I’M GOING TO tell you a story you’ve never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. It takes place on the night of June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murder of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night, because I know the facts better than anyone. I know the players. I’ve seen the evidence. I’ve heard the theories. And, of course, I’ve read all the stories: That I did it. That I did it but I don’t know I did it. That I can no longer tell fact from fiction. That I wake up in the middle of the night, consumed by guilt, screaming.
Man, they even had me wondering, What if I did it?
Well, sit back, people. The things I know, and the things I believe, you can’t even imagine. And I’m going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know—that’s not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong.
First, though, for those of you who don’t me, my name is Orenthal James Simpson—“O.J.” to most people. Many years ago, a lifetime ago, really, I was a pretty good football player. I set a few NCAA records, won the Heisman trophy, and was named the American Football Conference’s Most Valuable Player three times. When I retired from football, in 1978, I went to work for NBC, as a football analyst, and in the years ahead I was inducted into both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
I did a little acting, too, and for a number of years I was a pitchman for Hertz, the rental car people. Some of you might remember me from the television spots: I was always running late, pressed for time, leaping over fences and cars and piles of luggage to catch my flight. If you don’t see the irony in that, you will.
All of that was a long time ago, though, a lifetime ago, as I said—all of that was before the fall. And as I sit here now, trying to tell my story, I’m having a tough time knowing where to begin. Still, I’ve heard it said that all stories are basically love stories, and my story is no exception. This is a love story, too. And, like a lot of love stories, it doesn’t have a happy ending.
Let me take you back a few years, to the summer of 1977. I was married then, to my first wife, Marguerite, and we were about to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, but it was not a good time for us. Marguerite and I had been on shaky ground for a number of years, and at one point had actually separated, but we reconciled for the sake of our two kids, Arnelle, then nine, and Jason, seven. A few months into it, though, while Marguerite and I were in the middle of dinner, she set down her fork and gave me a hard look.
“What?” I asked.
“This isn’t working,” she said. “And I’m five months’ pregnant.”
I knew the marriage wasn’t working, but the news of the pregnancy was a real shock.
We finished dinner in silence—we were at the house on Rockingham, in Brentwood—and after dinner went to bed, still silent. I lay there in the dark, thinking about the unborn baby. I knew Marguerite would never consider an abortion, and it made for a very strange situation: The youngest Simpson would be joining a family that had already fallen apart.
In the morning, I told Marguerite that I was going to go to the mountains for a night or two, to think things through, and I packed a small bag and took off.
On my way out of town, I stopped at a Beverly Hills jewelry store to pick out an anniversary present for her—we’d been married a decade earlier, on June 24, 1967—then paid for it and left. As I made my way down the street, heading back to my car, I ran into a guy I knew, and we went off to have breakfast at The Daisy, a couple of blocks away. We found a quiet, corner table, and our young waitress came over. She was a stunner: Blonde, slim, and bright-eyed, with a smile that could knock a man over.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Nicole.”
“Nicole what?”
“Nicole Brown.”
“How come I’ve never seen you before?”
“I just started here,” she said, laughing.
She was from Dana Point, she told me, about an hour south of Los Angeles, and she’d come up for the summer to make a few bucks.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“I just turned eighteen last month,” she said. “On May 19.”
“I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” I said.
She smiled that bright smile again. “Me, too,” she said.
After breakfast, I made the two-hour drive to Lake Arrowhead, and I spent the night up there, thinking about my failing marriage, and trying not to think about the gorgeous young waitress who had served me breakfast. When I got back from the mountains, I went home, having resolved absolutely nothing, and a few nights later I went back to The Daisy. Nicole was there, and I took her aside. “I want you to know that I’m married, but that my marriage is ending,” I said. “So, you know—I’m still technically a ‘married man.’ I don’t know if that bothers you, but if it does I’m just letting you know that things are going to change soon.”
“Is that the truth?” she asked.
“It’s the truth,” I said.
Later that same night, I stopped by her apartment, on Wilshire Boulevard, and took her to a party. By the end of the evening, I was hooked.
That was in June, 1977. For the next month, I saw her almost every single day, until it was time to leave for football. I missed her, and I spoke to her constantly. I also spoke to Marguerite, of course, to see how the kids were doing, and to make sure the pregnancy was going okay, but I was pretty confused. I had a wife back home, with a third kid on the way, and I was already falling in love with another woman.
