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The People v. O.J. Simpson Recap: Fact-Checking Episode 7
Left, from Pool/AFP/Getty Images; Right, courtesy of FX
The glove didn’t fit, the prosecutors didn’t hook up (or aren’t telling), and that Colombian necktie gambit really worked.
BY
This week FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson gives us what we want: the glove! Finally. As with the Bronco chase, Ryan Murphy and the writers manipulate the audience’s expectations in the best possible ways. The most infamous events of the trial (even the ensuing parodies, from Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld are part of a shared memory that connects Americans old enough to have been a part of the trial, even just as viewers. And those personal memories further fill out every scene in the show—watching every episode makes us creators of the story as well as consumers.
David Schwimmer is back in a more prominent role this episode, playing conscience of America Robert Kardashian, asking Johnnie Cochran why nobody’s found the real killer yet, and why there’s no other “realistic” theory for who did it. Schwimmer plays the scene as if he were a kid discovering that Santa Claus isn’t real. “I have trouble with the blood in the Bronco,” which he actually said to Barbara Walters during a “20/20 interview, intimating that loyal friend A.C. Cowlings had similar doubts about their friend’s innocence.
A few episodes ago, we saw Johnnie Cochran emphasizing the importance of narrative—the side with the best story wins. Alan Dershowitz expands on his teammate’s axiom in a lesson for a class he’s leading at Harvard. As he and his students watch Cochran expound in the courtroom (on TV), Dershowitz appraises the spectacle: “Look at what the culture is becoming. The media, people—they want narrative too. But they want it to be entertainment. And what’s out in the world osmoses back into the courtroom, sequester be damned. If there’s gonna be a media circus, you better well be the ringmaster.”
There’s no question who the ringmaster is: it’s Cochran, who Christopher Darden describes as made of “Teflon.” Here, we see him take charge from the very first scene, sculpting the narrative that’s going to win, while both Marcia Clark and Darden naively dismiss the importance of a good story for the bland constraints of truth and evidence. Darden, who had earlier intuited the need for drama—“We have hard evidence and they razzle-dazzle a bunch of conspiracy nonsense in the big moments. We need to make our own big moment”—tells his friends that the jury will be able to tell the difference between entertainment and real life. A strategic misstep at the time, but now a sharp reflection on the merger between the two that dominates pop culture.
We see Cochran start to lose control of his story ever so briefly, that of upstanding member of the African-American community, when his first wife and former mistress appear on television together to air his dirty laundry, which really happened. He regains his balance quickly, and shifts focus from himself back on to the case, just like that. Barbara Berry, his ex-wife, also gave an interview to People magazine during the trial in which she said of Patricia, the woman with whom Cochran kept up a multi-decade affair during his marriage to Berry, “I feel she's been caught up in a web of deceit spun by Johnnie. . . . I'm just glad I'm not part of that circus anymore.”
On to a fact check of the episode’s highlights.
The “Colombian necktie” fax from Dershowitz to Cochran in the courtroom.
True. But even better was what was left out of the scene, either for time constraints or to preserve Cochran’s “ringmaster” image: Dershowitz, who may or may not have been teaching at the time of the fax (it’s not mentioned in his book about the trial), sent word that drug cartels sometimes killed in a manner similar to Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder—a “Colombian necktie.” But Cochran got it hilariously wrong in court. He asked Detective Tom Lange, “Have you ever heard of something called a Colombian necklace?”
Even so, Lange knew what Cochran was talking about and then proceeded to mess with him, on the stand. After a recess, Cochran corrected his question, but Lange answered the original question, describing a real form of mob murder in South Africa (as cited in Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth’s book about the trial: “ ‘My information is that it is a tire that would be put over someone’s neck and set afire,’ Lange answered. He was explaining a ‘necklace.’ Johnnie stopped short. That wasn’t what Alan Dershowitz had said in his fax.”
Johnnie Cochran’s ex-wife and former mistress appeared on tabloid T.V. together.
