Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (23 page)

I was trying to be there for all of my children and my friends who needed my support and who were also in pain, and to be there for Nicole’s parents and family if they ever needed me. But I also had to support myself. I didn’t want to lose myself in all of this because it was so tragic and it would’ve been so easy to be destroyed by all the pressures. Anger helped. I was really angry when I left Marcia Clark’s office after seeing the photographs. I was subpoenaed to testify and Marcia was preparing me for it.

The proceedings began each day at nine a.m. and went on until five p.m., and each day everybody would check in with everyone else on Nicole’s team—her parents, sisters, and friends—to see how everyone was doing and discuss what had happened on that particular day. Every day, as Bruce and I sat in the spectators’ seats with Nicole’s family and friends, I could see my ex-husband, Robert Kardashian, sitting at the defense table, always beside or near O.J. Sometimes my daughters Kourtney and Kimberly came to court with Robert and could see the division between us: Robert beside O.J., me sitting with Nicole’s family, Kourtney and Kimberly
somewhere in the middle, all of us intimately involved in this crazy murder trial.

We became entrenched in the daily proceedings. To carry on with our daily routine became difficult. Whether I was watching the trial on television or sitting in the courtroom, on some level I thought about Nicole all day long. Outside the courtroom, things were even more insane. It became an absolute circus. During the 133 days of testimony, the trial, which cost $15 million, was all anyone talked about—on the news, at cocktail parties, in the gym, in the supermarket, you name it.

Everyone was watching the trial, glued to their televisions all day, every day. Every major journalist, media outlet, and public leader in the country was discussing the story: Larry King, Geraldo Rivera, the Reverend Al Sharpton, Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Connie Chung, Jay Leno. CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and of course the
New York Times
—many of whom somehow got my home phone number and left countless messages asking for interviews.

It was surreal to walk into the kitchen and press
PLAY
on the answering machine, only to hear Barbara Walters and a dozen others say, “Hey, Kris, we’d love to get an interview.”

As I continued to think of testifying before millions watching around the world, I felt awkward. I wanted to be there for Nicole and do the best I could for her. At the same time, well, there’s no other way to say it: I was scared. Every commentator in the world would be analyzing, criticizing, and commenting on what I said. When my girlfriend Candace Garvey testified, all people had to say was something negative about her black headband. I could only imagine what they would say about me. What we wore was all so irrelevant; all we cared about was Nicole. Still, I knew I had to testify for Nicole if I was called.

In the end, I was never called to testify—and the reason why
turned out to be the saddest thing of all. Marcia Clark decided that the jury wouldn’t be receptive to the whole domestic violence component of the case, and she decided to pull it from her prosecution strategy. We were all shocked.

It’s all still foggy, even today, but I believe Marcia’s office called to tell me that I had been relieved from the witness list. However, they added, I was still under a gag order and couldn’t speak to the press without permission.

On one level I felt relief that I didn’t have to get up and testify. I wouldn’t have to look Robert Kardashian and O.J. straight in the eye. How did things get so twisted? But on the other hand, I was confused. How could Marcia present the domestic violence side of our case if I wasn’t able to tell my side of the story about what I knew had happened to Nicole?

“Why aren’t I and Nicole’s other friends going to testify?” I believe I asked. “We have such valuable information.”

We all felt like if there was a reason Nicole was murdered, domestic violence was an important aspect of it, and why wouldn’t Marcia have all of us tell the countless stories about everything that we had seen over the years? Marcia knew the whole story, but she had to prosecute this case the best way she saw fit. I was upset. I kept thinking:
I hope this woman knows what she’s doing,
because this decision not to include domestic violence in a case that was all about domestic violence could be a make-or-break decision.

“We’ll call you if we need you” was all Marcia’s office told me.

Once I knew I wouldn’t be testifying, I felt a lot of relief despite my feelings about eliminating what I thought was
the
only defense. I was still officially a witness, so I wasn’t allowed to give interviews or to talk about the case. I couldn’t even leave town without permission from Judge Ito, who issued his directives in writing.