I came home in time for the delivery of the baby, but split almost immediately after to rejoin the Buffalo Bills, the team I was playing with back then. When football season ended, I returned to L.A. and took a room at the Westwood Marquis, and I found myself pretty much living two lives—one with Marguerite, as an estranged husband and father of three, and the other with Nicole, my new love. I spent most of my time with Nicole, of course, at the hotel or at her little apartment, and from time to time—when I was called away on business—she’d hit the road with me.
Eventually, I met Nicole’s family—two sisters, Denise and Dominque, who were living in New York back then; a third sister, Tanya; and their mother, Juditha, who lived in Dana Point with her husband, Lou. I didn’t meet Lou till later, but that was only because the situation never presented itself. He knew about me, of course, and I don’t think he had any objections, and if he did nobody shared them with me.
Nicole also met my kids, but I waited an entire year before I made the introductions. I was a little wary, for obvious reasons, but Nicole took to them as if they were her own. They liked her, too. Before long, the kids wouldn’t go anywhere with me unless Nicole was part of it.
I’ve got to tell you: Life was pretty good. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.
The following year, I moved out of the Westwood Marquis and into the Hollywood Hills home of my old friend Robert Kardashian, and I asked Nicole to move in with me. I think everyone saw us as the perfect couple, including Nicole, but as the months turned into years she began to drop not-so-subtle hints about getting married. I kept trying to put her off, of course, because I’d failed at marriage once, and because I’d seen plenty of other couples fail, but Nicole kept pushing. This led to a number of heated arguments, and from time to time I was sure we were finished, but we survived—mostly because Nicole had faith in us. She believed that our relationship was special, and that we could beat the odds, and pretty soon she had me believing it, too.
In 1979, my divorce from Marguerite became final, and Marguerite moved out of the Rockingham house. I was making arrangements to put the place on the market, but Nicole talked me out of it. “This is a beautiful place,” she said. “All it needs is a little fixing up.”
She walked me through the house, room to room, telling me what we could change, and how it would look, and it was obvious that she had an eye for that kind of thing. She ended up redesigning and redecorating the whole place, top to bottom, and it turned out so well that I encouraged her to become a licensed interior decorator. Within a year, she was working professionally.
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 sometimes 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.
The next day, or the day after that—I can’t recall exactly—a detective came by to follow up with a few questions, and I walked the guy through it. I said I’d been drinking—that we’d both been drinking—and admitted that I’d become a little bit too physical. “I should have exercised more self-control,” I said.
“It’s one of those things that happen in all relationships,” he said, and I agreed with him. We’d been partying a little too hard. It was late. We weren’t thinking clearly. But hey, nobody got hurt. Yada yada yada.
As for Nicole, I guess she told the cops her own version of the same story, down to that misunderstanding about the nonexistent diamond earrings. I don’t know if she told them that she took a few swings at me, and that she came back for more after I locked her out, but she certainly told her mother, who went on national television and confirmed it. Still, at that point none of it seemed relevant. I had already apologized, profusely, and had even gone one better. “If I’m ever physical like that with you again, I will tear up the prenuptial agreement,” I told Nicole. I wanted her to know how serious I was about making things right. It didn’t matter to me that she had initiated the fight because my response was wrong, and that’s what counted—my response.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I mean it,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
So, yeah—as far as I was concerned, it was over.
But it wasn’t over. A month later, just as we were getting ready to fly to Hawaii, where I had business with Hertz, I woke up and read about the whole ugly incident on the front page of the Herald Examiner. It was surreal. I thought we’d moved on long ago, then bam!—there it was for the whole world to see. The story came as a complete surprise to Nicole, too. She had no idea that the cops were going to use her statement, and those incriminating photographs, to charge me with domestic abuse.
In the days ahead, everything became a little clearer. I found out that it’s quite common for a woman to charge her husband or boyfriend with abuse, only to call the police the next day and ask them to drop the charges. I guess they’re afraid of what those guys will do to them when it’s all over, so they find all sorts of reasons to change their stories: It was a misunderstanding, officer. Deep down I really love him. I don’t want to hurt the kids. Now that I think about it, the whole thing was my fault. Many women kept getting victimized as a result, repeatedly, sometimes with deadly results, and the cops were trying to figure out how to deal with the problem. In fact, they were attempting to put a new law on the books that would give them the power to make the charges stick, even if the complaint was withdrawn. And I guess what happened was, someone at the L.A.P.D. decided that I would make the perfect poster boy for spousal abuse—a perfect, high-profile launch for their campaign.
