His Name Is Ron (52 page)

“He will never see again the smile on his son's face…. Fred has lost all of that and infinitely more forever, and his life will never be the same….

“I'd like to play for you, one more time, one of Fred Goldman's last treasures that he has, he will always have, to remember his son by.” The overhead screen showed the videotape of Lauren's Bat Mitzvah. There was Ron, dancing with Melanie Duben and Lauren Cohen, supremely enjoying the moment as all of us joined in an impromptu hora.

Then, there I was onstage with Ron, hamming it up as we lip-synched to Bob Seger's “Old Time Rock 'n' Roll.” I had viewed the tape many times, and each time it choked me up. But this time I noticed as never before how often Ron and I glanced at each other as we pretended to sing. I noticed how we moved our inflatable plastic guitars together. We were
in synch
as we laughed our way through the unplanned performance.

Standing only a few feet away, Dan turned and looked directly at me, staring deeply into my eyes. I felt Patti's hand, reaching out toward me, and I grasped her palm. Dan said, “There was a sixteenth-century poet named Guillaume du Bartas, who best expressed a relationship between a father and son in a few simple words. Let me read them to you:

“ ‘My lovely, living boy,

“My hope, my happiness,

“My love, my life, my joy.' ”

And then he added, quietly, “Fred Goldman's lovely, living boy is no more.”

If Judge Fujisaki had not called a recess our collective tears would have flooded the courtroom. After the jury left, we all hugged Dan. Tom Lambert's eyes were very red. Peter, Ed, and Yvette were crying also. Someone said that even the most hard-bitten reporters—both those in the courtroom and those in the auxiliary room who were listening to the audio feed—were awash in tears.

Patti was stunned by Dan's presentation. “He was incredible, stupendous, brilliant, articulate, dignified, passionate, firm, and convincing,” she said. “And that's an understatement.”

She told him how impressed she was, and he responded, modestly, “That's what you hired me for.”

“We didn't know how great you'd be,” Patti said. “We didn't know one another. We were taking a chance on you and you were taking a chance on us. I just want you to know how proud I am to have you pursuing justice for Ron.”

The Browns' attorney John Kelly followed Dan, and he, too, confronted the killer directly. Lou, Juditha, and Tanya Brown watched intently as Kelly attacked their former in-law. He quoted the killer's own words:

Fame is a vapor, popularity is an accident, money takes wings, but only one thing endures, and that's character.

“And we agree that character endures,” Kelly said. “Whether it's good character or bad character, it endures.

“And we've learned a lot about Mr. Simpson's character; we know it was formidable; we know it was complex; and we also know it was frightening.

“And we've seen occasions when a sick, twisted mind would trigger the fury of an animal and the actions of a coward.

“And Mr. Simpson is a coward.

“You've heard about the public Mr. Simpson, the polished veneer. I mean, how many times are you going to hear about the fact he won a Heisman trophy, he shattered professional football rushing records, he was a spokesman for corporate America, and a commentator for the networks?

“But, ladies and gentlemen, winning the Heisman trophy doesn't give you a license to kill.”

Kelly spoke of the defendant's willingness to cheapen Nicole, the mother of his children, in front of the jury, and of the way he viewed women in general, as possessions. “Nicole was precious,” Kelly said. “She was a gem. She was a total package. And to Mr. Simpson, she was the Heisman trophy of women. But just like that trophy, an object to him.”

Quite effectively, we thought, Kelly was able to bring Nicole into the courtroom.

Nicole's battered face appeared on the screen, and Kelly said, “I want her in her own words to tell you people whether she was frightened, whether she was scared, that night of October 25, 1993.”

A portion of the 911 call was played. The operator asked, “You're scared of him?”

In a shaky voice that sent eerie shivers through us all, Nicole replied, “Yes.”

Kelly asked the jury, “What more would you want? She tells you right there, from as close as we can get to her, that she was scared that night.”

Kelly's style was more low-keyed than Dan's but very moving as he described the killer's actions on the night of June 12, 1994: “He put on soft-soled shoes to move quietly—rare designer soft-soled shoes—to move quietly that night.

