Every racial slur imaginable. “Those niggers, they run like rabbits.” Every demeaning stereotype. “Nigger driving a Porsche that doesn’t look like he’s got a $300 suit on, you always stop him.” Every fear that a black man could have about a racist cop, fulfilled. “How do you intellectualize when you punch a nigger? He either deserves it or he doesn’t.”
Did Mark actually mean these things? Even if he was, as McKinny claimed, spinning out a fictional persona, did he envision this character as a villain or a hero?
If African Americans got rough treatment, women got just as bad. I consider myself fairly well versed in the language of profanity, but Fuhrman had come up with some slurs I’d never even heard.
“Split tail?” I asked Chris, who was slumped dejectedly against my door. He’d just emerged from his own hellish immersion in those transcripts. He shook his head in disgust. “Man,” he said, “that motherfucker just lost the whole case for us.”
Back in his own neighborhood Chris was going to catch a lot or heat for this. I was glad, for his sake, that I was the one who’d ended up taking Fuhrman on direct.
But at that moment the anger and sadness I felt was not only for the prosecution but for the country, torn by racial hatred. People v. Orenthal James Simpson had done nothing but widen the divide. We’d hoped that by carefully presenting the facts, we could convince all the people that our charges were justified. Now these horrible epithets were about to infiltrate our courtroom, and they would further strain the uneasy truce between blacks and whites. The release of these tapes, and the prominence they would assume, would mean a step backward for all of us. And a step forward for hate.
Chris left without a word. I returned to the transcripts. The worst racial slur of all, repeated forty-one times. And when I reached the end, I threw the transcript down and cried.
That night I drove home from work in a trance. Got into bed. Stared at the ceiling. On this miserable night, the loneliness of that bedroom was killing me. I wanted to talk to someone who would listen with unconditional sympathy.
I reached for the phone and called my brother, Jon. It was always comforting to talk to him; he could make me laugh, and he shared my sense of outrage about what was happening in Lance’s courtroom. When this trial began, he was living nearby, but recently he’d moved north. I missed him.
It took him a moment to recognize my voice. “Marsh. You don’t sound too good,” he said. I told him about the transcripts.
“I still can’t believe it,” I said. By now I’d begun to weep. “It’s going to be so ugly.”
“You’ve got to pull it together,” he told me in his gentle, firm way. “This case is still happening-you’ve got to get through it.”
The next morning when I got up, the self-pity was gone. I was just plain angry. Fuhrman! Why hadn’t he told us about those fucking tapes? It’s not like they could have slipped his mind. One illuminating fact to have emerged from the transcripts was that Fuhrman had met with McKinny as recently as July 1994-just a few weeks after the murders-to discuss the “hot property” he’d become. The two of them agreed to lie low until the case was over; then they’d make the sale, and Mark would get a percentage. But apparently McKinny had seen her chance sooner: it was no accident those tapes were surfacing now.
Fuhrman had boasted in that July tape, “I’m the biggest witness in the case of the century-if I go down, they lose the case.” No, as a matter of fact, he was not our biggest witness. Just the most vulnerable. And when Johnnie got done with him, this would no longer be the Simpson trial; it would be the Fuhrman trial.
Did I feel betrayed? You bet. We all did. After the tapes came out, I got a lot of criticism for having “embraced” Fuhrman. Bullshit! I never had any choice about calling him as a witness. And it was Mark Fuhrman’s job to inform us of anything that might be used against him by the defense. Instead, he took the stand at the preliminary hearing without telling us about his personnel package. Then he testified-as I held my breath and silently screamed, No, don’t do it!-that he hadn’t uttered the N-word in the last ten years. All the while he knew about those tapes.
And now, after all our hard work-DNA, PCR, EDTA-the case came down to this: MF.
Read it any way you like.
Laura Hart McKinny showed up at our eighteenth-floor conference room with her attorneys and her husband. I wasn’t surprised when she agreed to talk to us. It was good PR for her to appear not to be taking sides. At first glance she struck me as a flower child gone slightly to seed. She was in her forties, but her hair hung long and free. Her freckled face bore no makeup and she wore the kind of funky, flowing clothing that you’d have seen at a Jefferson Airplane concert.
I wasn’t fooled by the packaging. Beneath that hang-loose exterior lay a stratum of steel.
I told her that we routinely taped our interviews, and she balked. Pretty ironic, under the circumstances. She and her team withdrew from the room to confer. I raised an eyebrow at Bill. By the time she returned, several minutes later, she was more compliant. Bill did the questioning while Chris and I sat by.
McKinny told us how one day in 1985 she was sitting at a café table in Westwood, tapping away at her laptop computer, when up sidled Mark Fuhrman. He asked her a question about the computer. (It sounded to me like a come-on line. No way Mark Fuhrman cared about RAM and ROM.) McKinny had something else in mind. Fuhrman, she learned, was a police officer. And, whaddya know, she happened to be writing a screenplay about cops.
They struck a deaclass="underline" he would give her inside cop skinny, and she would give him credit as her technical adviser and a percentage of whatever. Fuhrman, it turned out, was useful to McKinny not merely because he was an officer with the LAPD. He was also a member of a group called Men Against Women, MAW, which had resisted the advancement of female cops. Talk about an appealing protagonist.
After their decade of interviews on the subject, McKinny turned out a screenplay with the catchy title “Men Against Women.” And guess what. It didn’t sell.
She recounted this tale with no discernible sense of irony, and I grew increasingly impatient with her. This woman had laughed and giggled with Mark, listened to his chest-thumping accounts of cop life, and accepted without criticism his descriptions of police misconduct against blacks and women, all spiced with the vilest racial and sexual slurs that a human can utter. What was the deal here? Did she believe he was being himself? Or was he playing a role?
I asked her just that.
At the hearing in North Carolina, she’d claimed that what Mark had said was simply theater; now she backed off. Sometimes she knew that he was acting a part, she said. But at times, he seemed to be talking about himself. When he blathered on about police brutality, she didn’t bother to distinguish between what might have been true and what imagined. She was working on a piece of fiction. It didn’t matter. She was “a writer.”
But Laura, I asked her. When you heard him use those epithets, what did you do?
Nothing.
Laura, what did you feel?
Nothing, she replied. I was just listening.
Chris could take no more. “Nothing?” he repeated, incredulous. “You felt nothing when you heard him talk that way?”
At this McKinny got her back up. She was a writer, she insisted. Interjecting her opinion would have made her subject freeze up.
The upshot of Chris’s sally, unfortunately, was that McKinny herself froze up, and we got nothing more of substance out of her. As time went on, she would put serious distance between herself and her politically incorrect collaborator.
The leopard had changed her spots. By the time of her court appearance, she would have become mortally offended by this creature who had spewed filth into her tape recorder.