The OJ Phenomenon - 31 March 1995

Here is a piece of reporting from a European newspaper that gave me a start, and I shall read it to you without comment, so that it might startle you the way it startled me.

I quote: "In pubs and clubs all around London, Britons sip ale and talk of little but OJ In Parisian cafés, the French furiously debate the prosecutor's strategy and the judge's controversial calls. And on the Piazza in Palermo, the Sicilians are especially obsessed with the bloody glove. Indeed, those ubiquitous initials crackle in conversations all across Europe: OJ, OJ, OJ." Are they serious? The next two sentences give the answer, quote: "This is of course a fantasy, in fact a preposterous lie. The OJ phenomenon is so characteristically American that it's all but impossible to imagine it's arising anywhere else".

Well I wonder about that. In June 1963 a British cabinet minister resigned after telling the prime minister he had lied to the House of Commons and the next month, there opened at the Old Bailey, the trial of doctor, an osteopath, on charges of living off the immoral earnings of two call girls.

Because the main theme of the trial was about the relations of one of those girls with a cabinet minister and with a Russian naval attaché, the trial was dubbed in the papers, and then in two subsequent books, the trial of the century, and certainly it preoccupied Britain at least as obsessively as the trial of OJ Simpson obsesses America. This too is being called here, the trial of the century, which usually means the most exciting trial you can remember. I should think that the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping murder of Captain Lindbergh's baby, 63 years ago was equally an obsession, not only in this country but in Europe, because Lindbergh, only five years after his solo Atlantic flight, was an international hero, which Mr OJ Simpson is not. American friends have been saying to me since last June, when Simpson's wife and a friend were found murdered, I suppose you're telling them all about the Simpson case. No, I'd say, because they first want to know who is OJ Simpson, just as Americans used to say to equally incredulous Britons, who is Christine Keeler?

I think I've talked twice, maybe three times, not really about the case – which is still under judgement – a case which is complicated, being made more complicated every day by the lawyers on both sides. But I've talked about social aspects of the system, which makes it possible for instance, for all sorts of ordinary people on the fringe of the case: a servant next door, a chauffeur, a porter at the airport, an unemployed young actor, people who might appear a witnesses, to be offered packets of money for selling their story to the tabloids, to television, to radio interviews. Mr Simpson has already put out a book, which went hurtling up to the top of the best seller list. He'll need all the royalties he can get.

The cost of his team of lawyers, two blacks, two whites, a thundering and expensive reputation and DNA experts, is $20,000 a day. I think that means since last July when they were hired. The trial has been going on for a month and is blandly expected to finish sometime during the summer, July, August perhaps. I heard one lawyer say with absolute seriousness, I think, with luck, they should be through not long after Labor Day. That's the first Monday in September. The 1963 English trial about the cabinet minister, the Russian and the call girl, stretched out for all of ten days. The jury pondered for four and a half hours and brought a guilty verdict against a man who would never know it. He was dying from an overdose of sleeping tablets.

The expert guess here is that once the Simpson jury gets the case, it will be remarkable if it returns a verdict within a week and already lawyers, sociologists and other pundits are beginning to predict the outcome. There are on the jury – now, there have been four dismissals and replacements, – there are eight blacks, two whites and two Hispanics. Most of the speculation on the verdict focuses on the presence of the eight blacks. A little late in the day many people are wondering, what appeared to be a vital question at the start: would it not take remarkable courage for all eight blacks to find an American black hero guilty, in the present social climate of America? Will they not remember the atrocious riots after the policemen who beat up the black Rodney King in Los Angeles were let off? Might they not think first of what could happen to them? The defence counsel, which, as I say, consists of two black lawyers and two white, misses no opportunities and creates many, of accusing the prosecution – which is to say the Los Angeles Police Department – of chronic and well-known racism, racial cruelty, racial discrimination. One detective, the one who found, he says, a bloody glove, was cross examined for four days to deny that he was anti-black, that on one or two occasions in the presence of a man and a woman, who will evidently be called as defence witnesses, he had used the word 'nigger' derisively and one time wished aloud that the whole race could be piled together and killed. This detective, I must say, came though with at least plausible sincerity. He has filed suit for defamation against the bearers, he says, of false witness.