True. Patricia, with ex-wife Barbara at her side, went public with her 20-plus-year relationship with Cochran that produced son Johnnie Jr., in a joint interview on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show. Why the show runners didn’t want to fictionalize a Geraldo Rivera interview is anybody’s guess and a perhaps the only significant misstep the show has taken thus far. Following that interview, Johnnie apparently stopped monthly payments to Patricia, and during the trial, she filed a million-dollar patrimony suit.
As for the divorce documents that show Barbara accusing Johnnie of physical and verbal abuse, those also exist. Her analysis of not just past transgressions in their marriage (which broke up over his “philandering all over town” . . . on top of his double-life with Patricia), reads astutely and clearheadedly, and not at all like as if it came from a vindictive ex-lover, which Johnnie and then-wife Dale went on T.V. during the trial to imply. From an SFGate review of Barbara’s memoir, Life After Johnnie, “The book's respectful tone makes Berry's concluding remarks about Cochran's strategy in the O.J. Simpson trial all the more convincing. She believes the two men are “mirror images of each other in their apparent disdain for women,” in the way they demonstrate "the abusive man's need to control his wife” and in their style of "trying to co-opt rather than confront” people who stand in their way—until they don't get their way and violence is suddenly unleashed.”
Nicole Brown Simpson bought the Isotoner gloves that were found at the crime scene at Bloomingdale’s in December 1990.
True. A further, downer assertion from Without a Doubt, Marcia Clark’s book about the trial: “I found this whole business incredibly sad. It was clear to me that Nicole had bought those gloves as a Christmas gift for her husband. And he’d used them to murder her? Oh, man, what a world.”
Robert Kardashian had the garment bag that O.J took with him to Chicago the night of the murders—and Robert Shapiro was still suggesting that Simpson take a plea bargain, with Kardashian pleading as an accessory.
True. Kardashian was more outraged than the flustered Schwimmer at suggestions of an accessory plea from Shapiro. Kardashian was photographed carrying the Louis Vuitton garment bag and told CNN that he tried to give the bag to police, but they “refused” to take it. “The police could have taken it … at any time. They never sought to do so, in fact when we turned it in to the court nine months later, they still never did any tests to see if there was blood. I don't believe they really wanted to know the answer.”
Fred Goldman, victim Ron Goldman’s father, still maintains that Kardashian hid or destroyed evidence in the bag that would have convicted Simpson.
O.J. had been trained to kill for a T.V. pilot called Frogmen.
Halfway true. The cast (which, amazingly, included Evan Handler, who plays Alan Dershowitz in the FX series) received some training. According to Variety, “ Simpson played the leader of a crack team of ex-Navy SEALs. The group worked out of a surf shop in Malibu, and the tone seemed designed to tap into a vibe similar to that of The A-Team. In a moment that fleetingly drew attention during the trial because of its parallels to the murders, there was one sequence in which Simpson’s character, John “Bullfrog” Burke, surprises an intruder and holds a knife to her throat.”
Shapiro tried on the crime-scene gloves in evidence during a courtroom break.
True. So did Cochran, according to Lawrence Schiller’s American Tragedy. But the defense just planned “at some time in the future” to have O.J. put on the gloves before the jury.
F. Lee Bailey told Christopher Darden that he had “the balls of a stud field mouse.”
True.
Wait, really?
Uh-huh. At least according, again, to Schiller’s American Tragedy. It was Bailey who baited Darden into having the prosecution ask for what the defense would have done itself:
As the break was ending and Darden entered the courtroom, Bailey saw his moment. He walked over to the prosecutor and whispered, “You’ve got the balls of a stud field mouse.” Lee Bailey was enjoying himself thoroughly…. “You’re not going to have our client try these gloves on, are you?” Bailey said in a friendly tone. “They probably won’t fit, and you may not wish to know. But if, as I suspect, you lack the balls to find out, we might find out for you.” Darden smiled and said nothing.
Marcia Clark was against having O.J. try on the gloves in front of the jury, even though Darden was for it.
