Justice, too, has a Sense of Humor - The Rolling OJ Simpson Legal Thread

I am willing to bet that I am currently closer to the Bundy Dr. murder scene than any other ILXor currently.

>.5 miles.

The reemergence of Kato Kaelin as an evening news guest needs to be added to my end-of-civilization poll. Mods?

Also, my secretary (who is a little crazy) thinks that this is the latest attempt by an ongoing conspiracy to catch him doing something.

She has lived in the vicinity of the Brentwood condo for ~15 years.

http://i.l.cnn.net/cnn/2007/US/law/09/19/oj.simpson/art.oj.arraign.pool.jpg

Don't tase me, bro

I'm not sure that tshirt slogan qualifies as "wry."

Invisible handcuffs:

http://highbridnation.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/oj-017.jpg

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2008/10/02/PH2008100201768.jpg

RIP big man

so funny oj good luck
http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y49/picturesref/?action=view¤t=psychoj.flv

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/05/us/simpson.650.11.jpg

xpost ehhhhhhhhhh

Meantime, the price of fame for Lance Ito.

James Cameron is the director of 'Avatar' -- the highest-grossing film in history. But Mr. Cameron hasn't always had a smooth road to movie success. On '60 Minutes' (Sun., 7PM ET on CBS), Cameron discusses his early years in the industry -- including the time a studio tried to cast O.J. Simpson in one of his movies.

After being fired from his first directing job -- on the notorious flop 'Piranha II' -- Cameron had a vision for a new film. This vision literally came to him in a dream; a dream about a skeletal robot rising from a fire. In the end, the film became 'The Terminator,' his first blockbuster success.

But even though Arnold Schwarzenegger became famous in the role, he wasn't the studio's first choice. An executive wanted to cast O.J. Simpson as the killer cyborg from the future. Cameron was completely against the idea, thinking that O.J. would be totally miscast as a killer. Of course, this all took place years before the murders that would make Simpson infamous.

While telling this story, Cameron had to wince at the irony of the whole thing. "I didn't know O.J. Simpson. ... I didn't know that he was gonna go murder his wife later and become the real 'Terminator.'"

"Cameron was completely against the idea, thinking that O.J. would be totally miscast as a killer."

hahahahahahahaha

Wow, the glove making some news.

im fascinated by after the bronco chase, oj arriving home and drinking orange juice; its on his wiki but did it really go down the way its portrayed in American crime story of him verbally requesting his family bring him a glass of oj?? idk it seems so absurd

From a Vulture fact-checking article the other day: “I remember very well that he had orange juice,” Newton laughs. “I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t there, but once he was back home, he was allowed to compose himself and have a glass of orange juice before submitting himself to arrest. And that’s not uncommon in the effort to cool one of these situations off.”

No need for a link--I guess no one here is interested anymore.

hey guys OJ did it

*Drudge siren*

I wasn't suggesting his guilt was in question.

just waiting for a bills super fan to come on here and tell us that we can't know for certain what happened that night and should reserve judgment and not besmirch the juice's good name

lol

sad lol.

this is weird af

It's bizarre because it's probably a plant, it would be degraded beyond usefulness even if it weren't, he can't be retried, and he's in jail anyway. Unless there's a Trump connection, there's nowhere for the story to go.

there's a thread somewhere on ilx where some posters made a lengthy case for OJ's innocence, didn't find it convincing at the time

When I mentioned to friends I was seeing an eight-hour documentary on O.J. Simpson, two or three seemed at a loss to understand how the story could support such a length. It seemed just as obvious to me that, with some intelligence and a very wide lens, of course it could.

The first three hours, methodically laying out the 30-year backdrop to the murders, are excellent. Rodney King is the immediate prelude, but there's so much more, beginning with O.J.'s time at USC--you get a parallel track of O.J.'s racially ambiguous ascension on one side, Watts and John Carlos and Daryl Gates on the other, and you know already they're on a collision course. The murders and the trial--the next three hours--are very strong. The freak-show elements of the story are minimized (Kato Kaelin, for example, gets barely a mention); the focus is domestic abuse, Fuhrman, and how the case slipped away. I only started to lose a bit of focus during part five, the civil case and O.J.'s bizarre life after that (now that was a freak show).

At 12:30, when the film started, we were told the director would be there afterwards, along with "a very special guest"; "O.J.!" one guy called out, to much laughter. It was Gil Garcetti, who I had mixed feelings about at the time, possibly because he looked vaguely Satanic. He actually spoke thoughtfully about the film and the case. The sportswriter Robert Lipsyte was also there for the Q&A; he gets off what I thought was the funniest line in the film.

