As Zlomsowitch spoke, I stood there with my mouth open in amazement. O. J. Simpson was spying on his wife in the bushes while she was having sex, then, the next day, shakes the hand of her lover? That was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. (Since then, I’ve had a chance to learn a lot more about the nature of domestic violence. Batterers only rarely blame other men. It’s usually the wife or girlfriend, “the bitch,” who takes the heat. But at the time I first heard this story, Simpson’s behavior struck me as utterly incomprehensible.)
All in all, Zlomsowitch seemed an honorable guy. He’d been a pallbearer at Nicole’s funeral, and all he seemed to want out of this was to see justice done. The fact that he had been willing to recount events favorable to Simpson, like the handshake and apology, was reassuring proof of his honesty. And he had given us valuable new evidence-including the information about the stalking episodes-of Simpson’s behavior as a jealous husband.
David was as relieved as I was that Zlomsowitch had panned out. You take a risk putting any witness on blind, and here we were throwing one after another on the stand without a vetting.
“I can’t believe it,” David groused to me as we ate lunch on the afternoon break. “We have five minutes to put this case together for the grand jury, and law professors across the country are going to take months dissecting and critiquing every word.”
Man, if he only knew how true that would be.
Actually the grand jury was going pretty well. The only real screwup was Shively. I told myself we’d been lucky to find any witnesses whose testimony had not been tainted by pretrial publicity. The important thing was to proceed step by step and not be distracted by the babble of media around us. The grand jurors had been admonished to do the same thing. “Turn off your radio, don’t turn on your TV, don’t pick up a newspaper, don’t scan headlines at a newsstand.”
Grand jurors usually take their charge very seriously, but they are also human and as curious as anyone else. On Thursday, June 23, we were wrapping up the testimony and I had already started drafting my closing statement. I’d give it on Friday, and we’d be done. I think the jurors would have had more than enough evidence to give us the indictment. Then this hysterical pace would subside, at least until the trial started, which would be months from now. Maybe I could even go back to eating dinner at home again.
These were my thoughts as I walked down the hallway toward Suzanne’s office. I checked in with her at least once a day, usually around six o’clock. We’d kick back and shoot the breeze, or in more hectic times, like these, she’d fill me in on any brushfires that needed extinguishing. That night, I could smell smoke even before I reached her door. Suzanne and a visitor, a local television reporter, were sitting in front of the TV, riveted to the screen. There wasn’t much to see, as I recall. Just the staccato sound of a tape being played. The voice of an anguished young woman filled the room.
“He broke my door. He broke the whole back door in…”
A second voice, apparently that of a 911 operator, interrupted her: “And then he left and he came back?”
“Then he came and he practically knocked my upstairs door down, but he pounded it and then he screamed and hollered and I tried to get him out of the bedroom ‘cause the kids were sleeping there…”
“What the hell is this?” I asked Suzanne.
“Nicole,” she replied without taking her eyes from the screen. “A 911 tape.”
“What 911 tape?”
I knew that there had been police reports on the New Year’s Eve of 1989 and the door-kicking incident of 1993. Both had been triggered by Nicole’s calls to 911. But I was under the impression that the audiotapes of those calls had been destroyed in a routine recycling procedure.
My impression was wrong. It turns out that the city attorney’s office, which prosecuted that ‘93 case, had kept its own copies of the tapes. The press had tracked them down and petitioned under the state Public Records Act to get them. And somehow, they had gotten those tapes released-before I had even heard that they existed.
Suzanne’s reporter buddy handed me copies of the police reports on the tapes. I hadn’t seen these, either.
“Oh, great,” I fumed. “Now I’m getting discovery from the press!”
Within the space of an hour it seemed that tape was everywhere. You couldn’t step within earshot of a radio without hearing Nicole’s pitiful, quavering pleas for help. It was on all the television news shows, and they didn’t play it just once, but kept repeating it, in a sick parody of MTV’s heavy rotation.
“My ex-husband or my husband just broke into my house and he’s ranting and raving… He’s O. J. Simpson, I think you know his record… He’s fucking going nuts… He’s screaming at my roommate about me… about some guy I know and hookers… And it’s all my fault, and now what am I going to do…? I just don’t want my kids exposed to this…” When Nicole begged Simpson to calm down, for the sake of the children, his anger only increased. “I don’t give a shit anymore! Motherfucker! I’m not leaving!”
The backlash was immediate. Our lines were flooded by outraged callers. And most of them took the side not of the panicked 119-pound woman, but of the out-of-control former football player who was terrorizing her. They said, “How can you do this to that poor man?” Everyone assumed that the release of the 911 tape was part of a cynical scheme hatched by the D.A.‘s office, the LAPD, and the City Attorney’s office to spin public opinion against Simpson.
What a joke. Believe me, there wasn’t enough solidarity among these camps to coordinate a beer run, let alone an offensive like that. For days afterward, we would all point fingers at one another, Gil lit into the city attorney, James Hahn, for releasing the tape. Hahn insisted that he had acted in the belief that the LAPD had gotten approval from the D.A.‘s office for his office to release the tape. The LAPD would say it was against releasing the tape, but felt it hadn’t gotten support for that position from the D.A. In our office, it was David who took the fall. The cops had called, asking him if they should authorize release of the tape under the Public Records Act. And he had told them, “Do what you normally do.” It was the right instruction-but the result was disastrous.
The worst part of it was watching Shapiro exploit this screwup. He filed a motion to halt the grand jury hearing on grounds of excessive publicity. At a hearing hastily convened on Friday in the courtroom of a former prosecutor named Lance Ito, Shapiro was preening like a peacock in full plumage. He accused the D.A.‘s office of misconduct in making “improper expressions of personal opinion.” He cited my “sole murderer” slip as well as Gil’s speculation that Simpson might cop an insanity plea.
I couldn’t let this pass.
“Robert Shapiro has lost no opportunity to exploit coverage in this case to get sympathy for his client,” I told the court. “He has been no stranger to the spotlight.”
But the barbs exchanged by Shapiro and me were at that very moment being rendered irrelevant. That morning, our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had come back to Gil with reports that a couple of jurors were discussing the 911 tape. That cinched it. If we did get an indictment, it could be thrown out on the strength of this revelation alone. Gil himself had no choice but to file a motion to dismiss the grand jury. Superior Court Judge Cecil Mills heard the motion and began interviewing the jurors to see if they had read or heard anything that might affect their judgment. He concluded that they had, and granted Gil’s request to recuse the jury.
It was over.