False. The prosecution had always planned to have Simpson try on the gloves—but a duplicate pair of the exact ones found at the scene (extra-large Isotoners) that they ordered from the manufacturer, not the bloodied glove from evidence and not with a latex glove underneath. And it was Judge Ito who made the crucial call to have Simpson try on, with latex gloves underneath, the actual blood-soaked (and possibly shrunken) crime-scene glove, not the duplicates the prosecution had intended.
The scene, though devastating to the case, was slightly less pathetic in real life than played onscreen, at least to Clark’s eyes. From her memoir:
“Chris held up valiantly. He had Simpson pick up one of the felt-tip pens on counsel’s table and demonstrate how he could have held a knife. He then had Simpson make stabbing motions. It was a brave recovery. I gave him credit for that. . . . .
“When the demonstration was finally over, Simpson casually snapped the gloves off. And I thought to myself, If they were so hard to get on, why are they so easy to get off, Sparky?
“In the days and weeks that followed, we got literally thousands of faxes, phone calls, and letters with explanations of why the gloves hadn’t fit. We also received a dozen photographs of Simpson wearing Aris Leather Lights.”
As for Darden’s recollections from that moment: “ [Simpson] was bullshytting, and I hoped everyone could see it, hoped the jury could see it.”
Did Chris Darden whisk Marcia Clark off on a weekend getaway to San Francisco?
Yes. But. According to Without a Doubt, it was a trip to visit Darden’s family and his teenage daughter:
“We made the five-hour drive in Chris’s Toyota Camry. I was so paranoid about being spotted that when we stopped at a gas station, I pulled the hood of my parka over my face. But the farther north we got, the more relaxed I felt. We could talk for once without running the risk of being overheard. We vented about Fuhrman, Johnnie, Ito, the goddamned media. TFC, TFC, This fukking Case.
“That weekend I was in a state of absolute euphoria. Chris and I checked into the Fairmont—taking separate rooms, for those of you keeping score. He introduced me to his family. One night his sisters and I went out to a place near the wharf. People recognized us—hell, all that airtime had made us the two most recognizable civil servants in the country— but they kept their distance. I felt lighter, more hopeful than I had in months. It seemed possible that someday life might return to normal. On the trip home I remained enveloped in this euphoria . . .”
But Darden’s book is the source material for the hotel “Good night” scene in San Francisco: “I was grinning like a kid as I met Marcia on the side of the [Fairmont Hotel] . . . For Marcia and me, it was a world without jurors, experts, and television cameras . . . Much later, we paused at our separate doors, ten feet of papered wall between us. She faced her hotel room door in a trademark Marcia dress, short and black. She looked down toward her shoes. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said. “Good night, Chris.”
Both Darden and Clark have not revealed whether they had a romantic or sexual relationship, but they each write about the other with true affection and admiration. Clark has said they were “closer than lovers,” and Darden spends a lot of time wondering about entering into a relationship with her in his book. “She and I were two passionate people thrown together in a trial that left us exhausted and lonely. … Of course the question the media ask is more base. It is a locker-room question . . . My parents taught me that locker-room talk isn’t at all gentlemanly. I refuse to surrender the last posts of privacy that we have . . .”
Gossip magazines regularly reported seeing the two at bars and hotels around Los Angeles, and Peoplemagazine went so far as to claim that they planned to marry. From a Daily News story from 1995: “The New York Post cites a source in the Los Angeles' prosecutors office who says, “ ‘Everybody knows about them. Everybody's saying that it shows at least one good thing came out of that wretched trial.’ ”
If a scene like the one between Darden and Clark in front of her hotel room really took place, then it has stayed between the two of them. In choosing to have Darden rebuff Clark’s apparent willingness, the writers of the FX series did two smart things: kept the sexual tension going (which it did throughout the trial and even after the verdict), and given a more dramatic motive for Darden’s going for the glove. The viewer’s heart breaks twice over for one of the few genuinely likeable characters in the series.