If it seems overbold and premature to guess what eight jurors might decode. You can retreat into a more thoughtful position and remark, that in American criminal trials, all twelve jurors must agree. It takes only one contrary juror to produce a hung jury and at the moment it does seem that there's every likelihood that at least one black juror might hold out against conviction and that means, thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm sorry that your dedication and your labours have been in vain. Then what? Then the district attorney's office must begin again, call for a new trial.

I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering, with increasing anxiety, about the jurors, wondering about their state of mind, if this thing goes on for three, four, five months. This jury is sequestered, they live in a hotel, they do not eat in the presence of other hotel guests who might, after all, drop a passing syllable about OJ. They, the jurors, will not see their homes or their families till they are through. They may not read newspapers, hear radio, watch television, the court provides for them a whole flock of movies to play on a VCR, movies very carefully selected to exclude anything that might play on or encourage or suggest or remind them of racial discrimination or brutal policemen or any other court case which could somehow bear comparison with their own daily labours.

They're admonished every time they leave the court – and they do so about half a dozen times a day while the lawyers hassle with the judge about some request or ruling – they are warned not to discuss the case among themselves. Can you imagine yourself having the misfortune to be one of these selected jurors? Of course there are, must be, people who are eager to be on the jury at any cost, but I don't think when the trial started most of them had the remotest idea that they were being sentenced to a particularly severe form of house arrest, much worse off than any captured dictator. The only boon is meals they don't have to cook. Somewhere along the line, before they retire for the last time to the jury room, I should think that the emotional and intellectual strain they've been under will play its part in a verdict.

By the way, one prohibition which sounds cruel at first but was actually a blessing in disguise, was the judge's reminder that they would not be allowed to watch the Oscar award ceremonies of last Monday night, for fear that some comic might make a crack about the case. I hope they've been told what a nightmare of facetiousness, false sentiment and slow motion solemnity they missed. As for the Oscar winners, the irony of the week, perhaps of the year, why not the century, was that the people's obsession on Monday night, as correctly anticipated by the television news editors, was not Clint Eastwood or Anthony Hopkins or Jessica Lange or Tom Hanks. First item on the evening news, so the star of last Monday evening, was 'Kato' Kaelin. Who? 'Kato' Kaelin is a witness for the prosecution, a small, nervous, aspiring young actor, a bit player with blond, shaggy, shoulder length hair, an open, boyish face and a frequent twitch of apprehension, as if his last answer to either counsel was not quite right, but then maybe perhaps it was.

He rented, for some months, a guest cottage in the garden of Mrs Nicole Simpson's house. She is the murder victim. He was also a friend of Mr Simpson and at some point, when OJ decided that he and his wife had broken up for good, OJ thought it wouldn't look nice to have Kato living with Mrs Simpson, so Kato moved in to take a room with OJ in his house.

He is the last person to have seen Mr Simpson before Mr Simpson took a nap, he says, before he drove off to murder his wife and the man's friend, the prosecution says. So however fuzzy or imprecise 'Kato' Kaelin's testimony and his rather touching naïveté with the English language, at one point he was really baffled by the word anger: "I don't know what anger means," he said. Nevertheless, you can see how he could be a crucial witness. Anyway, for just appearing there, for three days, giving nervous answers, he has been deluged with offers of acting jobs, offered $50,000 to say his piece on one of Mr Rupert Murdoch's television shows. He was mobbed at a Washington dinner. He's been offered half a million dollars for a book. Which judging from his basic troubles with the language, somebody is going to have to compose. He was photographed for the new New Yorker magazine, shampooing his hair, After almost four hours of Hollywood's razzle dazzle, who won the biggest Oscar of them all? Let's hear it for Brian 'Kato' Kaelin.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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