Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (22 page)

By the time the trial was getting ready to begin in January 1995,
around six months after the murders, there had already been a lot of innuendo and leaked information from both sides of the case. It was chilly between Robert and me, for sure. It was a difficult time for us. It was hard to be neutral and civil to each other in front of the kids because the situation was so volatile, and there was so much going on, and there were issues cropping up daily.

Robert was doing media interviews. I did
Larry King Live
and
The Barbara Walters Special
, with Nicole’s parents’ blessing, and a handful of other interviews that the family wanted me to do. We taped my interview with Barbara Walters in a suite at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. I was frankly scared to death; I had watched enough
Barbara Walters Special
s to know that her specialty was making every guest cry. She always asked the most interesting yet the most dramatic questions. And in those days, if you wanted your story told to the widest possible audience, you did an interview with Barbara Walters. I was such a fan and admirer of hers. But never in a million years did I dream that I would ever be interviewed by Barbara . . . and especially not in the context of a murder case.

They didn’t give me questions in advance, and I was so nervous and anxious. But I kept reminding myself: this wasn’t about me. I felt like I was there to be a voice for Nicole. Somebody had to speak about her, someone who knew her and loved her, and that somebody was me.

I came to the interview with my friend Ron Hardy, who had washed Nicole’s blood off of her stairs. We sat down in the hotel suite, me sitting across from Barbara. The lights came on, and Barbara stared at me with her intense eyes and began asking questions. I can’t remember specific answers, although I know I told Barbara what a good person Nicole was and how much we missed her, all while refraining from giving my opinion about the case and trying my best not to cry. The interview seemed to last two minutes.

Barbara was famous for taking her guests on a walk during her
interviews. She did our walk after my interview was over. As I was walking through the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel grounds with Barbara Walters, I felt,
This just keeps getting crazier.
It was surreal, but it was only the beginning.

W
hen the trial started, Robert would come over to pick up the kids. We would meet in the driveway, because he actually thought that if he came into my house, someone might be taping him.

“Are you wired?” he would ask.

“No, are you wired?” I would say.

“Nope,” he would say.

Robert and I would stand there in the driveway, a healthy distance from each other, because neither of us truly trusted what we’d told each other about not being wired. It was very weird. We’d pass off the kids, and they’d get in the car and wave good-bye.

Finally, after a few of these ridiculous driveway encounters, Robert called and said, “I want to come over and talk to you. Do you have a minute?”

It was the night before the trial was to begin.

“Sure,” I said.

The enormity of the knowledge that the trial would begin the next morning was swirling around us. We were at the epicenter of this storm. At last, I felt, Robert wanted to talk about it. He came over, and this time he came into the house. We sat down in my living room and he pulled an envelope out of his suit jacket pocket.

“I can’t stay long,” he began. “I don’t want you to ever have any bad feelings about me and I need to give this to you.”

He handed me the envelope, which contained a handwritten letter from him.

“I just want to tell you that I know you’ll probably never understand
why I’m doing what I need to do, but hopefully this will be over soon,” he said, and then he left.

I opened the envelope, and read.

January 22, 1995

I burst into tears. He was finally acknowledging that we were in the middle of the Trial of the Century. I still felt like we were on different sides, but at least, on some level, we were on the same side as a family. We were going through the same things at the same time over the same friends, all of us experiencing similar emotions about two people we had known intimately. That he had brought the letter to me was monumental and was one of the things I will always remember about how good Robert was. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to explain anything to me. We were divorced. Yet, he still felt he had to say, essentially, “I still care about you enough that I need you to know why I am doing this.” That’s how much Robert loved us as a family, and I will never forget that.

A
few hours after Robert left, the phone rang.

“You have a call from a prisoner,” came a voice from a recording
from the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, asking if I would accept a collect call.

“Yes,” I replied.

Then O.J.’s deep voice came on the line.

“Hi, Kris,” he said.

“Hello,” I said.

“I could never have done this,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

He began talking . . . and talking . . . about everything. What was so crazy was that he even started talking about the bloody glove that was found at the crime scene and that would loom large in the upcoming trial. He seemed more concerned about Nicole’s relationship with our friend Faye Resnick and what had been going on between Nicole and Faye than anything else. Faye had written a book that was published four months after the murders:
Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted
. In the book, she talked about her relationship with Nicole and their friendship. O.J. was very upset about this, because the book had come out while O.J. was in jail. In the book, Faye claimed that she and Nicole had experienced a “night of girlish passion” around the time of the murders. O.J. was really angry about this, and he wanted to talk about it and talk about it.

Everyone who knows O.J. knows that he can be very long-winded. He can talk a lot. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, because I truly didn’t. I really had very little insight into Faye and Nicole’s intimate friendship. I obviously knew they were great friends because I introduced them. But I didn’t know what was going on between the two of them. But O.J. was convinced I did and that I wasn’t telling him something. He was more concerned with that than the fact that he was sitting in a jail in Los Angeles for the murder of his ex-wife. He was obsessed.

I had to go run errands and get things done for my business
before the end of the day, and I just couldn’t talk to him anymore.