Unless there's a Trump connection, there's nowhere for the story to go.

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/o.j._zps9k5tclk7.jpg

who else has seen the 4- or 8-hour version?

i have never cared to have an opinion on his guilt or innocence; i ignored the trial as much as i could at the time.

its gonna be on espn this summer, & im planning to not ever watch it

spoiler - hes guilty

wtf

Can a mod get that pls

ok i'll bite - what is this documentary everyone assumes everyone knows about

Its just the fullday chase coverage with an oj commentary track

i bet even the 8-hr version has only 20 seconds of Towering Inferno and Roots

what got modded above?

he did it

just saw the trailer - a lot of v on the level critics like wesley morris are dropping extremely high praise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrB3rOcrJxg

Them, plus me.

i read your post upthread, also has me intrigued.

a.o. scott's review sez it does not handle the domestic violence aspects of the case (and OJ's life) as adroitly as the other major issues - did you think the same? i'm gonna watch it regardless, but seems odd that it'd be a blind spot amid what's supposedly v nuanced material

esp. considering that the primary producer, caroline waterlow, considers it one of the movie's major priorities https://medium.com/@laura_berger/o-j-made-in-america-producer-caroline-waterlow-on-race-marcia-clark-and-domestic-abuse-61eacd3dc19b#.yj6pkiqhl

For me, that's an odd thing to find fault with--I thought domestic violence was one of the film's primary focuses (foci?). The photos, the 911 calls, they're all there--and they make it clear that it had been going on for years, and that the LAPD had looked the other way more than once.

i love oj's childhood friend with the raspy, high voice.

Me too, reminds me a little of Cuba's voice in the FX show

i already cannot remember the details but someone in this was talking abt oj's reaction to something like oj was behaving like a real [blank] or in that moment i thought oj was a [blank] and the broadcast bleeped out the word? anyone know what im talking abt?

is this really ilx's only oj simpson thread?

Justice, too, has a Sense of Humor - The Rolling OJ Simpson Legal Thread
OH NO THEY GOT O.J.!!
No one cares how O.J. "would have done it"?

Thank you. The third one is what I was looking for.

i already cannot remember the details but someone in this was talking abt oj's reaction to something like oj was behaving like a real [blank] or in that moment i thought oj was a [blank] and the broadcast bleeped out the word? anyone know what im talking abt?

― johnny crunch, Sunday, June 12, 2016 5:55 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's robert lipsyte reacting to O.J. not being offended by hearing a white woman say, "look, there's O.J. sitting with all those n----rs." after describing O.J. saying that the white women "knew" how he wanted to be perceived, lipsyte is like, "at that point, I thought O.J. was fucked."

protip: if you watch via watchespn/the espn app, it's uncensored

thx slothrop! yea I had figured it out on the ep reair; its an odd usage grammatically & contextually imo

agree w/ you there - i can't tell if he meant O.J. was fucked up for saying that, or like, fucked in a broader sense by his desire for white approval

as in like, fucked for life as a result. gotta be precise w/ your profanity folks!

word yea I think he means the latter but should instead say crazy or deluded

the director of the doc was on NPR w/ jeff toobin and they both emphasized the domestic-violence angle over and over and over again. for one thing, it provided the jury with a clear pattern of behavior and motive.

apparently the espn app has all the episodes streaming

As I mentioned above, Lipsyte was there for the Q&A after the screening I attended. I thought his line about O.J. being fucked (because of racial schizophrenia, yes) was the driest and funniest in the film. When I asked him to sign my program afterwards (wished I'd had a book with me, although I realized afterwards that I don't have anything of his), I had to ask if he had a pen on him; "I'm a writer, aren't I?" as he produced a pen from his front pocket.

carl e douglas is amazing in this

what ever was the deal w oj's son running out & yelling/flailing @ ac cowlings in the bronco

oj & our justice system are both huge piles of shit, basically

in the FX miniseries, the kid is scared and agitated and iirc trying to tell O.J. to surrender, to which A.C. replies, "let me handle this" or some such - while that's fiction obvs, as far as i can tell by comparison to the doc it sticks verbatim to the script in the moments that are a matter of public record. e.g., A.C. and O.J.'s dialogue in the miniseries' bronco scenes matches up to the snippets you hear in the doc.

all this is making me want to read toobin's book on which the miniseries was based but that might be O.J. overkill for this year

the other amazing moment in part 3 is watching oj watch johnny cochrane roast darden in the sidebar abt the nword -- i think bailey or someone tries to whisper something to oj and he just is so intently focused on johnny & u can practically see his expression of like omg theres no way im getting found guilty

oj as an individual is only compelling in the way that most sociopaths can be compelling--he's essentially an inexplicable void--but what really makes this documentary great (so far) is the way that something like history or larger socio-cultural forces become caught in the black hole of his orbit and then get explosively expressed through the whole sordid mess. it's riveting and even exhilarating to watch that unfold.

