A Ripple That Keeps Moving Outward

The image that came to mind after the shock wore off was this: a stone, dropped from on high by invisible hands into a placid lake of water. The stone disappears, but the ripples move outward in concentric circles, never stopping, never slowing, until they have covered the surface of the water.

The stone, of course, was the arrest of O.J. Simpson in the brutal double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. And the ripples were all the tangential issues and questions and imponderables that came up in the course of the trial:

Can a racist cop taint a whole case? Do mistakes by a coroner invalidate an entire autopsy? Should dismissed jurors be writing books before a trial concludes? What weight should a jury give to complicated scientific evidence? What role should emotion or common sense play in a difficult case? Do cameras in the courtroom serve the pursuit of justice?

Another ripple--and one that I hope will not dissipate for a very long time--is the sordid matter of domestic violence. For even if the jury did not convict O.J. Simpson of murder, some awful truths about him emerged in the course of the trial. He may be a free man now, but he will forever be imprisoned in one part of the public memory as a man who brutalized, humiliated and terrorized his wife. Even, as is so often the case in battering relationships, after the marriage was over.

“Indisputably,” said Patricia Giggans, executive director of the L.A. Commission on Assaults Against Women, “the thing that will not go away about O.J. is that he was a batterer.”

Giggans gathered her staffers on Tuesday morning to watch the verdicts on TV. No one was surprised, she said, though having followed the trial, there was a certain sentiment that the evidence pointed to guilt.

“Our work is still cut out for us,” she said. “There are people who don’t want to believe or see that this is going on in America’s families. On average, once a week a woman in L.A. County is killed by her husband or boyfriend. That is happening right now as we speak. And that reality does not change over the outcome of this particular murder case.”

True enough.

But we can learn a lot, if we choose to, from this particular murder case. About relationships, about power, about violence.

What became clear during the trial--and this, I hope, will be one of its legacies--is that it is possible to be affable, handsome, rich, famous and talented and brutalize your wife.

It is possible to be a Prince Charming in public and Attila the Hun at home.

In January, prosecutors presented a long, ugly chronicle of physical and mental abuse they said had been inflicted by Simpson on his wife. Some of the incidents were drawn from police and court records, some from friends and family, some from Nicole’s written statements.

Shortly before she was found dead, prosecutors said, Nicole Brown Simpson feared for her life, and feared that her death would come at the hands of her ex-husband. The list, they said, showed she had reason to be afraid.

At the time, defense attorney Gerald F. Uelmen responded that the incidents were merely minor disputes, “no more than usual” in a “bumpy marriage.” (This, by the way, is batterer-speak. Simpson passed off the famous 1989 beating of his wife as “no big deal,” saying “we were both guilty.”)

For most of their relationship, O.J. Simpson had the power--not just the physical power, but all of it: the fame, the money, the prestige. When prosecutors first laid out the tortured history of the Simpsons’ relationship, they stressed that Nicole’s feelings of helplessness were reinforced by her husband’s friendships with local cops, whom Simpson allowed to use his pool and tennis courts.

For 17 years, Nicole Brown Simpson was alternately courted and terrorized, bound to Simpson, as one newspaper reporter memorably put it, “by the twin forces of luxury and terror.”

“All this talk about self-esteem and everything is beside the point,” Giggans said. “Nicole Brown Simpson was a teen-ager when she fell in love with O.J. All you have to do is fall in love with someone who is a batterer. And then you are in it.”

It seemed, in the end, that Nicole Brown Simpson had begun to discover her own power. She was still bound to O.J. Simpson financially, but she could control certain things--who she dated, where she went, whether her ex-husband would join the family at dinner following the recital of a child.

I imagine her growing sense of freedom was intolerable to someone like Simpson. Regardless of what the jury said.