There was one glitch, however, and it was a big one. Back in those days, officers could only make an arrest if it was warranted by the situation, or if the perpetrator had a history of abuse. Our situation hadn’t warranted it—no one was getting beat up—and I didn’t have a history of abuse. Still, just in case anything had slipped though the cracks, the investigating officer sent a memo to various neighborhood precincts, asking if any officer had ever responded to a domestic disturbance at my home. Well, wouldn’t you know it—they got lucky. The Westec security guard who had stopped by during our one previous altercation, in 1984, had since become a member of the L.A.P.D., and both he and one of his fellow officers, Mark Fuhrman, responded to the memo. In his response, Fuhrman actually claimed that he’d been at my house that night, with the guy from Westec, and that he’d talked to both me and Nicole. If Fuhrman was there, and if he actually talked to either of us, I sure as hell don’t remember it. But that didn’t matter. The L.A.P.D. had been looking for a prior incident, and they’d just found it.
In the end, I was convicted of spousal abuse. I was put on probation, given a few hundred hours of community service, and ordered to pay a modest fine. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t think the charges were worth fighting, and I regret it to this day. If you don’t fight the charges, they stick. And these stuck. Suddenly, I was a convicted wife-beater.
Did I physically drag Nicole out of the bedroom and push her out into the hallway? Yes. Did I beat her? No. I never once raised my hand to her—never once—and if Nicole were alive today she’d tell you the same thing. In fact, right after the newspaper story broke, when she talked to her mother about it, she took responsibility for the whole ugly incident. And even during the divorce proceedings years later, when she had good reason to want to lie about my allegedly violent nature, Nicole refused to play that game. She told her lawyers that the incident had been blown completely out of proportion—and that she’d instigated the violence, not me.
Much later, months after the murders, I spoke about the incident with Dr. Bernard Yudowitz, a forensic psychiatrist. I remember crying as I told him about going up to San Francisco in 1986, to see my father, who was in the hospital at the time, riddled with cancer. He was tired and weak, but in good spirits, and we chatted for a while, then I took a moment to step out into the corridor to call Nicole, back in L.A. When I returned to the room, my father was dead. “I don’t understand why God gave me ten minutes with my father,” I told Dr. Yudowitz, “but not even one second with Nicole.”
I will admit to you, as I admitted to him, that some of my arguments with Nicole did indeed deteriorate into shouting matches, and that we tended to get in each other’s faces. But most of the time we resolved our differences peacefully, without getting physical. Nicole and I were together for seventeen years, and we had our share of conflict, but by and large we were always able to work out our differences.
During the trial, when Dr. Yudowitz took the stand—on my behalf, admittedly—he said what everyone expected him to say: That I did not fit the profile of a killer. In the days ahead, as expected, the newspapers trotted out their own experts. They said that four out of five murders were spontaneous, a result of circumstance more than intent, and that perhaps that had been the situation in my case. I also read about so-called “atypical” murderers: The quiet boy next door, say, or the mousy little preacher’s wife—men and women who seemed incapable of murder, but who were driven to violence by a given situation. Some experts immediately categorized me as atypical: I seemed like a nice guy, and it was definitely out of character for me to have committed the crime, but I could have done it just the same. That didn’t strike me as particularly insightful. Given the right circumstances, I guess anyone is capable of murder.
But I’m getting ahead of myself …
When I think back on my marriage to Nicole, I guess I’d have to say that 1989 was the big turning point—but mostly for her. Me? I was the oblivious husband. For one thing, I got busy. A few weeks after the incident, I had to go to Hawaii, for Hertz, and my business with them kept me occupied for the next few months. Then in the fall, I had NFL Live to do, with Bob Costas, and once again—like lots of guys—I lost myself in my work. I wasn’t even thinking about the incident, to be honest. I was moving forward, leaving it behind me, and in my mind that was a good thing. I thought we should put the past behind us. Cool off. Start fresh. And I figured Nicole probably felt the same way. She seemed a little removed at times, to be honest, but otherwise I thought things were fine. I didn’t realize till much later that she was having an affair, but that’s another story, and I was completely oblivious about that, too. Maybe it was self-delusion—who knows? All I know is that I thought things were solid, and that I felt we could get through anything. Plus I didn’t want the marriage to fail. We had two kids to raise, and we were at that point in our marriage where the kids had to come first. That’s just the way it was. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Nicole, or that I loved her less, but that I loved her in a different way. You lose some of the passion, sure, and you lose some of the closeness. And sometimes you’re just trying to stay out of each other’s way. But so what? The center of gravity shifts. You focus on the kids. You settle down. You mellow out. And that’s what I was doing, or trying to do.