Very well described--that's exactly why I thought it was so great, the way O.J.'s story was so inexorably linked to larger events (he's almost like the anti-Ali). Toobin's book (and every book of his I've read) is very good.

As the whole thing unfolds, there are a few elephants in the room who don't show up as interviewees: Darden and Ito are at the top of the list. (Shapiro fell out with the other lawyers the day after the case ended, so his absence isn't surprising). Darden must obviously still be really bitter about the whole thing. Someone suggested in the Q&A I attended that Ito was duty-bound not to participate, but the director quickly made it clear that Ito could have taken part if he'd wanted to. Also, that Garcetti's participation was the only reason Clark (who swears like a truck driver...) took part.

Fuhrman seems to take great pleasure in being the villain. Wasn't sure how to read him.

the director edelman said darden was one of the first people he tried to talk to but that dude doesn't wanna say word one about any of this apparently. can't really blame him

the most obvious missing talking head is OJ's first wife, and I can absolutely understand her not wanting to have anything to do with this or anything else about the guy, who I'll assume treated her like shit. she denied in the divorce proceedings that he abused her, and that's possible, but the doc makes clear that he cheated on her numerous times.

http://www.vogue.com/13446573/where-is-marguerite-simpson/

the spectacle of people surrounding the cops (who were themselves surrounding OJ) at the moment of his surrender cheering "Free OJ", etc. is so unbelievable. it's a mix of black folks and white folks. some of them are probably righteously indignant at the LAPD, for very good reason, but a lot of it reminded me of the retrograde penn state rioting after joe paterno was fired. just throwing their reflexive support behind an odious figure.

i should add, throwing their support behind him just because he's a celebrity they admired for his athletic prowess.

i was in college when all this went down. i remember watching part of the chase on TV, but then i moved on to something else... and i remember at the time (1995/96) feeling vague contempt toward people urging me to watch the trial on TV. i dunno, i guess i was just a snobby college kid, and i felt kind of repulsed by the whole thing. so a lot of this stuff is totally new to me, even though i easily could have been watching it 20 years ago.

most of the immed post-verdict reaxtion ftage shd be in the smithsonian, particularly the old woman screaming THE JUICE IS LOOSE HES LOOOOSE

i was in 6th grade when the trial ended so i didn't understand any of it. i didn't even understand until now what a big deal he used to be. unrelatedly, when he committed the robbery in las vegas he was 60 years old!

yeah i didnt have much context for the level of fame he had at the time of the chase, i knew from the reporting that it was a big deal but i had no idea why besides he possibly murdered someone

i said elsewhere the doc has been like a v comprehensive college course, it pulls a lot of threads together really well

Some of those ex LAPD on-camera interviews in ep 2/3 are so infuriating

i think i was a jr in hs, they wheeled a tv into my spanish class for the verdict

me too

i was too young to witness OJ's football career, so i mostly knew him as one of those celebrities who is mostly famous for being famous. oh, and "the naked gun" (where he is quite funny).

i was actually a little underwhelmed by the documentary, perhaps b/c expectations had been set so high. it's very good for what it is, particularly the first three episodes. but i found some of the discussion of the trial (and his history w/ nicole simpson) needlessly confusing, and there were some major lacunae.

I finished final ep tonight, was impressed that they don't really let anyone off the hook. Like, it's kinda shitty all round. And even Carl Douglas & Danny Bakewell claiming victory so decisively it comes across as pyrrhic

carl douglas is a very compelling screen presence.

yeah definitely. they should have had him play himself in the tv series!

i would listen to a carl douglas podcast/radio show for fucking hours

i love the way he talked about redecorating oj's house for the jury tour

"oh nooooo we would never do that" lol

and in the final episode talking about the nevada charges, "that thing was 2 years soaking wet" cracked me up

i think the achievement of the doc is the weight & sheer amount of context they gave to the "oj is innocent" movement

like i definitely came away with much more understanding of the complexities than i had before, in terms of the history of la wrt race & the lapd

Its def true all that plays in, but I was glad they also included the pov that the jury was just like fuck this we want to go home, your prosecution team was wack as hell so we are not even deliberating

still the superstar in rent-a-car

yeah that one juror was like fuck you I deliberated for 257 nights "I didnt deliberate" eat a dick

i kinda liked that old juror too, she was real as hell

the doc just briefly and gingerly touched on this, but i personally found the jurors' "we didn't like the prosecutors or the way they presented their case" excuse for the verdict to be a cover for an implicit misogyny. they blamed nicole.

