Denise Brown and a Crusade for Life...

Reporters who cover trials often say of witnesses that you have to take them as you find them; the same rule applies to the families of murder victims.

A murder trial is a narrative, a collection of family stories.

As a story, Denise Brown has the ambiguities of Becky Sharp. Was she prepared to be held up for scrutiny as the older sister of the most famous murder victim in postwar American history?

While Denise is in New York, I notice in her tote bag a single book: Insane Jealousy, a study of domestic violence - a phrase she routinely says she never heard until June 13, 1994.

Every interviewer now asks her the same question: How could she not have known that Nicole was being battered?

Why did she come out at first and say that Nicole was not a victim of domestic abuse?

It is a measure of the desperation of the family and the madness of this trial that Denise chooses to grieve in public, airing her confidences to Geraldo Rivera, who has become not only her close friend but a booker for reporters who seek interview time.

Her conversation has a definite agita; she speaks in the idiom of twelve-step programs. She says, "I don't want to spend my time thinking about what-ifs, what-ifs. Nicole never told us she was battered! She would say, 'He threw me against the wine cabinet, and then we went out to lunch.'"

Denise does not dwell on what the family chose not to see. "What good would that do?... I want to help other women now. This foundation is my crusade for life. Now I am a happy person. I have a mission and a cause."

Is it mean-spirited to speculate that, as in the case of many battered women, Nicole's family seemed intent on not seeing the truth of what was going on?

Denise has taken on the public role for the family; it is her odd task to advance the narrative of what the Brown family knew about the Simpson marriage. There are many episodes that she willingly retails: When Nicole attended a Buffalo Bills game on an early date, O.J. blew up when he saw her kiss a friend on the cheek. Denise said to her younger sister, "This is ridiculous. What are you doing with this guy?"

She is reduced to admitting, "He was awful again and again. And when it was good, they were in a honeymoon phase, and they would go around and around in a vicious circle."

Marie Brenner

Beyond the Courtroom

Vogue Magazine

(May 1995)

An Open Book?

The Fame of Denise Brown...

'Just Another Brentwood Sidewalk...'

Several weeks ago in Los Angeles, inside the ninth-floor courtroom of Judge Lance Ito, there was a weird silence as a bailiff prepared to screen a video of a Brentwood sidewalk on the morning of June 13, 1994.

The sidewalk at 875 South Bundy Drive is now a cultural totem, the most famous crime scene in America.

As the reporters in the courtroom wait for the video to begin, they scribble the precise time and date in their notebooks: February 23, 1.38pm.

There are no windows in Judge Ito's courtroom, no sense of the outside world; the tension is unrelieved as the lights go dim. "Let's take it from the top," Ito says.

We hear static and then, on a large screen behind the jurors' box, there is the first image of daylight: stalks of purple agapanthus blowing on a sunny day in June, Nicole Brown Simpson's summer perennial border. Blue Lilies of the Nile, creeping phlox.

At his seat at the defense table on the left side of the court, O.J. Simpson fidgets, then looks down at his feet.

Above us, visible through the scrim of agapanthus, are the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, shrouded in yellow tarps. The edges of the tarps flutter.

I resist the temptation to write in my notebook that it is an ordinary day in court - as if any day in "the Simpson matter" could be routine - but on the afternoon's calendar there is a defense motion, a "housekeeping procedure" to examine this particular video, taken by a Channel 5 camerman, of several police officers moving heavily through their duties on the morning of June 13.

This not a minor piece of business: It is a major contention of the defense that the L.A.P.D. botched the investigation, smeared the invisible footprints, mixed up the DNA.

In anticipation of the viewing of the crime scene, the reporters and the family in the courtroom are unusually fraught.

One of the more startling aspects of The State of California v. Simpson has been our realization of the capricious nature of the video camera; it can be anywhere at any time, wielded by a wandering parent at a Brentwood middle-school parking lot after a ballet recital or held casually by a TV camerman on South Bundy Drive on the morning after the murders and later subpoenaed to be viewed inside a courtroom while more than 15 million people watch...

Marie Brenner

Beyond the Courtroom

Vogue Magazine

(May 1995)

'A Macabre Performance'
Nicole Brown Simpson (The Poignant Story of a Life Interrupted)

'People Loved Her...'

Nicole Brown met O.J. Simpson in 1977 when she was just 18 years old. 

O.J. was 30 at the time and arguably one of the greatest football players of all time. Seven years later. she became his second wife.

