Victims’ Families Take On Simpson’s Defense Team : Trial: Lawyers accuse them of an orchestrated effort. Relatives say they are fed up with attorneys’ posturing.

Once silent in their grief, the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman have emerged as major offstage players in the O.J. Simpson trial, steadily ratcheting up the pressure on the man accused of killing their loved ones and influencing the courtroom drama unfolding in Downtown Los Angeles.

On Wednesday, their newfound activism touched off a major clash with Simpson’s defense lawyers, who accused the families of working on behalf of prosecutors in an orchestrated campaign to deny Simpson a fair trial.

That contention was sharply dismissed by the fathers of both victims.

“I think what you’re seeing is the culmination of months of frustration,” Fred Goldman, the father of Ron Goldman, said in an interview Wednesday. “For six months now, we’ve watched as the defense attorneys have engaged in posturing and manipulation of public opinion. Why is it OK for them to speak and not us? I just felt that it was high time the playing field got leveled.”

Lou Brown, the father of Nicole Simpson, said he too has been angered by out-of-court statements by Simpson’s lawyers.

“They seem to twist the news and sign the autographs and give daily interviews when they leave the courthouse,” Lou Brown said. “That has something to do with the anger that has welled up in (Nicole’s sister) Denise and the rest of us. . . . I’m tired of listening to their b.s. I realize it’s part of their strategy to screw up the conviction of O.J., but it still doesn’t go down good when they take the actual victim and forget about her and him, Ron and Nicole, and turn around and say we got the victim here. B.S., B.S., B.S.”

In the weeks following the murders, family members declined to venture opinions about Simpson or the defense team. But in recent weeks, bolstered by their discussions with one another and led by Denise Brown, they have leveled increasingly harsh challenges to the defense team.

They have objected to what they see as unfairly favorable publicity for Simpson, at various defense tactics and at the impression that their loved ones are being lost in the media frenzy that has engulfed the Simpson trial.

The emergence of the families as Simpson accusers has placed the defense team in a difficult bind: Failing to respond could make Simpson, who maintains his innocence, look guilty. But going on the offensive has angered the families and risks making the defense appear indifferent to the suffering of the victims’ relatives.

The families’ growing visibility has put the Simpson team on the defensive and also has begun to creep into the courtroom. Three prospective alternate jurors were excused Wednesday after admitting that they had heard comments that Denise Brown made in various interviews.

“She said (Simpson) did it,” one prospective juror said. Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro, who has complained about the remarks by the victims’ families even as he has tried to defuse them, swung around in his chair at that remark and smiled at the reporters in the courtroom.

“This shows how difficult it is to pick a jury when someone is out there making these kind of statements,” Shapiro said later.

Wednesday’s clash between the families and the defense had been building since earlier this week, when Shapiro responded to comments by some family members who believe Simpson is guilty. As he entered court Tuesday, Shapiro told reporters that he and the defense team were inclined to “forgive” the families for prejudging the case because they were so emotionally involved in it.

Denise Brown was outraged by those comments, and she immediately went public.

“I am fighting mad,” she said Tuesday on Geraldo Rivera’s show on CNBC.

A few hours later, Fred Goldman was calling into KABC-TV in Los Angeles and reading a statement of his own: “Mr. Shapiro, I don’t need your forgiveness. It is my right, as it is everyone’s, to form, to have an opinion.”

Wednesday, Goldman still was fuming. “He had the colossal gall to say he forgave me,” Goldman said. “Can you believe the level of arrogance?”

The rhetorical escalation prompted Simpson’s lawyers to strike back more aggressively, accusing the district attorney’s office of orchestrating an anti-Simpson media campaign and using the families as part of that effort.

“All of a sudden, the D.A. speaks out, the chief of police speaks out, both families speak out,” Simpson attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. said as he entered the courthouse. “It’s clearly orchestrated.”

Inside court, Cochran called the spate of recent interviews a “media blitz” and added: “The court can hardly turn on the television anyplace without seeing Denise Brown.”

Prosecutors scoffed at the suggestion that they were manipulating the families and said the Simpson lawyers have only themselves to blame for the anger directed at them.

“They (the families) are outraged at the manner in which you’ve painted all the evidence and all the witnesses as tainted and unreliable,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark said. “They are outraged at the way you’ve turned this into a circus.”

Clark added that she has tried in vain to discourage the families from speaking publicly but stressed that she cannot control the families, especially when they are angry about the conduct of the defense team.

“If Mr. Cochran does not like the response, then don’t make the first salvo,” Clark said. “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Clark’s sentiments were largely echoed by various family members. Fred Goldman and Lou Brown denied that their comments were part of any orchestrated campaign.

“We haven’t been in touch with the prosecution about what we should say,” Brown said. “It’s just gone too damn far, for the airwaves, the rag sheets, even the public press.”

Goldman agreed, saying he did not even consult with prosecutors before speaking out.

“I think we have, and the Browns have, independently reached our maximum level of tolerance,” he said. “Each of us, on our own, just reached capacity.”

Simpson’s lawyers at first tried to downplay criticism from the families. When Fred Goldman spoke out in an interview with The Times last month, Shapiro responded gently to Goldman’s criticisms of the defense team.

“I have the greatest empathy for the Goldman family and the Brown family and the tremendous losses they have suffered,” Shapiro said at the time. “Our job is to present to the jury the evidence or lack of evidence in a light that is most favorable to O.J. Simpson.”

But when the families, particularly Denise Brown, increased the pitch of their comments, Simpson’s lawyers responded with harsher rhetoric of their own.

“This particular lady, a victim no doubt about it, has become an advocate,” Cochran said in court Wednesday. As a result, he added, Brown is now “impinging on our client’s right to a fair trial.”

Brown has a right to her opinion, Cochran said, but “we also have a right to address this attempt to deprive Mr. Simpson of a fair trial.”

Although both families have become increasingly visible and forceful in recent weeks, substantial attention has focused on the transformation of Denise Brown--whose articulate delivery and striking resemblance to her slain sister has made her a popular fixture on television.

In the weeks immediately after her sister’s death, Brown denied that Nicole Simpson was beaten by her husband. “If she was beaten up, she wouldn’t have stayed with him,” Brown told the New York Times. As recently as September, the members of the Brown family told ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” that they had difficulty believing that Simpson could have committed the June 12 murders.

All that has changed in recent months. Denise Brown said she concluded that her sister had in fact been a victim of spousal abuse after discovering notes belonging to Nicole Simpson. In court Wednesday, Shapiro persuaded Ito to order prosecutors to turn over any such notes. Without elaborating on their contents, Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman said “some materials have been identified as fitting the description” of those requested by defense lawyers.

Having concluded that Simpson beat her sister, Denise Brown became an ever-more visible spokeswoman on the issue of spousal abuse. She lent her name to an Orange County center for battered women, and last weekend, four members of the Brown family appeared at a charity ball to increase public awareness of domestic violence.

The Browns did not address the Simpson case at that event, but Denise Brown has commented extensively elsewhere. She has granted interview after interview in recent days, each time claiming that Simpson had threatened to kill his ex-wife--a charge absent from her comments in the months immediately after the murders.

But for Brown--who once said she would not speak ill of Simpson because he is the father of Nicole’s two children--those early qualms are now gone. In the interviews over the past week, Brown has left no question that she thinks Simpson killed her sister.

“Do you firmly believe . . . that the right man is accused of committing these crimes?” Rivera asked her Tuesday.

“I do,” Brown responded. “I really do.”