I am a sports atheist, and I was in college during Simpson’s murder trial. As a hardened New York native, I scoffed at the idea of so much media coverage of the OJ Simpson murder case, a simple, local homicide case. I still do not consider this case worthy of national news coverage. To my dismay, the case followed me when I briefly went to Denmark, and I swatted any questions away. Unless Simpson was going to pay my student loans or my mom’s rent, it held no importance to me and had no national ramifications. If pressed for an answer, I only had two questions of reasonable doubt: killing two people is bloody work so how was there not more blood evidence and was Simpson smart enough to cover up that evidence? I did not attempt to answer my questions until now. I do not watch the news. I read it.
I would have gladly never considered the case again, but OJ: Made in America attracted my attention when it won Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017 and beat I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary which I watched three times: two times in theaters and once at home. I dutifully added it to my Hulu queue and became alarmed when it was removed with no notice. I requested it from my library since I was not about to devote my 3 Netflix DVD membership to this quest that I was barely interested in. Do we really need 7 hours 47 minutes for a has been football player? After watching the documentary, I would respond that it should have been a little longer. (I still think I Am Not Your Negro should have won while reserving the right to change my mind once I watch the other competing documentaries.)
If you could stop a murderer by admitting to being a racist in order to appear as a credible and honest witness, would you do it? OJ: Made in America answers negatively and shows that if bad behavior is tolerated, either in favor of individuals or institutions, when a reprimand is necessary, and the results are exponentially more tragic, justice will not work. I was stunned that even after over a decade, no one who favored the prosecution at the time was able to look back critically and objectively at what happened. Even Jim Newton of the LA Times described Mark Fuhrman as not “an authentic racist.” Then who is? They wanted Simpson to be found guilty by the jury and not admit that the LAPD has historically had a disparity in its treatment of the average black person from the extrajudicial executions of Eulia Love and Leonard Deadwyler to the excessive force used on Rodney King, which I recall even horrified former President George Herbert Walker Bush.
The LAPD is only a microcosm of the nation. What is so hard about admitting to being a racist or at the minimum, struggling with racist actions? Everyone is prejudiced. Even Jesus said in Mark 10:18, “No one is good—except God alone.” Fuhrman knew that a screenwriter recorded him using derogatory language, but even without the Tarantino tribute, he knew that he admitted to using bad procedure and setting people up. As Marcia Clark wisely asked, “What the fuck dude!” Side note: I liked her in this documentary. Imagine if during his initial testimony, before being questioned by the defense, he turned to a majority black jury and said, “I have said racist things, and here is how I am working on it.” He would not only be seen as truthful, he would have declawed the defense’s case and won the courtroom. How do you think that white men end up ministers of majority black congregations? This lack of honesty about one’s behavior and beliefs explains why people analyzing Presidon’t’s victory have to perform mental gymnastics to explain the results.
I don’t think that blackness is a monolith, but OJ: Made in America does a good job of juxtaposing other black athletes’ experiences and actions with Simpson to illustrate that he achieved success by doing the opposite. Many documentaries assume that the audience knows a famous subject’s life and provide little background, but Ezra Edelman helped me understand why Simpson is so famous and placed it in a historical context. In contrast to other black athlete activists who worked in the Civil Rights era and were considered militant, Simpson started his college football career in a community sequestered from the black community, adjacent to, but mentally removed from the Watts uprising. His explicit goal was to transcend race and erase blackness. “I’m not black. I’m OJ.” He was delighted to hear a story when someone asked why OJ was sitting with a “bunch of niggers,” because he was not lumped together with the other black people. Some of the people who interviewed him mistakenly theorize that he forgot who he is, but I would suggest that he did not and calculated how to distance himself from his origins, which is smart and conniving.
I think that embracing performative blackness during the homicide trial in his clever choice of attorneys, including Carl Douglas (don’t hate the player, hate the game), who provides the best legal strategy, albeit immoral, commentary, partially explains why Simpson then embraced media stereotypes of blackness by dressing like a pimp, putting on a preacher’s mantle or acting like a gangster and gathering a bunch of middle aged white and black dudes to invade a hotel room. The formula had produced so many positive results that like his effort to erase his blackness, he took it too far until he was confronted with the negative backlash of blackness.
