The Silence of Nicoles and Near-Nicoles

Once upon a time--about 30 years ago, to be more precise--she wore the tight little uniform of the Playboy Bunny, complete with ears, fluffy white tail, black pantyhose and three-inch regulation heels. “Hello, I’m your Bunny Vicky,” she would say. She’d smile and flirt and serve drinks to the men and women who dropped by the old Playboy Club on the Sunset Strip. Some men recognized Bunny Vicky as Playboy’s Miss September, 1963.

Years have passed since the clubs and their Bunnies disappeared. Victoria Carbe, now 52, has been through many changes, too. A Glendale resident, she is a single mother of two daughters, ages 23 and 16, and a registered nurse who specializes in home hospice care. She also talks like an awakening activist, moved to action by the 911 recordings of Nicole Brown Simpson’s terrified cry: “He’s going to kill me!”

“My guts turned to water. My insides started shaking,” she said, “because I’ve been there.”

Back when she was Bunny Vicky, Victoria Carbe said, few people knew she was also a battered woman, victimized by a common-law husband. Only in recent years has she talked more freely, though some of her reticence remains. The night after O. J. Simpson, admitted wife beater, was acquitted of murder, Carbe was moved to write an essay venting her feelings as a woman, a feminist, a survivor.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. It’s easy to grow weary of how a double homicide was so easily transformed into political theater. But Carbe’s story, her rage and sympathy, helped me better understand why.

*

As a community of sisters, we have been betrayed. . . . Through history we have been treated as objects and possessions. We have been used as pawns on the chess boards of our men’s ego games. Even when we weren’t physically abused, our spirits were.

No, a diatribe wasn’t what I wanted to read. Male bashing has all the appeal of white bashing or black bashing.

It was later that Carbe’s tale became more compelling.

I know a Caucasian woman, very intimately, who was married to a black-Cuban man fourteen years her senior, way back in 1963. They had a child of their own and two children from his prior marriage. He was handsome, charming, talented and charismatic. He began hitting her after she was pregnant, though the psychological battering and controlling behaviors had begun early on. He threatened to kill her if she ever tried to leave him. Having nearly succeeded on more than one occasion, she believed he would have no qualms. She was devoted to their three children. He wouldn’t let her out of the house alone with them. She stayed.

She recalls an instant in which the family was out in public and was “rousted” by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department.

She was made to sit on the curb with her babies, while he was thrown against the wall and searched. She was degraded and verbally abused, the children traumatized while “makes” were run on them both. Maalox tablets were pulled from the glove compartment and attempts made to construe them as drugs. The trunk was searched. They were finally released.

In parting, the woman asked the patrolman why they were stopped. He told her that they thought the brake lights weren’t working, but when the car stopped they realized they were.

The message couldn’t be any clearer. Every person of color in this nation can attest to this kind of treatment from police (and much worse) as we have witnessed, countless times. The land of the free, the home of the brave, the land of opportunity? I think not; not for many.

One day after her husband had beaten her into unconsciousness and her last waking memories were of being raped, choking on her broken tooth and babbling deliriously for her mommy, the LAPD was called. A tall Afro-American cop was her savior and spoke righteously in her defense.

The LAPD was there when [her husband] got out of jail and stalked her, with murderous intent. They made him (and his thugs) leave the area, but nothing more. He was only in jail for four months in 1965. . . . But her three children were placed in foster homes for a year. She never retrieved custody of her stepchildren who knew her only as “mommy” . . . .

The point I’m attempting to make here, I hope, is obvious. Yes, there are bad cops, fascist cops and hero cops. Yes, there are battering, murdering husbands of every color and there are hero husbands, best friend husbands, feminist husbands . . . . Every aberration of justice should be tried in its respective day in court. . . .

My heart breaks for the Goldmans and the Browns. As the mother of a racially mixed six-year-old son, whom I lost to drowning 25 years ago, and as a hospice nurse, I feel their pain most acutely. I know from experience that time does not, exactly, heal. It only dulls and the gut-shot feelings become less and less frequent. If we are lucky, we make peace with it and turn it into something productive, and hope the rage doesn’t destroy us.

*

Something interesting happened when Victoria Carbe went to a secretarial firm to have her essay faxed to me. It took a few days, delayed by a clerk who objected to her sentiments.

Nicole Brown Simpson, the woman argued, was rich. She had options. When O. J. beat her, why didn’t she take the kids and leave?

Even other women, Carbe thought sadly, have a hard time understanding the consequences of falling in love with a man who turns out to be abusive and violent.

The two women have since patched things over. The clerk, it seems, has come to understand Carbe’s perspective, perhaps from reading the essay in its entirety.

Carbe wanted her voice heard, because battered women “are a silent population.” We discussed the possibility that some readers may wonder whether the Caucasian woman, the friend she knows “very intimately,” is really herself.

Readers, she told me, are free to draw their own conclusions.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.