And it was working great—or so I thought. I remember being in New York in December 1991, hanging out with Nicole, doing a little Christmas shopping and stuff, and thinking how happy she seemed. She even looked terrific. She had been struggling to get back into fighting shape ever since the kids had come along, and complaining about it every time she caught sight of herself in the mirror, but after months of hard work she was in the best shape of her life. I was amazed, and I told her so, and I remember thinking how glad I was that we’d weathered the post-1989 storm. I was proud of myself for making it through the rough parts of the marriage, and equally proud of her, and I was feeling genuinely optimistic about the future.
A month later, in January 1992, I was in New York for the playoff games, and flew home for a long weekend. The very first day I was back, Nicole and I went to lunch at Peppone’s, right there in Brentwood, and about thirty seconds after we sat down she let me have it: “I think we should separate,” she said.
I was floored. I was tired and jet-lagged and I honestly wasn’t even sure I’d even heard her right, but she repeated it, saying she didn’t understand why I looked so surprised. We’d been having problems for a long time, she said, and we should both look at it as an opportunity to work on ourselves and think about the problems, yada yada yada. “I want to try living apart for a month,” she added. “But I don’t want to get the lawyers involved.”
Then she suggested that I move out of the Rockingham house, to make the separation less disruptive for the kids, and I knew right off that I had to stop this thing before it got any crazier. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish by us living apart for a month,” I said. “I’m hardly here as it is, traveling all the time. If you want to work on yourself, you’ve got plenty of time to do it. And if you think I need to work on myself, maybe you can tell me what needs fixing.”
“No,” she said. “That’s not it at all.”
“Then what is it?” I said. “I’m confused. Is there someone else?”
“No—God! How can you even think such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out how it came to this. I know we don’t have a perfect marriage, but who does? And I thought we were doing pretty well.”
At that point she began to talk about the fact that she had spent her entire adult life with me—fifteen years—and that she felt as if she was living in my shadow. “All of our friends are your friends,” she said. “Everything we do is stuff you want to do. Our life together is basically about you.”
I tried to defend myself, saying that I had always listened to her, and that I had never stopped her from pursuing her own interests and her own friendships, but she wasn’t really paying attention. “I want to be around people who like me for me, not because I’m O.J. Simpson’s wife,” she said.
I thought that was bullshit, too, and I told her so, but she was adamant: she wanted to take a break from the marriage.
“Fine,” I said, trying to keep emotion out of it. “If you want a break, I’ll give you a break. But there’s no way in hell we’re doing this without lawyers.” We needed the lawyers so that we’d be absolutely clear on what was going on, I explained. She wanted out, not me, for reasons I couldn’t really understand. And the Rockingham house predated our relationship. It was my house, a fact that was clearly spelled out in the prenuptial agreement. That house held a lot of history for me, including the drowning death of my infant daughter, Aaren—the little girl I had with Marguerite during the rocky tail end of our marriage—and I wasn’t going to let anyone tell me to move out.
At the end of that month, with the lawyers already hard at work, Nicole moved into a rented house on Gretna Green Way, not eight minutes from my place, and—given my hectic travel schedule—took physical custody of the kids. I was in a state of mild shock for several weeks, to be honest, unable to get my mind around what had happened, and how it had come to this. Her mother was in shock, too, as were most of her friends. None of them seemed to think that our problems were all that significant, though of course one never really knows what goes on behind closed doors.