“He wore a ski cap to avoid identification.

“He wore rare designer gloves so he wouldn't leave fingerprints.

“And he used a knife so he could kill quietly.”

The defense had tried to depict the killings as a lengthy struggle. But Kelly said, “I think struggle is one of the biggest misnomers of this case…. Nicole received a blow to the brain with such velocity … a blow to the brain that bruised it. And Ron Goldman, relaxed, unsuspecting, finished with work, off to meet his friends, dropping off glasses, was ambushed in a pitch-black area, pitch-black. … It wasn't a struggle; it was a slaughter.”

Kelly's conclusion was forceful.

“And you have to make this man understand—understand things; that when you do things like—you hop fences, you hide things in trash cans, or you run from the cops, or you peep in your wife's window late at night without her knowing, you're a sneak. And when you look at a photograph of you in the killing shoes, and you say it's a fake, you're a liar.

“And when you are unfaithful to your wife, you're a cheater.

“And when you kick her, and when you hit her and you pull her hair, you're a batterer.

“And when you slaughter two people in the primes of their lives, you're a killer.

“And all Nicole and all Ron are asking you people to do is to assign that responsibility to a man who refuses to accept it.”

After lunch, the defense got its turn. Prior to beginning his presentation, Baker indicated to Judge Fujisaki that his argument would carry over into Thursday morning. That would still give Dan time for his rebuttal, and the jury would likely begin its deliberations by the afternoon.

Before the jury came in, Dan had an issue to address. He said to the
judge, “Yesterday, I saw Mr. Baker with Mr. Simpson working with the gloves. I see the gloves up there, and I don't know what Mr. Baker has in mind, but I would absolutely object to any attempt during closing to put any gloves on Mr. Simpson. That's testimonial. It's evidentiary. I don't want to object in front of the jury.”

Ignoring Baker's sputtering, Judge Fujisaki said quickly, “Sustain the objection.”

The jury took its seats, and Baker rose to present what was supposed to be the definitive exoneration of his client.

In contrast to Dan's tightly woven, brilliantly delivered argument, Baker seemed disjointed and off his stride. With all the irrefutable evidence on our side, he did not have much to work with. He claimed to be suffering from some sort of virus, and perhaps he wanted the jury to believe this to be the reason that he was erratic and disorganized. To us, it was clear that he was neither as prepared nor as polished as Dan. And perhaps he did not spend much time in preparation, for much of his script appeared to be a plagiarized version of Johnnie Cochran's closing argument during the criminal trial.

I was astounded to realize that, in fact, he was going to argue the issues I had mentioned the night before. Everyone was lying—except for his wonderful, marvelous, Heisman trophy–winning client.

As usual, Baker was rude, cold, and, we thought, ineffective. Early on, he sought to portray the case as some sort of frivolous lawsuit. He lectured, “Now, any one of us, all the people in the gallery, can go down to the first floor of this building and, for about $200, file a lawsuit, and they can charge somebody else, another human being, or a corporation, with malfeasance, doing something wrong, and seek to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions of dollars…. But with that enormous and awesome privilege that is granted to us comes the burden of proof.”

He chastised Dan for supposedly ignoring that burden and instead, playing on the jury's emotions. He complained that, because our side would have the final word in rebuttal, Dan had a chance to “sandbag” the defense. He attempted to point the finger of blame at everybody, everywhere, except where it belonged—at his client. In the World According to Baker there was a long list of despicable people whose sole purpose in life was to trash his client: the plaintiffs, our attorneys, the police, the FBI, our expert witnesses, and even the media. “I'm including the media,” he said, “because, ladies and gentlemen, if, in fact, you find him not responsible, the gravy train is over. The case is over. It's not in the news every day. It is gone.”

He trained his guns directly on us, telling the jury, “You know, I was kind of amazed that Mr. Petrocelli had to bring up myself and my son. I was kind of amazed that he had to do that.

“I can tell you this, ladies and gentlemen, I would have a terrible time if I lost him. But I wouldn't take $450,000 for a book. I wouldn't prosecute an innocent man. That would never happen.”