carl douglas seems like a deeply morally compromised dude

he's also charismatic as hell

ideal combo for a defense attorney!

the doc just briefly and gingerly touched on this, but i personally found the jurors' "we didn't like the prosecutors or the way they presented their case" excuse for the verdict to be a cover for an implicit misogyny. they blamed nicole.

well, there was the one juror (now an elderly woman) who said a whole string of very unsettling things, including that she blames battered women for the harm done to them, since they didn't have the courage to leave their men.

xposts ... no, i didn't "like" that juror. she was "real" insofar as she admitted making her decision based on something other than a careful weighing of evidence.

the lack of deliberation is ridiculous. i've been on a jury for a much more small-potatoes crime (workplace harassment) and we deliberated for two whole days.

one guy on the jury was a contractor and constantly reminded us that for every hour we deliberated, he was losing money. eventually we had to call the judge in to remind him of his duty (and more or less tell him to shut up).

i mean, i was sympathetic to the guy (i was losing money, too, though maybe not as much money), but if you're on a jury you gotta deliberate.

granted we had not been sequestered for nine months, which to me is just unimaginable... almost like torture.

the insane experience of the sequester is as plausible a reason for the verdict as any. the defense team put on a dazzling show for nine whole months, the prosecution bumbled, often offensively so, and so it's not a far stretch to say they literally inhabited an alternate and distorted reality.

xpost yeah it's too long, any jury would work against you after that long sequestered

that whole thing where marcia clark said "they just didnt care" after presenting the domestic abuse material made me think that it was less the jury not caring and more that the prosecution just assumed the jury WOULD care without trying to understand their own jury or frame it in a way to make them care? idk

i think we have to admit that some folks on the jury (yes, even women) had some really retrograde notions about domestic abuse. and that played into the verdict. :(

yeah, i guess that's more the point :(

the doc just briefly and gingerly touched on this, but i personally found the jurors' "we didn't like the prosecutors or the way they presented their case" excuse for the verdict to be a cover for an implicit misogyny. they blamed nicole.

― ryan, Monday, June 20, 2016 1:43 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. they touched on that a bit though. didn't the prosecutor discover that the jury had an "unfavorable" view of nicole simpson? that was so fucked up to me. poor women was trapped in an abusive relationship with a probable sociopath since she was 18 years old.

in the end, i didn't understand why cochran, a civil rights lawyer, decided to take this on. he made his name protecting people who were unjustly victimized by the lapd and oj simpson was.... not that.

still on pt 3 tho

Didn't they explain that he did cases for famous people before?

As someone who don't remember anything about the case, which really didn't make sense as a kid in Denmark, this was a weird viewing experience. Of course, I know of the case, it's been referred to so much since then, but a lot of it was still very new to me. And very interesting. On the other hand, the story seemed slightly skewed. I know the trial is THE major part of any story on OJ Simpson, but from a purely dramatic viewpoint, it's really not the climax. It's the turning point, and the real story is from there til they jail him for something much less serious.

Which takes up way too little.

I think in Johnnie Cochran's eyes, O.J. was unjustly targeted by the LAPD. I only partly agree with that--I'm very much of the two seemingly contradictory truths view, that O.J. was 100% guilty and that the LAPD probably did try to embellish its case--but I don't think there's any doubt that Cochran saw, most egregiously in Fuhrman, a perfect case to underscore his life's work.

I think Cochrane was the only person who understood OJ and LA on a deep, cynical level and knew that the less this case was about murder the better. And he wanted to WIN. Prosecution wanted so badly to be right that they didn't realize they were playing small-ball til it was too late

and i agree with clemenza

You can get Cochran's whole closing statement online:

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/Simpson/cochranclose.html

Echoing VG's point--rather amazing, when you think about it--Cochran ends his statement with this: "That is Mark Fuhrman."

Actually, the title says "Excerpts," so I can't be sure that was the way the statement ended. Going by the placement of the eliding asterisks, it would seem so.

LAPD's institutional racism and general ineptitude undermining an open-and-shut case should come as a surprise to no one (or at least no Americans)

for real

it is truly awful that such horrific murders were not afforded a non-circus trial, i feel terrible for nicole's family & the goldmans

but there's a tiny part of me that is (somewhat guiltily) impressed by cochrane's laser vision

oj can eat a dick forever tho

finished part 4. i think cochran was drawn to the extraordinary opportunity this trial offered for both noble and ignoble reasons (fame on the one hand, and exposure for the very real issue of racial injustice on the other). he was a powerful orator and this was a once in a lifetime stage... idk, he comes across ambiguously to me in the end.

it's hard for me to believe anyone on the defense team sincerely believed oj was innocent though.

