If there’s one thing you’d think Americans could agree upon 30 years later, it’s that OJ Simpson was a wife-beating double-murderer who got away with it.
But the usual mainstream media outlets — the New York Times, NBC, ABC, the L.A. Times, New York magazine and NPR, just to name a few — are eulogizing him as a football legend who suffered greatly in a racist America that nonetheless made him rich, famous, and handed him a not guilty verdict despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Here was the New York Times, in a subhead that ran moments after his death on Thursday:
‘He ran to football fame… But his world was ruined after he was charged with killing his former wife and her friend’.
His world was ruined.
The Times did not even name his ‘former wife’ and ‘her friend’.
The usual mainstream media outlets are eulogizing him as a football legend who suffered greatly in a racist America that nonetheless made him rich, famous, and handed him a not guilty verdict despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Such callousness and cowardice extends to the White House. President Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, an utter mediocrity verging on camp, offered sympathies… to OJ’s surviving relatives. How morbid and tone-deaf can she be?
‘Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones,’ Jean-Pierre said before making a hasty exit.
NBC New York, in their coverage Thursday night, called Simpson a ‘complicated’ person whose passing left many Americans ‘conflicted’. Has it, really?
NPR, aggressively ignorant: ‘What legacy does he leave behind?’
CNN contributor Ashley Allison, who has worked for Obama and Biden, on that network: ‘He represented something for the black community in that moment, in that trial, particularly because there were two white people who had been killed. And the history around how black people have been persecuted during slavery.’
Yes, Allison was apparently linking the violent murder of two innocents — one a young mother who happened to be white — to slavery, with not a single challenge from her on-air interlocutors.
What serious person, let alone national news chiefs, can countenance such grossly distorted reframing?
For those who don’t recall or weren’t alive: The crime scene photos remain online.
Nicole Brown Simpson, his 35-year-old ex-wife, was slaughtered so violently that she was nearly decapitated. You can see her larynx through the blood pooling in her neck.
Nicole and OJ’s two children were asleep upstairs during the blitz attack on their mother. Their daughter Sydney was eight years old. Their son Justin was five.
If not for a neighbor who went outside and found Nicole’s dog wandering with a bloody paw, Sydney and Justin most likely would have discovered this gore, their mother crumpled in the fetal position and slathered in blood.
Nicole’s friend Ron Goldman, there that night by chance, was similarly severed at the neck. He was only 25 years old.
But so much of the media still won’t honestly cover OJ Simpson.
For those who don’t recall or weren’t alive: The crime scene photos remain online. Nicole Brown Simpson, his 35-year-old ex-wife, was slaughtered so violently that she was nearly decapitated. You can see her larynx through the blood pooling in her neck. (Pictured: Nicole and OJ with their children).
How fitting, this week, to see a longtime NPR editor writing for The Free Press about liberal newsroom orthodoxy choking objective coverage. The Wall Street Journal has a similar piece about The New York Times.
To read and listen to those outlets is to believe that OJ was just a complex guy who faced many challenges, none of his doing.
‘A handsome warrior with the gentle eyes and soft voice of a nice guy,’ the New York Times purrs in its obituary. ‘And he played golf.’
Well, then!
The Times, in its front-page story and internal two-page spread, didn’t even run a photo of Ron Goldman. Nor did they run a single image of a bruised and battered Nicole, or a crime scene photo.
Columnist Maureen Dowd compared Simpson to Othello, called his case ‘a great American tragedy’, and refrained from calling him a killer.
What a disgrace. What an affront to women and victims of domestic violence.
The crime scene was among the most gruesome the LAPD had ever seen. Nicole was a battered wife who had called the cops for years, begging them to arrest OJ after the latest beating he inflicted, but — impressed by his wealth and fame — they would never do a thing.
One scene from January 1, 1989: Nicole calls 911 at 3:58am from their marital home on Rockingham estate in Brentwood.
The dispatcher hears screams and sounds of a struggle. When the police arrive, Nicole emerges from her hiding spot in the bushes, wearing only sweatpants and a bra.
She had a split lip, a black eye and a bruised forehead, and was screaming for help: ‘He’s going to kill me!’
The cops asked who she was talking about.