I so admired Robert for bringing the letter explaining his situation at the start of the trial. But that didn’t mean I agreed with the
pro-O.J. stance he was taking. Once or twice as the trial dragged on, I talked to Robert about his role. I tried to be subtle, but that was tough. “Are you crazy?” I asked him more than once about his unflagging belief in O.J. I guess that wasn’t a very subtle thing for me to say. “Look, do you know what you’re doing?” I asked him.

“I really feel like you’re wrong,” I would continue. “You weren’t there with her when we were all there with her and you didn’t see what was going on, because you weren’t as close to them at the end. I mean, you were still close to O.J., but you weren’t as close to O.J. and Nicole socially. You weren’t going out with O.J. and Nicole like Bruce and I were. I was seeing Nicole every day, and you weren’t, and you’ve got to listen to me.”

“No, you’re wrong,” he would say, cutting me off.

One day, when he came to bring the kids back to me after a visitation, Robert and I talked in the driveway after the kids went inside.

“You’re going to end up in a weird place here because I think you’re going to lose this trial,” I said.

“The only way we’re going to have a problem is if they find Nicole’s blood in the Bronco,” he answered.

When investigators did find Nicole’s blood in the Bronco, I told Robert, “Well, I guess you guys have a problem.”

“Oh, no we don’t,” he said.

That’s the way it was with everything with Robert. With every new piece of damning information, he would come back to me and explain it away. I think that’s what he was doing to himself in his mind, and I think he really believed it.

T
hen strange things started happening in the trial.

First, the whole Mark Fuhrman situation. Johnnie Cochran very passionately accused Fuhrman, the lead detective on the case,
of being a racist, tampering with evidence, and essentially setting O.J. up for the murders.

“Fuhrman wants to take all black people now and burn them . . .” Cochran said in court. “That’s genocidal racism. . . . Maybe this is one of the reasons we’re all gathered here this day. Maybe there’s a reason for your purpose. Maybe this is why you were selected. There is something in your background, in your character, that helps you understand this is wrong! Maybe you’re the right people at the right time at the right place to say ‘No more!’”

Fuhrman was then caught on tape making racist comments multiple times in crude contexts after saying that he hadn’t, under oath, which was a field day for Johnnie Cochran. Cochran was a really confident and well-spoken attorney known for representing Michael Jackson, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Sean Combs, and many others throughout his career. And he often involved race and police corruption as part of his arguments.

Race was definitely a valid issue in the trial, but at some point, it seemed like it had outweighed the basic question of whether or not O.J. was guilty, and the fact that Nicole had been murdered.

Then came the moment when O.J. tried on the gloves.

I was at home that day watching it all unfold on TV. When I heard Chris Darden ask O.J. to try on the gloves found at the murder scene, I panicked.

“What are you doing, Chris?” I literally screamed at the TV. “Don’t let him try it on!”

The gloves had been soaked in blood. I knew they weren’t going to fit. Anybody who knows leather knows that if you get it wet on any level it’s going to shrink and change the integrity of the material.

The famous courtroom scene of O.J. seeming to struggle to pull the gloves on, saying, “They’re too tight,” would lead to Cochran’s
famous and much-repeated quote: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Cochran would use this saying throughout the trial whenever he was trying to prove to the jury that a piece of the defense’s evidence didn’t make sense. In his closing arguments, Cochran would bring up the gloves again, and try on a similar pair of gloves himself in front of the jury to try to drive in his point: “You will always remember those gloves,” he told the jury. “When Darden asked him to try them on and they didn’t fit. . . . If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

It was such a ruse. The fact that the gloves didn’t fit and that the jurors bought that sideshow was shocking to me. Later, they even had O.J. try on a new pair of the gloves in the same size, and they fit. Wow. I couldn’t believe it. What I flashed back on was when Nicole and I were in New York at Bloomingdale’s and she bought those gloves as a treat for O.J.