The only person who had seen it coming was her best friend, Cora Fishman, because Cora had known about the affair—the one Nicole denied having. It wasn’t anyone she was serious about, I learned much later, but it had happened, and when shit like that happens you know that deep down something is very wrong. It’s strange, though, because years later, in a letter she wrote me when she was trying to reconcile, she still said nothing about the affair. Instead, she talked about the 1989 incident, and how that had been the big turning point in our relationship—for her, anyway—which was kind of odd because she was no longer blaming me for what had happened. She said she was beginning to realize that she had contributed as much to our problems as I had, if not more, and that looking back on it she felt that I’d been right from the start—that we did have a pretty good life together. It was the first time she had taken responsibility for her actions, and it was a good thing, but unfortunately it came too late. When I read that letter, it about broke my heart. All along I thought we were going to make it, and I guess I never really understood the depth of her unhappiness—let alone the reasons for it.
So we started our new life, in separate homes but still committed to making it work—like so many other couples. I was optimistic, to be honest. I had been through this before, with Marguerite, twice, and we’d managed to survive the first separation, so in my heart it wasn’t over. We’re just separating, I told myself. We’re trying to get back together. And this time I’m determined to make it work.
Still, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t enjoy watching Nicole settle into a new place with the two kids, watching her move forward without me. She even found a guy to help out with babysitting and running errands and stuff, someone she’d met skiing in Aspen, and she let him move into the guesthouse, rent free, instead of paying him a salary. His name, as you may recall, was Kato Kaelin.
When that first Valentine’s Day rolled around, less than three weeks into the separation, I was in Mexico for a celebrity golf tournament, but I sent Nicole some nice flowers, and a note, and she was very appreciative. I told her I wasn’t giving up on us, and I didn’t. I was still traveling a great deal, mostly to New York, but whenever I was in town I’d take her out, sometimes alone, and sometimes with the kids.
From time to time we even ended up in bed together. On occasion, she cried after we made love. I don’t know if she was crying from being happy or unhappy, to be honest, and I don’t think she did, either, but I kept hoping it was because she loved me, and because in her heart she knew that we belonged together.
Still, I wanted to give Nicole her freedom—the freedom she thought she wanted—so I didn’t get pushy about wooing her back. It was pretty weird, though. Early on, for example, she went on a couple of dates, and she was a little worried about protocol because she hadn’t really dated anyone since she was a teenager. “You think the guy’s just trying to get into my pants?” she asked me at one point.
“Honey, what do you expect?” I said “You’re gorgeous, you’re smart, you’ve got your own money, and you don’t want more kids. For most guys, that’s an unbeatable combination.”
“So should I go out with him?”
“Yeah. If you like him. Why not?”
“But how do I know if he likes me for me,” she said, “and not for something else.”
“What? You think he likes you for your car?”
“I’m serious, O.J. This is all new to me.”
She sounded like a teenager, but it struck me that in dating terms she really was a teenager. “Nicole, stop worrying so much,” I said. “You’re a great girl. Just be yourself and have fun.” I was sitting there, on the phone, trying to build up her self-esteem, and when I got off the phone all I could think was, Man, that’s my wife! That was bizarre!
If there is one good thing I can say about the separation, it’s this: We never fought about anything. In fact, during that entire period we only had one argument, and it was because some of her friends were racking up charges on my account at the golf club in Laguna. My assistant, Cathy Randa, spotted the charges and brought them to my attention, and I immediately called Nicole. “Who the hell do these people think they are, eating and drinking at my expense, and why the hell are you allowing it?” Nicole apologized, promised she’d take care of it, and that was the end of that.
Afterward, we were friendly again—maybe too friendly. Nicole got into the habit of calling me two or three times a day, to chat, often about some of the guys she was dating. I thought that was a little strange—I felt she was treating me almost like a girlfriend or something—but I didn’t mind. I realized that, if nothing else, I was probably her closest friend, a friend she could talk to about anything, and it gave me hope. She always began by talking about the kids—that was the excuse, anyway—and within a minute or two the conversation shifted to stories about the men in her life. This one guy was a complete schmuck, this other guy seemed so nice at first but had turned into a real creep, and so on and so forth. I would think, Why are you wasting your time with them? You could still be living with me! But I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to push her. I wanted her to know I was there without putting any pressure on her.