“I’ll call you back,” I said, forgetting for a moment that he was in jail.

“No, you can’t call me back,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”

I left my house and went straight to Beverly Hills Stationers on Beverly Drive, where I had shopped for a decade, although I don’t remember driving to the store. That’s how distracted I was. I walked into the store and began ordering office supplies. I couldn’t concentrate. All that kept going through my head was the phone call with O.J. When I got up to the cash register to pay, the telephone behind the counter rang. The sales clerk behind the register, who I had known for years, turned to pick up the phone. She answered it and shot me a strange look. “There’s a collect call for you,” she said. “From jail!”

I was shocked. “What?” I said. Then I thought,
How the hell did he find me here?
It was scary.

“Oh my God, it’s O.J.,” I said under my breath.

“Would you like to take the call in the back?” the clerk asked.

“Uh, yes,” I said, practically running to the back room. I was so freaked out. A manager was back there. “Where’s the phone?” I asked. He pointed and I grabbed the phone, punching the line that was lit up.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hey,” said O.J.

“How did you know I was here?” I asked. “How did you find me?”

“Your assistant told me,” O.J. said.

Now I was stunned. “What?! What do you mean, my assistant told you? Why are you calling me at Beverly Stationers?”

“I just need to talk,” he said.

“O.J., I told you to call me later at home.”

But he wouldn’t let me off the phone. I talked to him for about ten minutes, and then I said, “I will call you when I get home.” I realized then that I couldn’t do my errands because he was going to call me wherever I went. Somehow he knew where I was and where I was going. So I went home, and the minute I walked in the door, the phone rang: O.J. again. I went upstairs and I talked to him and talked to him and talked to him and talked to him. I would put the phone down and go do something in my bedroom and come back and he was still talking.

O.J. was desperate to talk, but I was used to that side of him. The needy O.J., the obsessive O.J. This was a guy that I had known my whole adult life, and I felt like he was trying to make me believe that he hadn’t killed my friend, but not actually explaining how it couldn’t be true. He just kept saying, “This is why this couldn’t have been like this.” Or: “The glove wasn’t mine.” Whatever. He tried to explain away all of the accusations, and he would keep going back to Nicole and her relationship with other people. He was still totally obsessed with whom she had been seeing and whom she had been sleeping with and whom she had been friends with. He was just sort of way out there, talking about stuff that didn’t really matter. It was all really odd and very upsetting.

Finally, I said, “Okay, let’s talk in a while. I’m exhausted.”

That series of phone calls were the last time I ever spoke to O.J. Once the trial got under way, I never spoke to him again.

T
he trial began on January 23, 1995.

What struck me most was the whole entire thing was bigger than life. It wasn’t just a trial; it was a spectacle. Bruce and I parked in back of the courthouse, where we were told we had a spot. Marcia Clark’s case coordinator, Patty Fairbanks, met us there and took us under her wing. She told us all about Judge Lance Ito, who
would preside over the trial. She told us what to expect. She gave us a tour of the entire facility: where to park, where to go through security, where to eat, what to say, what not to say.

“Never talk when there are others in an elevator,” she said, “because you don’t know who may be there.”

The biggest surprise for me during this time was that I was finally pregnant. I pulled out the maternity clothes that Nicole had given me before she died, and I decided to wear those clothes to the trial every day. Every day on my way to the courthouse, I would think,
Please don’t let me have a miscarriage.
I thought I was going to miscarry about five times because I was so upset all the time and I didn’t sleep at night. I was terrified of testifying. It absolutely took over my life as I watched my friends and acquaintances being called to testify on the witness stand one by one. I knew I was next. It was a very scary time, and I was overly emotional anyway because of the baby.

Before the first day of the trial, Bruce and I had to go into Marcia Clark’s office several times and talk about our relationship with Nicole and O.J. She wanted to know what we knew about them and their lives, and what could be possible reasons for O.J. to murder Nicole. At first it seemed like there was this whole domestic violence side of the trial that Marcia Clark was building her case around. It seemed like Marcia was planning for some of Nicole’s girlfriends, including myself, to testify on Nicole’s behalf on the subject of domestic abuse. I remember Marcia asking me if I wanted to see the crime scene photos, because I’m sure she didn’t want me to see them in court for the first time, as it would be such a shock.

In her office one day, Marcia put the crime scene photos up on the wall for me to see. They were very big and very shocking. I could see Nicole lying at the bottom of the steps in front of her town house in a huge pool of blood. I looked at them and just wept
for her, wept for her family, and wept for her children. They were horrible pictures of her.

The photographs were so shocking that I felt like I wasn’t in the room with them but somewhere else, looking into the office and seeing those gruesome images. Maybe my mind was protecting me. The mind acts in very strange ways, and it can be very strong when you need it to be, and that is what happened to me that year. When you go through things of such enormity, you can wallow in your misery and you can feel sorry for yourself, you can become defeated and turn to drugs or alcohol, or you can become bitter and nasty. Or you can rise to the occasion and you can be strong and you can try to overcome your circumstances, and you don’t let yourself fall down. It’s really all about how you choose to overcome adversity.