Simpson Case Compels Nation to Look at Domestic Violence

First came Betty Ford, who spoke of alcoholism and drug abuse, breast cancer and radical mastectomies. Then there was Rock Hudson, whose 1985 death landed AIDS on Page 1. Anita Hill was next, our professor on sexual harassment, how complicated it is and how little acknowledged.

And now there is the case of O.J. Simpson.

As he sits under suicide watch in a tiny Los Angeles jail cell, charged with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman, the football star turned commentator joins the pantheon of famous--if sometimes unwilling--professors on delicate subjects, this time domestic violence.

From newspapers to talk shows, offices to neighborhood bars, domestic violence was the issue of the week after a double murder and a celebrity arrest. Although 4 million women suffered some form of battering by husband or lover in 1993, it is this woman, Nicole Brown Simpson, and this man, Orenthal James Simpson, who have made us talk about it.

“As the story evolves, I think all of us are going to get educated on domestic violence,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, on the Sunday morning talk show “Face the Nation.” “It’s our dirty little secret. This is the leading cause of injury among women in our society.”

The investigation of Nicole Simpson’s slaying has brought to light her long and turbulent relationship with Simpson--one that is now being deconstructed nationwide. There are police reports, a 1989 conviction for spousal battery, interviews with neighbors, a desperate letter read on national television.

To a country that does not face its problems until forced to take stock by dramatic events, this latest primer in human behavior is a stark and painful unveiling of yet another former taboo subject.

“For the past seven years, the surgeon general has been telling us that domestic violence is a leading cause of injury to women in this country,” said Stacey Kabat, of the Boston-based group Battered Women Fighting Back and a co-producer of the 1993 Academy Award-winning film “Defending Our Lives.” “Hey everybody, this is nothing new.”

That is just the point made by Dr. Alvin Poussaint of the Harvard Medical School on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning. As with child abuse in the 1960s, he said, this country has ignored domestic violence because it is a “family affair,” largely played out on a very private stage.

O.J. Simpson told police just that on New Year’s Day in 1989, when he beat, punched and kicked his wife so severely that she required treatment at a hospital. He later pleaded no contest to misdemeanor spousal battery charges, served no jail time and was allowed to be treated by a psychiatrist of his choice over the phone rather than undergoing a yearlong counseling program.

“The police have been out here eight times before, and now you’re going to arrest me for this?” Simpson yelled that night to two police officers responding to a 911 call, according to documents released by the city. “This is a family matter, why do you want to make a big deal out of it when we can handle it.”

Five years later, Simpson had not changed his mind. In a letter written Friday and read by a friend on national television while he was running from police, Simpson said he “took the heat New Year’s 1989 because that’s what I was supposed to do. I did not plead no contest for any other reason but to protect our privacy.”

To psychotherapist Ellen Ledley, who specializes in domestic violence issues, that comment shows Simpson’s complete denial that any problem existed in his marriage. “The problem with most men who batter is that they use denial, avoidance, minimizing, that it’s just between us.”

In the letter, which was written Friday just before he fled from police and began “To whom it may concern,” Simpson also said he felt “like a battered husband or boyfriend,” and that what he and his wife went through was “no more than every long-term relationship experiences.” Domestic violence counselors report that most batterers do feel victimized, that somehow they are the ones suffering abuse and that by their actions they are getting back at their wife or partner.

“The letter was so confused,” Ledley said. “It had a really deranged feel to it. He’s denying (the abuse) on one hand and proving it on the other by everything he says.”

What makes those who counsel battered women most angry about the Simpson domestic violence case are the breaks that they say O.J. Simpson received because of his celebrity. But they are the first to admit that less famous sometimes men get off easy in a system that often does not protect battered women.

“If you live in a nice area, if you have social status, are a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, that helps you get preferential treatment,” said Ellen Okamoto, community education coordinator for the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. “On the other hand, if you have a criminal record or your neighborhood isn’t so nice . . . it’s more likely you won’t get treated as well. You may go to jail for a few hours. Still it’s not pursued either way.”

Although men are by no means immune to the most extreme act of domestic violence--murder--women are far more likely to be killed by someone they love. Figures from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence in Washington show that among murder victims in 1993, women were four times as likely as men to be killed by spouses or other partners. Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti contends that one woman is killed in Los Angeles County every nine days in an episode of domestic violence.

“I want to focus on the issue of domestic violence,” said Garcetti, who has made the rounds of television talk shows to discuss spousal abuse and the Simpson case. “Our goal is to stop the violence. . . . It should not matter if the batterer is a celebrity or Joe Jones from down the street.”

The most lethal time in any abusive relationship is when the battered partner, usually the woman, decides to leave. “In terms of being murdered, that is the time at which they are particularly vulnerable, when they say, ‘I’ve had enough of this garbage,’ ” said William Samek, a Miami psychologist who is director of the Florida Sexual Abuse Treatment Program.

These are the lessons that O.J. Simpson is teaching the nation this week: Why men abuse and why women stay, and why it hurts so much to everyone involved in an abusive relationship. He is in good company, for most such difficult lessons these days are not learned without celebrity assistance.

Nice people didn’t use drugs until Betty Ford said they did. She knew firsthand; she was hospitalized in 1978 for a dependency so serious that it “was really sort of miraculous that I survived it,” she later said. Ford also went to great lengths to publicize the threat of breast cancer after her radical mastectomy in 1974.

“Betty Ford got cancer, and everyone went out and got mammograms,” said filmmaker Margaret Lazarus, a veteran of women’s causes and a co-producer of “Defending our Lives.”

AIDS wasn’t an “epidemic” until Rock Hudson died.

Sexual harassment only happened to “other people” until Anita Hill accused Judge Clarence Thomas of it after he was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1991, Lazarus says. “We are about to witness a national debate about how seriously we take cases of sexual harassment in 1991,” said Susan Estrich, a USC law professor, as the Hill-Thomas case unfolded.

But sometimes celebrity lessons backfire. Consider Mike Tyson, now serving a prison sentence in the 1991 rape of Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant.

Okamoto, of the Commission on Assaults Against Women, spends a lot of time teaching high school students about rape, what it is and what it isn’t. Most students understand--until the Tyson case comes up.

“They say, ‘Mike Tyson and Desiree, well, she invited him in,’ ” Okamoto recounts. “You’re taking down a hero, and that’s big time.”