Then early in May, while I was back in town for a few days, I was out at a club with a group of friends and ran into Nicole and a couple of her girlfriends. I remember thinking it was kind of odd to see her there: We had been living apart for more than three months, and this was the first time I’d run into her in public. One of her girlfriends made a little joke about the situation: “O.J., are you stalking your estranged wife?” And I smiled and said, “Yeah, me and my whole posse.” We exchanged a few more words, everything warm and friendly, then went off to enjoy the club with our respective friends.
Later in the evening, my entourage and I took off for another club, and I guess Nicole was gone by then, because I didn’t see her. About an hour later, when I left the second club, alone, I found myself thinking about her, and missing her a little. And on the drive home I decided to stop by her house, the one on Gretna Green, to see if she was still awake. I parked on the street and approached the front door, and as I drew close I noticed lights in the window and went to have a closer look. Nicole was inside, on the couch, with a friend of hers, Keith Zlomsowitch, one of the partners at Mezzaluna, a Brentwood restaurant. It was pretty hot and heavy. I took a deep breath and turned to go, but paused to knock on the front door—I rapped on it twice, hard—just to let them know that they’d been seen.
I went home and got into bed, alone, and I must tell you—I was pretty steamed. I think maybe it was just beginning to dawn on me that the marriage was over, and I wasn’t real happy about it.
The next morning, I went off to play golf, and I forgot all my woes, but on my way home I called her and told her that we needed to talk. I stopped by the house and she invited me in, and right away I let her know that it was me who’d rapped on her front door the previous night. “What you do is your business, but the kids were in the house,” I said. “I don’t think it would be too cool for them to walk in on that shit.”
Nicole was very apologetic. She said that she’d been drinking, and that she had never meant for anything to happen with Keith, and that nothing like it had ever happened before.
I didn’t know what to say, so I reminded her of our little agreement. “We both decided that if we were going to get involved with somebody else we would tell each other. From where I was standing, that looked pretty involved.”
“No,” she said. “He’s just a friend. It’s never been like that with him and that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Well, it happened,” I said. “And before it happens again, at least think about the kids.”
I left, feeling lousy. In my opinion, shit like that doesn’t happen unless you let it happen. You always hear stories about guys crying to their wives about some woman they screwed while they were away on a business trip or something, and how it didn’t mean anything—that they’d been drinking and they were just missing them and that it just sort of happened. Well, that’s bullshit. You’ve got to be in a place in your relationship for something like that to happen, and I was beginning to see that Nicole was already in that place. As for me, I wasn’t there yet. I was still acting like a married man. And guess what? I hadn’t been laid in months.
A couple of weeks later, late that May, my suspicions were confirmed. Nicole went down to Cabo San Lucas with some friends of ours, including Bruce and Chrystie Jenner, and one of them called to let me know that she’d met a guy there. I felt like I’d been kicked in the nuts, but I handled it. Life throws some shit at you, and you deal with it. I went in and looked on my kids. They were both fast asleep. They looked like angels.
A couple of days after that, with Mother’s Day looming, Nicole called and told me she was flying back, and wondered if I could drive the kids down to Dana Point so we could all spend the day with her family. I took the kids and met her there, taking flowers for both Nicole and Juditha, and the whole family went to church together. Nicole and I stayed for dinner, and drove back late that night. The kids fell asleep in the car.
“That was nice, Nicole said. “Thanks for coming.”
“It was fun,” I said. But it wasn’t fun. All along, I’d been expecting her to tell me about the guy she’d met in Cabo, per our agreement, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.
We got back to my place and put the kids to bed, and that’s when Nicole broke the news. “I met someone,” she said. “A guy I’m pretty crazy about.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“What do you mean you know?”
“Some of my friends were in Cabo, too, remember?”
I didn’t say it angry, and I didn’t say it with attitude, and I didn’t pass judgment. I just said it: I know you met someone. Period.
There was nothing else to say.
When Nicole left, I poured myself a drink and sat on the couch and tried to figure out what it all meant. Strangely enough, by the time I’d finished my drink I felt kind of relieved. Nicole was telling me it was over. It was that simple. For four months, I’d been wining and dining her and sending her flowers and being the perfect estranged husband, but now I didn’t have to keep trying. I had wanted her back, yes, but obviously the feeling wasn’t mutual. She was done with me. If I kept chasing her, what kind of fool would I be? Hadn’t the woman just told me that she was in love with someone else? So, yeah—I accepted it. My marriage was over. My wife didn’t want me anymore. It was time to move on.