‘OJ Simpson, the football player,’ she said. ‘You guys never do anything. You never do anything. You come out. You’ve been here eight times. And you never do anything to him.’
That time, they told OJ he was going to the police station. But OJ just got into his Bentley and drove off, and the police let him.
So if we’re going to talk privilege, let’s start here: OJ was a known, longtime wife-beater, a former professional athlete of great strength who stood 6’1″, weighed over 200 pounds and repeatedly pummeled his 5’5″, 129-pound wife to zero consequence.
Another 911 call, the second of two made on the night of October 25, 1993. Nicole and OJ had separated, she had moved with the children into a condo, and OJ broke down her back door.
‘He’s OJ Simpson,’ Nicole tells the dispatcher. ‘I think you know his record. Could you just send somebody over here? He’s… going nuts.’
Was OJ Simpson ever charged and tried for domestic violence? No.
Was he ever treated like a pariah among their glittering social circle, many of whom knew something was deeply wrong, if not aware of the abuse? No.
Did OJ ever lose an endorsement deal, a movie role, his post-NFL gig as a commentator for NBC and ABC?
No, no, and no.
Nicole Brown Simpson was so desperate, so sure of her imminent murder, that she left a safety deposit box filled with photos of her battered face and body, along with a diary detailing 60 separate incidents of OJ’s abuse.
Before Nicole died, she told her sister and others: ‘One day OJ will kill me. And he’ll get away with it.’
Rational people know: This is true.
The crime scene was among the most gruesome the LAPD had ever seen. Nicole was a battered wife who had called the cops for years, begging them to arrest OJ after the latest beating he inflicted, but they would never do a thing.
Nicole was so desperate, so sure of her imminent murder, that she left a safety deposit box filled with photos of her battered face and body, along with a diary detailing 60 separate incidents of OJ’s abuse.
Yes, we now have a greater understanding of race in America. But there is remarkable symmetry here, the Rodney King verdict presaging Simpson’s acquittal in 1995, and George Floyd’s murder presaging coverage of Simpson’s death thirty years later.
Yet here’s an uncomfortable truth about Simpson, one explored in Ezra Edelman’s masterful five-part documentary ‘OJ: Made in America’: OJ had no use for the black community or for the cause of civil rights.
‘I’m not black,’ he would often tell his friends. ‘I’m OJ.’
Simpson lived in a white world of wealth and privilege, friends with the white police who let him off time and again for breaking his wife’s arm or throwing her into walls or beating her during sex.
After his acquittal and his laughable subsequent promise to find ‘the real killers’, OJ was convicted of armed robbery, kidnapping, assault and other charges in Nevada — 13 years to the date of his not-guilty verdict.
This was a criminal and a murderer who all but confessed years later, in a book called ‘If I Did It’ and a subsequent 2006 TV interview with Judith Regan. It’s online, and I’d encourage anyone who thinks I’m being unduly harsh to watch it.
Avoid, if you can, the filter of American ‘news media’, for here was Good Morning America’s framing of this most damning clip:
‘The interview has people wondering: Was this long-lost tape a murder confession from OJ Simpson?’
Read this exchange and tell me if you feel insulted being asked a question that has only one answer.
OJ: ‘I know the facts better than anyone’.
Regan: ‘Why don’t you tell me what might have happened on the night of June 12, 1994?’
OJ, laughing: ‘Uh… in a hypothetical, I put on a cap and gloves… I always kept a knife in the car for the crazies, ‘cause you can’t travel with a gun.’
He says that Nicole ‘fell and hurt herself… and uh, this guy kind of got into a karate thing, and I said, «Well you think you can kick my ass?» and I remember I grabbed the knife, I do remember that portion… and to be honest, after that I don’t remember. Except I’m standing there and there’s all kind of stuff around.’
Regan: ‘What kind of stuff?’
OJ: ‘Blood and stuff around. You know I hate to say this’ — and here OJ erupts in laughter — ‘but this is hypothetical!’
The clip ends.
‘Hard to watch,’ said GMA’s George Stephanopoulos.
It sure is. But it’s even harder to watch the media genuflect before a remorseless double murderer, whose death should be a relief and a celebration.
