The Juice
My mother and the False Auntie can recall in vivid details where they were, what they were doing, what they were wearing when they found out that Kennedy had been shot. My generation has 3 such moments: the Challenger explosion, OJ Simpson’s verdict and of course, 9/11.
It’s hard to imagined that I’d put OJ in the same category as the catastrophe of 9/11. They are of course completely different in every imaginable way linked only by how big these events were in the shared vernacular. Judge Ito, Marcia Clark, Johnnie Cochran, and Kato Kaelin became part of our collective conscious and their honesty and character were debated with an intensity usually reserved for people we know in real life and not the through the lens of a TV camera.
At the time of the murder and subsequent trial, I was living in Florida, working for Company X. I wasn’t the football enthusiast that I am now and didn’t know anything about OJ… apart from the Hertz commercials and the fact that (and this is horrible to admit) I was generally distrustful of black people. I may cover the subject of race in a future blog but to appease the masses (otherwise known as the 12 people who read my blog) know that any racism I may have been harboring is as extinct as it can be in the world in which we live today.
Company X had just moved a bunch of the sales people into the twin buildings at the center of the campus and I was on the 3rd floor on the phone with a customer. This was 1995 so news and information as we experience them now didn’t exist. We turned on a radio and heard the verdict of not guilty and I remember thinking that I couldn’t BELIEVE that OJ hadn’t been convicted. All that evidence! The Bronco chase! Ditching the gym bag at the airport! The bloody glove!
The few black people working for Company X sent a loud cheer through the building. It may have been the first time I realized that the color of our skin does in fact shape our view of the world. That black people (we were still using the term ‘black’ then as opposed to ‘African American’) had been the object of social, political, economical and criminal injustice. The framework by which African American’s regarded the OJ case was that he was a victim of a system that had been denigrating an entire race of people for too many years. His not guilty verdict put some small faith back in our legal system.
OJ’s trial is forever linked to my Grandma Fackler. When she died the next year we discovered that she had taped the entire trial on VHS. Thinking on it now, I remember discussing the case with her back and forth in our letters and periodic phone calls. That she was as captivated by the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman as the rest of us makes me wish that we’d talked about it more.
The subject of OJ came up today over lunch when Desagraloskawitz suggested that one theory not widely discussed at the time was that Jason Simpson, OJ’s older son had committed the murders, making OJ guilty of the cover up but likely nothing else. She quickly added that OJ’s a toad no matter how you look at it and that if there’s justice then he’ll get what’s coming to him in his trial this September over the botched Las Vegas robbery where he was trying to steal some of his stuff back.
In the end OJ represents the things that are the most difficult to wrap our arms around: race, jealousy, money, love, sex, loyalty, honesty, murder which might be why there continues to be interest in OJ. The Goldman family wound up winning the right to publish the book, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer as a way to satisfy a portion of the 34 Million dollars owed to them as a part of the civil case. I may read it… but there is another book out there called OJ is Guilty but not of Murder by William Dear that as I understand it takes a look at the case as though the verdict from the criminal case was accurate and OJ is definitely not the person who murdered Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.
Probably though, he’s guilty. But what if he weren’t?
what about lady di’s death. that would be another such moment.
I totally forgot about Di’s death. Weird thing is that I was living in DC at the time but happened to be in Florida when the news broke. I worshipped her when I was a ‘tween.
The first horrifying “tragedy being replayed over and over again via video” was when Reagan was shot. No matter what you political affiliation, when you are 6 and see that, it’s a little unsettling.