Ahead lay that excruciating press conference. There, before all the media he’d gathered in anticipation of victory, Gil had to admit that he was “profoundly disappointed” in the verdict. But he implored the nation not to lose faith in its system of criminal justice.
I hadn’t wanted to speak. I didn’t know if I could get the words our of my throat. I managed to say something about my sorrow for the families: “Their strength and dignity have been a source of inspiration.” It was a poor expression of my feelings. I hadn’t prepared more.
Chris was at the mike now. I heard him say, “I’m not bitter…I’m not angry. I am honored to have-”
Then he choked and slumped forward. Several of us reached for him to keep him from falling. I put my hand on Chris’s back and followed him through the thrashing strobes into the anteroom next to Gil’s office.
“Anything I can do?” I asked him.
“I want to go to my office” was all he said.
As I watched him disappear down the hall, I stood for what seemed like an hour. I’m sure it was only minutes. And gradually, it dawned on me. “I’m still here.”
Like someone walking out of the wreckage of a 747, I looked around and saw that I’d fallen 30,000 feet and my legs weren’t broken. I wanted everyone to witness the fact of my survival. I wanted the law clerks, the brass, the TV crews, the black gals out in that Chicago women’s shelter who’d cheered Simpson’s acquittal, the jurors who were planning to attend O. J. Simpson’s victory party in a few hours… I wanted them all to see me now. Bloody, dazed, and reeling. But upright. I wanted them to see that I’d stood for something. I wanted them to see that I’d put myself through hell for the right thing.
I had to believe that suffering was part of something bigger. Justice, like the will of God, doesn’t always manifest itself on the spur of the moment. It doesn’t always come when you think it should. You just gotta wait it out.
And when it comes, I’ll still be standing. Without a doubt.
Postscript
After the verdict I slipped into a malaise. I told myself that this was only post-trial letdown, the kind you always feel after a verdict comes in-even when it’s favorable. It takes a while to wean yourself off the adrenaline. But this was different.
For quite a while, five months at least, I couldn’t shake the sense of dislocation. And guilt. I felt such guilt. I felt like I’d let everyone down. The Goldmans. The Browns. My team. The country. The fog didn’t begin to lift until the spring of 1996, when I finally sat down to write.
Let me be perfectly frank with you. I am not a memoirist by nature. Left to my own inclinations, I might never have done this book. In a perfect world I would have slipped quietly out of the spotlight and tried to get some semblance of my old life back. But my old life was gone.
I could have continued being a D.A. But I knew what would happen. I wouldn’t be able to try cases for a long, long time. Either the defense would try to get me removed, for fear the jury would be biased in my favor-or my own office would be afraid to deploy me, because a jury might be biased against me. As I saw it, the Simpson trial had ruined me as a prosecutor.
That caused me more pain than I can tell you. For fourteen years so much of my image of myself had rested upon being a deputy D.A., an advocate of the People, that leaving the office felt like amputating a limb. But I knew there was no place for me there any longer and I had to move on.
Throughout the trial, I would wake up at three in the morning with night sweats, worrying over how I would support two small sons. What kind of work could I get that would allow me to raise and educate them, that would also allow me to spend time with them? I don’t mean “quality time.” I wanted to be-please don’t laugh-a soccer mom. In short, I wanted to do all those things that working mothers manage only with the greatest difficulty.
This book came to my rescue. When I received my contract-bearing a figure I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams-I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that I could both support my family and do my writing at home.
But this book has done even more than give me financial peace of mind. It’s given me an opportunity to set the record straight.
Since the verdict, I feel that my actual accomplishments-and those of my team-have been obscured by revisionism, some of it simpleminded, much of it downright vicious. I have found myself accused of being too arrogant and too meek; of being too flirtatious and too butch; of cozying up to Mark Fuhrman and of distancing myself from Mark Fuhrman; of protecting the LAPD and not being loyal enough to the LAPD; of being too attentive to detail and too inattentive to detail; of being too passionate and too listless; of being too high-minded and too underhanded. There has been no coherent theme to this criticism, which serves to underscore one point: when a verdict assumes the proportions of a national crisis, someone has to take the fall.
I know that to the vast majority of Americans, that verdict came as a gut shot. I’ve seen photos of the faces of people watching television as it was read back. I’m talking about the look of dumb shock caught on the face of Americans in bars and beauty salons and living rooms all over the country. They knew he was guilty. We all did. How could something like this happen in a country where every sixty-minute weekly courtroom drama has conditioned us to expect-in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt-a triumph of justice?
Was the prosecution perfect? Of course not. No prosecution is perfect. If prosecutions had to be mistake-free, no defendant with a semiconscious lawyer would ever go to jail. But this truth seems to have been lost on the pop chroniclers who, during the months since the criminal verdict, have rewritten history. To a man, they’ve taken the easy road, pinning the blame for the verdict on me and my colleagues rather than explaining to their readers some very complex and brutal realities. The People lost this case not because we introduced too much evidence or too little evidence. We lost because American justice is distorted by race. We lost because American justice is corrupted by celebrity. Any lawyer willing to exploit those weaknesses can convince a jury predisposed to acquittal of just about anything. In the case of People v. Orenthal James Simpson, a handful of clever, expensive attorneys were allowed to manipulate the system by invoking the wholly irrelevant, yet provocative issue of racism.
In recent months I’ve watched members of Simpson’s defense team try in their various ways to distance themselves from the race issue. Tune in to late-night TV talk, and you’ll never hear them brag about what a clever move it was steering that kid from The New Yorker to the Fuhrman story. They’ve all been remarkably silent about that-with the exception of Alan Dershowitz, who has made some of the most baldly ill-considered comments I have heard on national airwaves.
Last December, while appearing as a guest commentator on Rivera Live, Dershowitz proclaimed that the defense had never really played the “race card,” only the “perjury card.” In this revisionist reality, we’re asked to believe that it was really just Mark Fuhrman’s denial of using racial epithets the defense was concerned about. Which conveniently ignores the fact that the Dream Team was arguing for the right to introduce the term “nigger” at least two months before Fuhrman even took the witness stand. Dershowitz was hooted off the screen by fellow commentators.
Make no mistake about it, this so-called Dream Team played the race card. I’d just like to ask those guys a question: Did it ever occur to you, as you broke your buns getting your spoiled, rich, sadistic jerk of a client acquitted, that you might just be putting public safety at risk? Whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles-and other cities-could have gone down in flames, Johnnie, because of your irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric. And no amount of revisionist fast talk is going to change the fact that you guys pandered to racial hatred in order to win. You took a jury itching to avenge Rodney King and incited it to nullify the law. The result was a miscarriage of justice, which, in turn, left many whites gunning for payback.