LAPD's institutional racism and general ineptitude undermining an open-and-shut case should come as a surprise to no one (or at least no Americans)

― Οὖτις, 6. juli 2016 22:50 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, this is the main thing I took from it. It's presented as if this was kinda just the first time a black defendant had the money to really do a background check on the LAPD officers who was on the case, and - surprise! - there was a Mark Fuhrman. But there would always have been a Mark Fuhrman, because this is the LAPD. The institution was so racist, so rotten, that it could never have won the case cleanly.

the florida years are so weird.

the las vegas thing, too, seemed like a subconscious attempt to face justice, like raskolnikov returning over and over to the scene of the crime or whatever. although if he was a true sociopath i guess he wouldn't feel that sort of guilt.

like all lawyers described as "high-powered," cochran was an egotist - he wanted the glory (and probably the intellectual challenge) of winning a high-profile case, and incidentally didn't mind the money, either. i don't know why we have to assume his "race card" defense was sincere (or why it would matter). btw by the mid-1990s cochran had long since displaced much of his civil-rights work for celebrity clients.

Finally finished the doc just now. an amazing piece of work and i tink ryan above puts his finger on it with larger socio-cultural forces become caught in the black hole of his orbit and then get explosively expressed through the whole sordid mess., and what Veg said about it feeling like a college course. the director's ability to field all these themes, and then explore them in depth via digressions throughout the documentary, was impressive, as well as his ability to tie all these threads together.

so many thoroughly sleazy and unlikable characters throughout the story. OJ's the key demon, but really: Furhman and his self-pity; Peter Hyams, who knew OJ did it but couldn't comprehend and hated african-americans' joy at the verdict; the defence team, who were only doing their job but seemed proud of how adeptly they did it; nearly everyone involved in the Florida and Vegas era...

this is marvelous

the other amazing moment in part 3 is watching oj watch johnny cochrane roast darden in the sidebar abt the nword -- i think bailey or someone tries to whisper something to oj and he just is so intently focused on johnny & u can practically see his expression of like omg theres no way im getting found guilty

― johnny crunch

One of the year's best moments.

In a sign of unity Trump should pardon OJ and hire him for his cabinet. Inner city physical fitness outreach?

xp of this year or 1995

never 4get

https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JR-HGfMcwLbhqxnx17cwJpbt8qY=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3638570/bushcampaignevent.0.jpg

BBC showing the full thing uncensored
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04st1yv/oj-made-in-america-part-1

tore through the first 3 hours last night, god damn this is amazing. sheer disbelief that there are people who are prepared to go on tv in 2017 and be equivocal about
the whole Rodney King thing.

i see it's up for an Oscar for Best Doc too.

It's amazing.

By weird coincidence I've just started watching the drama starring Ross From Friends now its on Netflix, and it's very jarring, having devoured all of that fantastic, very sober, very dark and very depressing documentary, to see the same story retold with very little nuance or subtlety and with constant, distracting "No really look its the Kardashians! Off TV!" digressions. Not not annoying it - it's trashy but good at being trashy - but it leaves a funny taste in the mouth after that magnificent, epic documentary.

binged this via t0rr3ntz on a couple of long flights last summer and was totally blown away - will def watch again on iplayer, it's just masterfully put together.

i kinda think it's better to watch the Murphy tv drama then follow up with the doc- it's like going from paint by numbers to an impressionist painting

i told a friend the doc is like taking an undergrad course in OJ

the doc is v v good

and agreed on the uncanny valley chasm between the doc and american crime story. my pop crit radar is completely off, though - i thought the show starring john travolta's forehead was r r bad, like R bad, like every time the camera would spin around the room 360 degrees and land back on that forehead i was more and more convinced that there was something subversively good going on, but the badness was unintentional. then it got all these award show nominations and people were taking it seriously and writing episode recaps and all that shit.

i have not read this thread so apologies if a bunch of people here liked the show and i'm being a dick. judging by the general acclaim for the ross/travolta-forehead show, there's probably quite a few fans here too

i enjoyed it but there's a weird disconnect between the actors who are intentionally camping it up and those who are unintentionally camping it up and those who are trying to be good and succeeding and those who are trying to be good and failing and those who aren't trying at all

also the bizarreness of cuba gooding jr as the main character, yet barely appearing at all and barely saying anything (for good reason), compared to the fascinating portrait of oj you get from the doc.

cuba's the weakest & most baffling part of the tv show to me. like, he's nowhere close to capturing oj physically or his charm or aggression ... it's just cuba pretending to be oj & it's dumb

i mean Sterling K Brown or Courtney Vance hit it out of the park & Cuba's playing fkn wiffle ball idgi

i told a friend the doc is like taking an undergrad course in OJ

Yes! And also American race relations in the 60s-90s, and the sins of the LAPD, and corruption at the higher echelons of American society, and how celebrity seduces so thoroughly it can help those who possess it literally get away with murder.