Left, from Pool/AFP/Getty Images; Right, courtesy of FX
The glove didn’t fit, the prosecutors didn’t hook up (or aren’t telling), and that Colombian necktie gambit really worked.
BY
This week FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson gives us what we want: the glove! Finally. As with the Bronco chase, Ryan Murphy and the writers manipulate the audience’s expectations in the best possible ways. The most infamous events of the trial (even the ensuing parodies, from Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld are part of a shared memory that connects Americans old enough to have been a part of the trial, even just as viewers. And those personal memories further fill out every scene in the show—watching every episode makes us creators of the story as well as consumers.
David Schwimmer is back in a more prominent role this episode, playing conscience of America Robert Kardashian, asking Johnnie Cochran why nobody’s found the real killer yet, and why there’s no other “realistic” theory for who did it. Schwimmer plays the scene as if he were a kid discovering that Santa Claus isn’t real. “I have trouble with the blood in the Bronco,” which he actually said to Barbara Walters during a “20/20 interview, intimating that loyal friend A.C. Cowlings had similar doubts about their friend’s innocence.
A few episodes ago, we saw Johnnie Cochran emphasizing the importance of narrative—the side with the best story wins. Alan Dershowitz expands on his teammate’s axiom in a lesson for a class he’s leading at Harvard. As he and his students watch Cochran expound in the courtroom (on TV), Dershowitz appraises the spectacle: “Look at what the culture is becoming. The media, people—they want narrative too. But they want it to be entertainment. And what’s out in the world osmoses back into the courtroom, sequester be damned. If there’s gonna be a media circus, you better well be the ringmaster.”
There’s no question who the ringmaster is: it’s Cochran, who Christopher Darden describes as made of “Teflon.” Here, we see him take charge from the very first scene, sculpting the narrative that’s going to win, while both Marcia Clark and Darden naively dismiss the importance of a good story for the bland constraints of truth and evidence. Darden, who had earlier intuited the need for drama—“We have hard evidence and they razzle-dazzle a bunch of conspiracy nonsense in the big moments. We need to make our own big moment”—tells his friends that the jury will be able to tell the difference between entertainment and real life. A strategic misstep at the time, but now a sharp reflection on the merger between the two that dominates pop culture.
We see Cochran start to lose control of his story ever so briefly, that of upstanding member of the African-American community, when his first wife and former mistress appear on television together to air his dirty laundry, which really happened. He regains his balance quickly, and shifts focus from himself back on to the case, just like that. Barbara Berry, his ex-wife, also gave an interview to People magazine during the trial in which she said of Patricia, the woman with whom Cochran kept up a multi-decade affair during his marriage to Berry, “I feel she's been caught up in a web of deceit spun by Johnnie. . . . I'm just glad I'm not part of that circus anymore.”
On to a fact check of the episode’s highlights.
The “Colombian necktie” fax from Dershowitz to Cochran in the courtroom.
True. But even better was what was left out of the scene, either for time constraints or to preserve Cochran’s “ringmaster” image: Dershowitz, who may or may not have been teaching at the time of the fax (it’s not mentioned in his book about the trial), sent word that drug cartels sometimes killed in a manner similar to Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder—a “Colombian necktie.” But Cochran got it hilariously wrong in court. He asked Detective Tom Lange, “Have you ever heard of something called a Colombian necklace?”
Even so, Lange knew what Cochran was talking about and then proceeded to mess with him, on the stand. After a recess, Cochran corrected his question, but Lange answered the original question, describing a real form of mob murder in South Africa (as cited in Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth’s book about the trial: “ ‘My information is that it is a tire that would be put over someone’s neck and set afire,’ Lange answered. He was explaining a ‘necklace.’ Johnnie stopped short. That wasn’t what Alan Dershowitz had said in his fax.”
Johnnie Cochran’s ex-wife and former mistress appeared on tabloid T.V. together.