According to the court testimony from Richard Rubin, the former vice president and general manager of the glove manufacturer, Aris Isotoner, the brown gloves were part of a limited batch of the Aris Isotoner Lights line, which were sold exclusively at Bloomingdale’s. Between 200 and 240 of the gloves were sold in 1990.

Richard Rubin knew every fact, detail, and statistic about the gloves. “No other retailer in the United States had this model,” Rubin testified. “And because of this particular type of sewing, which was unique to this model as well as the weight of the cashmere lining, the weight of the leather utilized and the way the vent is put into the palm, this could really not be any other style except 70263.”

I know Nicole bought a pair of this type of glove at Blooming-dale’s when we went to the store together during the first week of November 1989. She must have gone back for more gloves in December 1990. Had we only known what the future would bring.

There was a mountain of evidence piled up against O.J., but Johnnie Cochran and O.J.’s “Dream Team” of attorneys were really smart and clever. Independent of whether O.J. was guilty or innocent, race had become a
huge
component of the case, and many people believed that the police department had framed O.J. In a CNN-
USA Today
Gallup poll that came out in August, 67 percent of Americans thought that O.J. was guilty, and 30 percent thought that Fuhrman had planted the bloody glove.

The February before the verdict was announced, Dominick Dunne wrote in
Vanity Fair
about the country’s obsession with the trial: “The Simpson case is like a great trash novel come to life, a mammoth fireworks display of interracial marriage, love, lust, lies, hate, fame, wealth, beauty, obsession, spousal abuse, stalking, brokenhearted children, the bloodiest of bloody knife-slashing homicides, and all the justice that money can buy.”

I
was sitting at home and got a call from Patty Fairbanks in Marcia Clark’s office.

“Come down to the courthouse immediately, and come to Marcia’s office,” she said. “The jury has reached a verdict.”

I couldn’t believe the trial was finally coming to an end. After almost a year of this spectacle, the jury was ready to announce a verdict on October 3, 1995, nine months after the trial had begun. It only took them around four hours of deliberation. Because the deliberation was so short, we thought for sure that meant a guilty verdict. One reason why: they had asked to once again hear the timeline for when the limo driver, Allan Park, picked O.J. up for his flight to Chicago. The driver was supposed to pick up O.J. on Rockingham at 10:45 p.m. on the night of the murders and take him to the airport for his flight to Chicago, but O.J. was late. All the lights of his house were off, like no one was home, so Allan Park called
his boss, who told him to go around the back of the house, because O.J. sometimes watched TV in the room that was back there. The driver ran into Kato Kaelin in the side yard of O.J.’s house, carrying a flashlight, and later also saw a man Marcia Clark described in court as a “six-foot, 200-pound African American person in all dark clothing” walking into the front of the house at “a good pace.” A minute or so later, someone finally answered the intercom, and it was O.J. The timing of this weird sequence of events made it seem so obvious that O.J. was the man in dark clothing who had entered the house. Allan Park also testified that on the ride to the airport O.J. kept complaining about the heat and asking him to turn on the air-conditioning.

We thought for sure that the jury asking about the timing of all of these things involving the limo driver meant they thought O.J. was guilty.

When it was announced that the jury was going to give their verdict on October 3 at 10:00 a.m., Bruce and I drove to the courthouse. I was eight months pregnant, and Marcia Clark and Chris Darden didn’t want me to go into the courtroom because they weren’t sure what was going to happen. I was to watch the verdict on a television upstairs in Marcia Clark’s office with two of Nicole’s sisters. We drove up to the courthouse. As always, it was a circus and the media swarmed around our car. Marcia Clark had security officers waiting for us to take us into the building. They met us at the car and walked us inside to the elevators to Marcia’s office. As I walked through this sea of media, everybody was calling my name and yelling out, “Good luck, Kris!” Or “We love Nicole!” Or “O.J.’s innocent!”

Everyone on both sides thought they were going to win, I believe. I don’t know for certain about O.J.’s side, but I knew we had a strong case and I knew Marcia Clark believed we would win.
Nobody really said it out loud, but I think everybody was pretty confident because of the jury only taking four hours.