And tbf American Crime Story is R R BAD, esp any scene involving the younger Kardashians, but Ross From Friends is not camping it up even slightly and is actually really affecting in his role as the guy who believes in the Juice and really wants to save him but often seems really critically inept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=726Ujz_KOHE

Cuba's nothing performance actually makes People v OJ fit alongside the doc a bit better. The show is about the lawyers and the people surrounding the case, while the doc takes a deep deep dive into OJ himself. They complement each other.

good point

Fuhrman stuff; pretty mindblowing. had no knowledge of him before.

Cataclysmic, as I remember the Fuhrman tapes; split the trial into before and after.

not surprising that he's still a racist shithead, saying the lapd should have just choked rodney king

Halfway through a rewatch. Not something that most viewers will care about, but I wish they spent a bit more time on his two years with the 49ers--at the very least, some details as to how he ended up there. The film has him retiring before you even know he's playing for San Francisco.

Not too many people in this who come across worse than Roy Firestone.

http://media.cleveland.com/sports_impact/photo/african-american-athletes-at-news-conference-af400c2cb31b07a9.jpg

This is the "Ali Summit" that part 1 delves into. (Simpson declined.) I felt dumb because I didn't know any of the athletes in the second row, but turns out they're all NFL players, and I'm not football fan. Nobody else besides Russell from the NBA, nobody at all from MLB. (Flood or Gibson would have been my best bet.)

Watched the first 3 hrs of Made in America last night. It's pretty good, generally, but I thought it was odd that while there was room for speculating that OJ's dad being gay was a key to his psychology (plausible but hardly proven), there was no real bg on Nicole Brown's family and youth (perhaps later?).

The vomitorious Roy Firestone interview is the ideal of all toadying entertainment 'journalism.'

Nobody else besides Russell from the NBA

uh isn't that Kareem at lower right

it is, then called Lew Alcindor

was he at UCLA/not in the NBA at that point?

yes, didn't graduate and enter NBA til '69

ah my bad. I can't even keep the details straight on the only athlete I know anything about lol

I knew Kareem, Οὖτις--the photo was in '67, pre-NBA. He's the only guy in the photo not focused on whatever everyone else is looking at just out of frame to the left.

on part 4 of Made in America. this is an excellent documentary.

gonna entertaining this was the moment the news decided, "fuck it, let's just run w sensationalism from now on forever"

I know the trial is THE major part of any story on OJ Simpson, but from a purely dramatic viewpoint, it's really not the climax

Fred B wrong as usual

As someone who don't remember anything about the case, which really didn't make sense as a kid in Denmark

i was in high school. we watched his getaway footage while in class. we stopped class to watch the final verdict.

it's impossible to understate how much coverage this trial got. maybe it doesn't seem all that special in an era of 24/7 news, but i feel like this was the first real taste of that, where "informative" news and reality tv intersect.

i think i talked abt this upthread or on the tv show thread maybe

it got a lot of coverage in Australia but I had no context for who OJ was except vaguely knowing he was the actor from Naked Gun

so at the time of the chase it seemed weird that Americans were covering the Bronco "chase" so intensely & then the verdict was all over the news all the time (no 24/7 courtroom coverage but regular updates). I understood that I was *supposed* to be fascinated because of the hype. My friends at college would talk about a lot & I'd nod along but silently I'd be like "ok but I still don't get who this guy is or why it's such a big deal"

it was because there was a big social discussion around police violence esp in LA. one of the best things about this doc is that it places it in the proper historical context. this was a charged and hightened atmosphere. the Rodney King beating was a big deal, there was mass outrage. there were the cries to censor "Cop Killer". it was a US cross cultural event that dealt w race and justice in real time and this doc has plenty of tragic examples. i saw the Rodney King beating video at 11 on the local news and it was very upsetting and the social issues were brought up in school and discussed in social studies classes and the like. even in the south teachers felt it was important to witness a social discussion and conversations around real civil rights being played out in real time. the OJ trial was a nexus of US political, racial, social life in the early 90s. imo the defense used the shitty state and legitimate public grievances towards the LAPD (again, at the time, in historical context, where the trial was strategically held). its fascinating all the angles that both sides throw at each other. also ground-breaking in that multi-media coverage of this type had not really been done aside from the (first) Iraq War and embedded journalism of CNN. the personal and identity politics nature of it was also ground breaking, much to the chagrin of Marcia Clark, who has a good point that it was more about the circus and gossip than the facts. the more things change eh?

most insane part so far was when the one guy breaks down talking bout the LA riots and how the cops were told to not go into the riot area at all and they all stood a block away and watched as a truck driver got killed in the middle of the road in front of them. fucking insane. LA in the 90s was a very charged place.