In the course of her adult life, Brown, who moved in with Simpson soon after graduating from Dana Hills High School in Dana Point, California, held only two jobs - that of waitress and sales clerk. Her entire working career lasted no more than a few months.

Yet, as the wife of an NFL superstar, Nicole Simpson led a life surrounded by beautiful things, full of leisure time and travel to exotic destinations.

Who  was Nicole Brown Simpson?

She was a beautiful girl who came of age amidst luxury and fame; the one-time wife of a great American athlete; a mother of two.

People loved her.

Days after her death the bloodstains on the steps outside her condominium had still not been scrubbed away...

O.J. Simpson: From Triumph to Tragedy

Collectors Edition

The Rise and Fall of a National Hero

(LFP Inc 1994)

'The Brutal Truth...'

A spine tingling computer re-enactment of the brutal murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman reveal that the killer cruelly tortured both victims before slaying them.

Experts also say that the attacker took off his gloves to feel for his dark woolen cap, which had been knocked off during the death struggle.

The amazing re-creation, which marked its debut of the USA Network, was pieced together using medical evidence from the victims' bodies and measurements from the crime scene by Failure Analysis Associates of Menlo Park, Calif.

It's the same firm that re-created for investigators the 1981 Hyatt-Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City, and the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

"What we have created is the only hypothesis of the murders that accounts for all of the major wounds, the final positions of the bodies, and the timing of the attacks," boasts Failure Analysis C.E.O. Roger McCarthy.

The fatal sequence, which runs 3 minutes and 40 seconds, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and took 23 days to make.

McCarthy says the assailant was portrayed as a black man because 26 African-American hairs were found in the cap left behind by the killer...

Globe Magazine

April 18 1995

'Covering Up the Truth'

The Simpson trial is hardly typical of what goes on in courtrooms daily across America.

But however unwittingly, Jeanette Harris's interviews opened an important window on issues that have reverberated since the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman last June.

She showed - again - how blacks and whites view the judicial system in profoundly different ways. She raised questions about the cherished system of trial by jury, and the role that money plays for criminal defendants.

She illustrated how the intense pressure of the news media can transform the judicial process.

In the confines of his jail cell, Simpson could leisurely contemplate these issues...

But his team had a week that most murder defendants could only dream about.

Barry Scheck, one of two defense lawyers in charge of blood evidence, skewered criminalist Dennis Fung in a devastating cross-examination. Fung conceded a variety of potentially highly damaging points. 

Among then: that a blanket taken from Nicole's condo to cover her body could have contained O.J.'s hair and clothes fibers - and that could explain how they ended up at the crime scene outside 875 South Bundy.

Having failed a fortnight ago to shake the testimony of Mark Fuhrman, the detective who found the bloody glove, the defense now found itself with a corps of Keystone criminalists and coroners to torment.

The impact was not lost on former L.A. district attorney Ira Reiner. "The defense is going to take that blanket and make it large enough to cover everything from Bundy to Rockingham before they're through with it," he said.

Newsweek Magazine

April 17 1995

'A Defence Strategy of Altercation...'

It is fair for the defence to introduce evidence about racist remarks allegedly made by a detective 10 years ago, but not fair for the prosecution to introduce evidence about Simpson's wife-battering, what the defence prefers to describe as "so-called domestic violence", or "domestic discord".

The night Simpson gave Nicole such a beating that she told police she thought he was going to kill her is routinely referred to by Cochran as "an altercation".

But the defence tactics hit rock bottom on the day Nicole's older sister, Denise, gave evidence.

Denise was close to her slain sister and bears a striking resemblance to her; it was absolutely understandable that she should begin to cry on the witness stand when she was describing how Nicole was treated by Simpson - on one occasion he grabbed her crotch in a crowded bar and bellowed "This belongs to me!" - but every time she began to weep the defence objected and asked for a "sidebar", a huddle with the judge and the prosecution lawyers out of earshot of the jury.

Denise, dressed head to foot in black and wearing a silver cross that belonged to Nicole, ended her testimony that day tearfully recalling the last time she saw her sister, only hours before she was killed. They had been together at a dance recital at the school attended by Nicole's nine-year-old daughter, Sydney, and then went out to dinner.

Afterwards Nicole said she was going off to buy some ice cream for the kids and they said goodbye. They kissed and Denise told her sister that she loved her. At that point Denise broke down completely, sobbing pitifully, unable to continue. It was painful to watch...

I imagined, perhaps naively, that nobody in the courtroom could fail to be moved by Denise's grief at the loss of her sister. I was wrong.