True. Patricia, with ex-wife Barbara at her side, went public with her 20-plus-year relationship with Cochran that produced son Johnnie Jr., in a joint interview on Geraldo Rivera’s talk show. Why the show runners didn’t want to fictionalize a Geraldo Rivera interview is anybody’s guess and a perhaps the only significant misstep the show has taken thus far. Following that interview, Johnnie apparently stopped monthly payments to Patricia, and during the trial, she filed a million-dollar patrimony suit.
As for the divorce documents that show Barbara accusing Johnnie of physical and verbal abuse, those also exist. Her analysis of not just past transgressions in their marriage (which broke up over his “philandering all over town” . . . on top of his double-life with Patricia), reads astutely and clearheadedly, and not at all like as if it came from a vindictive ex-lover, which Johnnie and then-wife Dale went on T.V. during the trial to imply. From an SFGate review of Barbara’s memoir, Life After Johnnie, “The book's respectful tone makes Berry's concluding remarks about Cochran's strategy in the O.J. Simpson trial all the more convincing. She believes the two men are “mirror images of each other in their apparent disdain for women,” in the way they demonstrate "the abusive man's need to control his wife” and in their style of "trying to co-opt rather than confront” people who stand in their way—until they don't get their way and violence is suddenly unleashed.”
Nicole Brown Simpson bought the Isotoner gloves that were found at the crime scene at Bloomingdale’s in December 1990.
True. A further, downer assertion from Without a Doubt, Marcia Clark’s book about the trial: “I found this whole business incredibly sad. It was clear to me that Nicole had bought those gloves as a Christmas gift for her husband. And he’d used them to murder her? Oh, man, what a world.”
Robert Kardashian had the garment bag that O.J took with him to Chicago the night of the murders—and Robert Shapiro was still suggesting that Simpson take a plea bargain, with Kardashian pleading as an accessory.
True. Kardashian was more outraged than the flustered Schwimmer at suggestions of an accessory plea from Shapiro. Kardashian was photographed carrying the Louis Vuitton garment bag and told CNN that he tried to give the bag to police, but they “refused” to take it. “The police could have taken it … at any time. They never sought to do so, in fact when we turned it in to the court nine months later, they still never did any tests to see if there was blood. I don't believe they really wanted to know the answer.”
Fred Goldman, victim Ron Goldman’s father, still maintains that Kardashian hid or destroyed evidence in the bag that would have convicted Simpson.
O.J. had been trained to kill for a T.V. pilot called Frogmen.
Halfway true. The cast (which, amazingly, included Evan Handler, who plays Alan Dershowitz in the FX series) received some training. According to Variety, “ Simpson played the leader of a crack team of ex-Navy SEALs. The group worked out of a surf shop in Malibu, and the tone seemed designed to tap into a vibe similar to that of The A-Team. In a moment that fleetingly drew attention during the trial because of its parallels to the murders, there was one sequence in which Simpson’s character, John “Bullfrog” Burke, surprises an intruder and holds a knife to her throat.”
Shapiro tried on the crime-scene gloves in evidence during a courtroom break.
True. So did Cochran, according to Lawrence Schiller’s American Tragedy. But the defense just planned “at some time in the future” to have O.J. put on the gloves before the jury.
F. Lee Bailey told Christopher Darden that he had “the balls of a stud field mouse.”
True.
Wait, really?
Uh-huh. At least according, again, to Schiller’s American Tragedy. It was Bailey who baited Darden into having the prosecution ask for what the defense would have done itself:
As the break was ending and Darden entered the courtroom, Bailey saw his moment. He walked over to the prosecutor and whispered, “You’ve got the balls of a stud field mouse.” Lee Bailey was enjoying himself thoroughly…. “You’re not going to have our client try these gloves on, are you?” Bailey said in a friendly tone. “They probably won’t fit, and you may not wish to know. But if, as I suspect, you lack the balls to find out, we might find out for you.” Darden smiled and said nothing.
Marcia Clark was against having O.J. try on the gloves in front of the jury, even though Darden was for it.