I felt my pulse quicken and I saw Dan's jaw tighten.

Baker opined that this case was about law enforcement versus his client. “There's no doubt about it. They're linked at the hip, or any other place you want to join them.”

He questioned the objectivity of some of our expert witnesses. Referring to FBI agent Douglas Deedrick, who happened to have a photograph in his office of him with Kim and me, he said that Deedrick had testified, “ ‘But I'm independent, you know. I flew out here from Washington, paying my bill. You, the taxpayers, are paying my bill, but I'm unbiased.' ”

Then Baker attempted a ridiculous analogy, “Well, you can call a stallion a cow, but you can't get milk from it. He can call himself unbiased, but it isn't so.”

Baker's droning attempts at logic were very difficult to follow. Spectators nodded off. Throughout the presentation, Judge Fujisaki often looked surprised at the issues being raised; at other times he appeared simply bored.

Baker derided the theory that his client would use a highly visible vehicle to drive over to Nicole's condo, calling the Ford Bronco “the biggest white elephant that's been made.”

He spent about two hours on the subject of motive—attempting to convince the jury that his client did not have a motive to kill Ron and Nicole. We found this quite interesting, because under the rules of this civil litigation, we did not even have to prove motive!

“There was no obsession,” Baker said. “Certainly it's a stretch, a quantum leap, but it's part of the effort by the plaintiffs to demonize and to manufacture a motive. You can't get your arms around it because it doesn't fit.”

During a break in the proceedings, when few people were in the courtroom, I happened to notice that Baker had strolled over to the plaintiffs' table. He was glancing intently at something. “He's looking at Dan's notes,” I muttered. Hearing this, Baker walked away. I stepped over to the table and turned Dan's notes upside down.

Late in the day, Baker was still babbling in a somewhat incoherent, dispassionate way when, in a lame attempt to mimic Johnnie Cochran's “doesn't fit—must acquit” rhyme, he embarrassed himself by saying: “I'm
no poet, obviously, but if you don't have time, you most certainly could not commit the crime.”

If I did not detest the man so much, I might have felt sorry for him.

Finally, Baker tried an unsubtle ploy. Thwarted in his attempt to have the killer try on the gloves, he found another way to make his point that, in his opinion, the gloves were too small to fit his client. He referred to testimony from some witnesses who failed to see cuts on the killer's hands the night of the murders. Then he turned to the defendant and said, “Look at the size of this man's hands. Hold up your hand, O.J.” The killer raised a paw. “His hand's about an inch and a half bigger than mine,” Baker commented. “Big hand.”

After court, some of the reporters told Kim they did not know whether to laugh or cry at Baker's absurd “gravy train” comment. Many of these people had lived away from their families, in cramped apartments, for months on end. They worked eighty-hour weeks without overtime pay and did not feel as if they were riding a “gravy train.”

Patti's stomach was upset over the cheap shot that Baker had taken, insinuating that our primary objective in this case was money. “Dan,” she said, “you've got to do something, say something, in your rebuttal so that the jury understands it's not about money. It's never been about money. The jury has to realize that this was the only avenue open to us. It was the one and only way we could seek justice.”

“You wait,” Dan said to us. “I'm gonna nail that son of a bitch for what he said. I know what I'm going to say.”

Baker angered Judge Fujisaki on Thursday morning by declaring that the defense had changed its plans and “probably will go all day long today.” The judge reminded Baker that because of the defense team's previous, shorter estimate, he had not changed his plans to attend a judicial conference on Friday—so that meant that Dan's rebuttal could not begin until Monday. Baker was clearly upset that court would be dark on Friday; he did not want Dan to have three days to prepare his rebuttal.

Judge Fujisaki grumbled, “I think that you're not in the position to be too complaining under those circumstances. Okay. Bring in the jury.”

I thought: Dan's been ready for months. This delay probably will only make him even more impassioned.

Baker's performance of yesterday was almost universally panned in the
press, so it was not surprising that he passed the baton to Robert Blasier this morning. Balsier once more implored the judge to allow his wife back inside in order to witness the “crowning glory” of his career, and the judge relented.