When Cochran breezed out of the court building that weekend, he announced to reporters that he thought Denise might have been putting on an act, coached by the prosecution. "That is one of the reasons we kept approaching the bench. I saw it coming. We kept trying to say it was not fair."

Someone asked what was so unfair about a woman weeping and Cochran replied: "If it was planned, is that fair?"

The Magazine

The Sunday Times

April 16 1995

'An Obsessive Relationship...'

Kato Kaelin, 36, captivated the nation with his jittery, hyperactive and at times funny appearance as a key witness in the O.J. murder trial, where prosecutor Marcia Clark grilled him about his relationship with Simpson and Nicole.

A court insider says: "Everyone's talking about what was really going on between Kato and Nicole.

"Why did she let this wannabe actor live in her house and babysit her kids?"

And sources told STAR that Simpson was obsessed by the very same questions.

For months after Kato moved in with Nicole, O.J. believed he was more than just a wise-cracking jester at her home.

O.J. became suspicious after Kato took over the guest house in the back yard of Nicole's rented property on Gretna Green Way, Brentwood, in the spring of 1993, after agreeing to pay her $400 a month rent.

And he was angered when word got back to him that Nicole was telling everyone: "You should meet my new babysitter. He's just the cutest guy."

One of her close friends said: "We all thought it was amusing that Nicole should use Kato to look after her kids.

"Kato's boyish charm and impish behavior was just what Nicole needed. She was vulnerable and needed a guy around the house..."

Star Magazine

April 11 1995

'A Strategy of Denial...'

But now, after detailed interviews with the defense source, STAR can reveal the Simpson's team strategy...

In another strange event on the night of the murders, it is claimed that a woman - who said she was a reporter for NBC - called the Wilshire Police Division in Los Angeles between 10 p.m and 10.30 p.m and asked the watch commander if he had information on "the double murders on the west side" of the city.

She apparently said her information came from the coroner's office.

"We will prove that this call was made even before the murders were committed," says the source, "and that someone else must have known about the crime.

"One of our investigators has found the police officer who documented this call," says the source.

"It is amazing how conveniently this piece of information is being ignored by the prosecution and the LAPD."

Star Magazine

March 14 1995

'The Sinister Secret...'

Desperate lawmen have kept sinister secrets from the jury in the O.J. Simpson trial because they're terrified that he'll walk if they hear the whole story!

That's the startling charge O.J.'s defense team has leveled at the detectives and the district attorney's office in the winner-take-all court battle.

The cop's primary motivation was fear of the defense and the media, says O.J.'s team.

After Nicole Simpson's and Ron Goldman's bodies were taken away, worried police cleaned up the scene so completely there was nothing for defense experts to get their hands on, say O.J.'s lawyers.

Cops didn't call the coroner for hours after Officer Robert Riske first saw the bodies, because they feared the press would come with the coroner, say police witnesses.

Insiders also suggest that the LAPD's friction with the coroner's office was another reason they kept them in the dark.

Ironically, because the police waited and because the coroner didn't preserve some of the victim's vital organs, the prosecution was left with precious little detail of when Nicole and Ron actually died.

The other motivation for the cops was hatred of O.J., Cochran says.

The police force is rife with racism that reared its ugly head when a rich black man was charged with killing his white wife and her white male friend, charge insiders.

And Cochran says the cop who hates O.J. the most is Mark Fuhrman.

He and other defense lawyers believe Fuhrman planted the glove to frame O.J.

National Examiner Magazine

March 7 1995

'Nicole Brown Simpson...More Than Just Skin Deep'

Though the money she asked for in her divorce might suggest otherwise, her friends claim that the Nicole they knew didn't fit the stereotype of the idle, rich divorcee whose days are divided into equal parts of shopping, lunching and full-body grooming.

"She looked grubby a lot of the time," says Patricia Rose, meaning it as a compliment.

"She wasn't into make-up." 

Arina Hanciulescu, a sales clerk at a clothing shop in Brentwood Gardens, a collection of nice stores at the heart of the neighborhood, remembers seeing Nicole only occasionally.

"She would just look and leave. I never sold her anything."

Says Greer, "I think she wore the same dress almost every day. She hated shopping.

Pretentious people were her pet peeve."

The Nicole her friends remember was attentive, concerned, nonjudgmental, even spiritual...

Nicole Brown Simpson: Her Story

Jeannie Ralston

Glamour Magazine

October 1994