I'm either the only person watching, or the only person who'll admit to it.

It's bizarre, because they have to confine themselves to this case, and not mention the other one. (One woman on the parole board, pointing to letters for and against release, made brief mention of the murder case.) So when O.J. says he's led a largely "conflict-free" life--or when they ask him about a victim-empathy course he took--your head explodes a bit.

I don't know how long this will go on, so I'll have to duck out. My guess is he's granted parole.

I hope so. God only knows what the real killer has been up to while OJ's been prevented from seeking justice.

i was talking to a coworker at his cubicle this morning and noticed he had OJ's wikipedia page open, now the mystery has been revealed

Paroled. Trump will call.

most of the immed post-verdict reaxtion ftage shd be in the smithsonian, particularly the old woman screaming THE JUICE IS LOOSE HES LOOOOSE

― johnny crunch, Sunday, June 19, 2016 12:55 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im sure this gif exists, someone pls post it

He went to jail because they couldn't send him in '95, right?

I used to see him at a couple of Coral Gables bars in the early '00s. He had pull with the bartenders, nobody talked to him, kinda pathetic: old dude drinking Bud at a Hillstone's.

Could Trump wipe his slate clean, thus allowing him to run for Congress or president?

he's out. gonna start the stabbing and head chopping again shortly.

Xp to Alfred, he was fairly clearly guilty of the incredibly stupid crime that put him in jail, but there's been plenty of speculation (including from Alan Dershowitz) that he got extra years on his sentence because he got away with it in 95

He went to jail because they couldn't send him in '95, right?

Absolutely, or at least why he got such a severe sentence--nine years, whereas Toobin and everyone else said you'd normally get one or two--one of the many reasons today was so bizarre. There was close to (but not) unanimous agreement on CNN that you had to parole him: excessive sentence, model prisoner, low-level risk. But all of that was mitigated by the fact that there was equally near-unanimous agreement that he was a murderer, and even if you were to overlook that, which the acquittal required the board to do, there was still the domestic abuse that took place before the murders, and how the board curiously didn't mention that (even though they could have--maybe it came up in deliberation).

Weird for me watching CNN, as someone who was glued to the first trial. Toobin was there, of course--he's a mainstay on CNN. They brought back Mark Geragos, who was a regular in '95. No Greta Van Sustren--no explanation necessary. No Gerry Spence--still alive, I see. No Judge Tenner--died in 2008. No Milton Grimes, no Dick Thornburgh, no Roger Cossack, no Robert Philibosian, no Leslie Abramson (all alive--most were on Larry King, the last two on Nightline). I got more of these people in '95 than Trump's CNN entourage last year.

I read that Mark Fuhrman is supposed to be covering it for Fox, too

Yeah--I'm interested in reading a transcript of that, although I don't know that I would have wanted to watch him. I think I hold the pretty standard view of simultaneously believing O.J. guilty and viewing Fuhrman as a creep who may very well have tried to embellish the case. (I did find his brazen please-hate-me interviews in the documentary compelling.)

Fred Goldman has been extremely visible the past 20 years, so I took it for granted he would comment; Christopher Darden has been anything but, so hearing from him is a big surprise.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2722773-fred-goldman-christopher-darden-comment-ahead-of-oj-simpsons-parole-hearing

Does OJ still owe money per the civil verdict, or is that paid off/out? Regardless, once he's free he can finally resume his search for the real killer(s).

Interesting what he plans to do to em, given he's out on what you'd imagine are pretty strict conditions.

Does OJ still owe money per the civil verdict

That's why he lives in Florida (and will continue to)--most of his money is protected there, and his NFL pension ($300,000/year) is protected everywhere. I think he still owes almost all of the civil penalty.

Something surreal you would have missed if you didn't watch today: just before the decision was delivered, they had O.J. on an open mic talking with his lawyer. He was deriding some guy--forget the name, and I couldn't tell if it was a writer or another inmate--for spreading lies about him while he was in prison. At one point, he said the guy had accused him of cutting into line in the cafeteria. (Paraphrase) "Cutting into line? This is prison--even Mike Tyson doesn't cut into line."

from a few years ago:

http://www.theonion.com/article/sight-of-oj-simpson-actually-kind-of-comforting-32434

Is it just coincidence that his parole follows two high profile onscreen retellings of his story?

