privacy and reputation, at the expense of his own, but with the media-people just going on sticking there noses where they don't belong, and her personal life being shamelessly discussed on TV, we already knew so much that all he could do was to give us some more information to put things in their place. I must say that some of the things she did really made me very angry, where as I can now understand them better and find them a bit more acceptable.