OJ: Made in America does not do a good job of conveying the story of how Simpson finally ended up in jail. I ended up rewinding that portion repeatedly and taking notes to understand what happened. There are multiple contradictory accounts. Here is my assessment simply based on watching the documentary and superficial judgments of the interviewees’ credibility. Mike Gilbert, Simpson’s agent, is interviewed throughout the documentary. He basically admits that he knew that Simpson killed his wife and Ron Goldman, helped Simpson beat the charges anyway and hide Simpson’s property after he lost the civil suit. During the film interview, Gilbert expresses dismay that the authorities took Simpson’s personal property, but there is a news clip showing that he took Simpson’s Heisman trophy and other personal property in lieu of unpaid fees. Whether or not Glbert took that property legally is questionable, but considering that Simpson is later looking for it, it certainly hampers his ability to profit from reselling the property if you have a person whom you believe is a murderer chasing you and trying to reclaim it.
I think that Gilbert worked with Alfred “Al” Beardsley to set up Simpson, whom they knew was a hothead. They knew that if Beardsley called Tom Roccio, whose tabloid schtick is apparently to record and make money off of sensational crap, Roccio would tell Simpson where to find his property. I think that Roccio said that Beardsley took the stuff from Gilbert. A writer says Bruce Fromong took it from Gilbert, but I think that she got it wrong because none of Fromong’s stuff corresponded with what Simpson was looking for. Roccio may be sleazy, but he has no incentive to lie. He likes exposing things so I’m inclined to believe his account over the writer who is only getting second hand accounts.
Beardsley then called Fromong and asked him to bring his Simpson memorabilia. Fromong’s property, which was not the same objects that Simpson was looking for (a ring, a photo with J. Edgar Hoover and a football) and probably legally acquired, was essentially being used as collateral in this scheme because neither Gilbert nor Beardsley actually wanted to use their property to lure Simpson. Fromong was unaware that he was being used. Meanwhile Gilbert claims the stuff got lost in storage. Sure, yeah, accomplice after the fact. Meanwhile Simpson busts in Fromong’s hotel room with his gang of multiracial midlife crisis buddies (when Fromong calls the police, he says it was 4 black guys, but the hotel footage indicates otherwise-side eye), takes all the sports memorabilia, which like an idiot, he didn’t check to make sure it was even the stuff that he was looking for, but actually included items from other sports stars, then goes to jail because duh. Roccio ended up earning $150,000 for selling his secret recording. Simpson is out of the way, and Gilbert and Beardsley can sell Simpson’s stuff on the black market without fear of reprisal. Please note that none of them are right if they did not legally acquire the stuff prior to the civil suit verdict. Give it up to Ron Goldman’s daddy, who stays mad. I think if Simpson stubbed his toe, he would be cheering nearby, which I can appreciate. He gets a few things wrong in interviews, but fuck, he lost a son. I don’t expect sober, analysis from him. My condolences, Fred Goldman.
I suppose that it would be expecting too much from OJ: Made in America to want as sophisticated an analysis of gender as we are given on race in the US. Somehow Nicole Simpson (RIP) lived in a world where if a guy attempts to rape you on the first date, she believed that was attraction and gave him a second date. People who love her are sad, but seem more resigned about Nicole’s murder. I am sure that no one who loved her wanted anything bad to happen to her, and she did nothing to deserve what happened to her, but the entire community seemed to think it was acceptable and knew about it. We don’t hear that people attempted to intervene or refused to socialize with OJ while Nicole was alive and enduring abuse. There is an implicit seal of approval by Nicole and their community that he had a right to abuse her, and it is a sign of love. Even the way that the police privilege OJ’s comfort over actual law enforcement and permitted him to run away two times from being arrested with no legal consequences for anyone may speak to fame, but also speaks to male privilege in domestic violence cases. Their outrage came too late. I cannot believe that OJ is not responsible for other incidents of violence against women. Nicole seemed to believe her life was supposed to look like that, and her community gave a tacit seal of approval so their subsequent outrage and horror at others doing the same albeit for different reasons rings a little hollow.
It is twenty-three years later, and I finally have an opinion on (eye roll) the case of the century (sarcasm). OJ did that shit. Since he was a kid, he had no problem throwing his friends under the bus, and his friends would thank him for the privilege and marvel at his way of evading consequences. He is an expert at manipulating people and a narcissist. In interviews, he names women that he has issues with, rarely men, even though men played a dominant role investigating and prosecuting him. He admits to being responsible for his wife’s bruises, and Occam’s Razor has yet to fail us. He has no alibi. Even though his friends probably would cover up the evidence, none of them were willing to swear under oath that they were with him. There is DNA evidence. The Juice is loose. LAPD is now under scrutiny for pedophilia. Same as it ever was.