I think they might more likely have been opportune (or inevitable) productions tbf

That's why he lives in Florida (and will continue to)--most of his money is protected there, and his NFL pension ($300,000/year) is protected everywhere. I think he still owes almost all of the civil penalty.

fuckin' florida, the only place on earth which will be improved by disappearing beneath the waves in the coming decades

Is it just coincidence that his parole follows two high profile onscreen retellings of his story?

Good question. You would think that having seen one or both of these (the documentary, especially, which went into the robbery in great detail) would inevitably color one's attitude towards O.J. Maybe the parole board people, knowing the hearing was coming up within a year, either skipped them voluntarily or were advised not to watch them. On a related note, Jeffrey Toobin was on CNN non-stop last night, and multiple times he made disbelieving mention of the parole board guy who was wearing a Kansas City Chiefs tie yesterday.

ESPN had that elfin weasel from the defense team who got a lot of talking-head time in their miniseries (i really wouldn't be inconsolable if he was flattened by a tractor trailer)

fuckin' florida, the only place on earth which will be improved by disappearing beneath the waves in the coming decades

― he tasted like mouth (bizarro gazzara),

hi!

as in so many thing, alfred, you are the exception which proves the rule

you can always seek sanctuary with k-lo and the gang on the national review's cruise ship!

Daily seminars featuring NR's editors and guest speakers;
Two "Night Owl" sessions;
"Break out" policy sessions;
Three revelrous cocktail receptions;
A late-night "smoker" featuring world-class H. Upmann cigars;
Intimate dining on two evenings with a guest speaker or editor.

'intimate dining' with jonah goldberg, resplendent in his formal cargo shorts

Clearly Florida's fate is an advancing coastline that relegates it an island, with Disney/Orlando at the center. Disney/most people prolly cool with that. Atlanta gets to be the new Redneck Riviera. Other swamp people can move to Oklahoma or something.

Alfred excepted, of course. He can stay at the top of Cinderella's Castle and beam, Sauron-style.

The Island of Disney

Never thought I'd watch the mini-series, but a station here was rerunning the whole thing over the weekend, and when I stopped on a few minutes midway, it actually seemed to be well done. So I went and bought a bootlegged DVD this afternoon.

First episode pretty shaky--lots of yelling. The part where Shapiro asks O.J. point blank if he did it; did that actually happen? I thought that question was verboten among criminal defense lawyers, that it was just a distraction to preparing a defense. Or does it vary from lawyer to lawyer?

My #1 Guilty Pleasure on television (which really means Embarrassed Pleasure--such things never actually make me feel guilty) is Pawn Stars, which I always stop on when flipping around. I find some of the items interesting, and the phony pretense of the show kills me--if the bald guy knew even half as much as what's scripted for him, he'd have either won a million dollars on Jeopardy! by now or he'd be a Harvard professor in the I Know Lots About Everything department.

On an episode playing this afternoon, O.J.'s Bronco turned up (A.C.'s Bronco, technically--the one from the chase). I recognized the guy trying to sell it (Mike Gilbert) from the documentary. Obviously the whole thing was scripted; he didn't just show up one day looking to sell it. When asked how he happened to have the Bronco, he explained that he was O.J.'s agent at the time, and he took over ownership when he found out that some outfit was trying to buy it with the intention of using it for tours on the same L.A. freeway where O.J. fled. This was great: he thought that was "classless" and intervened. Line I wanted to hear next: "That's why I'm here today trying to sell it on Pawn Stars to you and your son, a guy named Chumley."

He asked for $1.3 million. The store passed.

wtf lol

I killed her

— O.J. Simpson (@TheReaIOJ32) June 15, 2019

I fuckin knew it

Could someone just please go punch Mark Fuhrman in the face for us?

Is that really OJ's account?

it says right there ‘therealoj’, it’s illegal to impersonate someone on twitter iirc

i’d kill for some pussy RN

— O.J. Simpson (@TheReaIOJ32) June 15, 2019

Even if the account is a fake, I still stand by my first reaction.

I’m amazed how an imposter can say with such 100% accuracy what O.J. is thinking

"If I tweeted this"

I killed her

Spoiler alert!

No one is gonna take OJ seriously after this

the white bronco chase was 25 years ago today

*turns on TV*

I was 10, was so mad that my mom made me go upstairs to bed before it was over for no apparent reason, took me years to realize that she didn't want me to see Nordberg from Naked Gun blow his brains out