False. The prosecution had always planned to have Simpson try on the gloves—but a duplicate pair of the exact ones found at the scene (extra-large Isotoners) that they ordered from the manufacturer, not the bloodied glove from evidence and not with a latex glove underneath. And it was Judge Ito who made the crucial call to have Simpson try on, with latex gloves underneath, the actual blood-soaked (and possibly shrunken) crime-scene glove, not the duplicates the prosecution had intended.
The scene, though devastating to the case, was slightly less pathetic in real life than played onscreen, at least to Clark’s eyes. From her memoir:
“Chris held up valiantly. He had Simpson pick up one of the felt-tip pens on counsel’s table and demonstrate how he could have held a knife. He then had Simpson make stabbing motions. It was a brave recovery. I gave him credit for that. . . . .
“When the demonstration was finally over, Simpson casually snapped the gloves off. And I thought to myself, If they were so hard to get on, why are they so easy to get off, Sparky?
“In the days and weeks that followed, we got literally thousands of faxes, phone calls, and letters with explanations of why the gloves hadn’t fit. We also received a dozen photographs of Simpson wearing Aris Leather Lights.”
As for Darden’s recollections from that moment: “ [Simpson] was bullshytting, and I hoped everyone could see it, hoped the jury could see it.”
Did Chris Darden whisk Marcia Clark off on a weekend getaway to San Francisco?
Yes. But. According to Without a Doubt, it was a trip to visit Darden’s family and his teenage daughter:
“We made the five-hour drive in Chris’s Toyota Camry. I was so paranoid about being spotted that when we stopped at a gas station, I pulled the hood of my parka over my face. But the farther north we got, the more relaxed I felt. We could talk for once without running the risk of being overheard. We vented about Fuhrman, Johnnie, Ito, the goddamned media. TFC, TFC, This fukking Case.
“That weekend I was in a state of absolute euphoria. Chris and I checked into the Fairmont—taking separate rooms, for those of you keeping score. He introduced me to his family. One night his sisters and I went out to a place near the wharf. People recognized us—hell, all that airtime had made us the two most recognizable civil servants in the country— but they kept their distance. I felt lighter, more hopeful than I had in months. It seemed possible that someday life might return to normal. On the trip home I remained enveloped in this euphoria . . .”
But Darden’s book is the source material for the hotel “Good night” scene in San Francisco: “I was grinning like a kid as I met Marcia on the side of the [Fairmont Hotel] . . . For Marcia and me, it was a world without jurors, experts, and television cameras . . . Much later, we paused at our separate doors, ten feet of papered wall between us. She faced her hotel room door in a trademark Marcia dress, short and black. She looked down toward her shoes. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said. “Good night, Chris.”
Both Darden and Clark have not revealed whether they had a romantic or sexual relationship, but they each write about the other with true affection and admiration. Clark has said they were “closer than lovers,” and Darden spends a lot of time wondering about entering into a relationship with her in his book. “She and I were two passionate people thrown together in a trial that left us exhausted and lonely. … Of course the question the media ask is more base. It is a locker-room question . . . My parents taught me that locker-room talk isn’t at all gentlemanly. I refuse to surrender the last posts of privacy that we have . . .”
Gossip magazines regularly reported seeing the two at bars and hotels around Los Angeles, and Peoplemagazine went so far as to claim that they planned to marry. From a Daily News story from 1995: “The New York Post cites a source in the Los Angeles' prosecutors office who says, “ ‘Everybody knows about them. Everybody's saying that it shows at least one good thing came out of that wretched trial.’ ”
If a scene like the one between Darden and Clark in front of her hotel room really took place, then it has stayed between the two of them. In choosing to have Darden rebuff Clark’s apparent willingness, the writers of the FX series did two smart things: kept the sexual tension going (which it did throughout the trial and even after the verdict), and given a more dramatic motive for Darden’s going for the glove. The viewer’s heart breaks twice over for one of the few genuinely likeable characters in the series.
