Insights Into Simpson’s Life Provided by Transcripts

On the periphery of the 1,534 unedited pages that make up O.J. Simpson’s deposition--far removed from questions of justice, law and human contradiction--is a treasure trove of telling insights into Simpson the man.

Here is O.J. the country club gambler. O.J. the flirtatious single guy. O.J. the man who kept a loaded pistol in a miniature violin case in his Bentley. O.J. the doting father and husband. O.J. the awkward romantic, buying one bracelet for two women. And O.J. the man who could find a golf game--anytime, anywhere.

The deposition of the former football great will not alter the outcome of America’s most famous murder case. It may not change public opinion.

But what five days of aggressive questioning reveal is a new and sharper image of a man of strong appetites and emotions, who lived out the full measure of his fame and fortune, right up to the night his ex-wife and her friend were murdered.

Simpson, who did not take the stand during the murder trial that ended in his acquittal, has not appeared reluctant to talk since the proceedings ended, although he has deflected questions about the details of the case by reciting the 800 number for his video. During the still-unfinished deposition, Simpson has at times answered questions despite his lawyer’s protestations. And since The Times’ publication last weekend of extensive excerpts from his deposition, Simpson has accelerated his speaking out, calling in to a CNN show and granting a 90-minute interview to Times reporters at his home Monday, and calling a radio station Tuesday.

For the most part, his public statements have amounted to broad attacks on his critics, pitches for his $29.95 video and staunch assertions of his innocence in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. But it is in the 28 hours of pointed examination--mostly by Daniel M. Petrocelli, the lawyer for Goldman’s father--that Simpson has revealed the most about himself.

What often emerges from the protracted conversation in a room full of lawyers is a portrait of Simpson the unvarnished alpha male--the macho ex-jock who got into a loud beef on the golf course and who, the same evening, placed phone calls to a Playboy playmate and then a lingerie model.

But other images also abound. There is Simpson the weary celebrity donning a fake cast to dodge autograph hounds. Simpson the host unfazed by a friend dropping in late at night to borrow the Jacuzzi and a bottle of wine. And Simpson the attentive family man--rushing out to buy his daughter flowers for her now-famous dance recital, going grocery shopping for his sick wife or setting up a video game for his young son.

Drug Use Denied

The life Simpson describes is supercharged, always at the end of a cellular phone and a secretary’s scheduling book, but one that he insisted knew moral boundaries that his ex-wife’s did not. During his questioning before lawyers in a Westside office, Simpson apparently became most emotional when he insisted that Nicole Simpson’s life had slipped into decadence and that his own life had not.

He so repeatedly and vociferously denied using drugs--ignoring his lawyer Robert C. Baker’s admonitions not to answer--that the attorney finally asked: “Am I a potted plant?”

Later, Simpson said it was Nicole Simpson’s behavior--including purported association with drug users and even, in one instance, with someone he describes as “a Heidi Fleiss girl”--that caused him to kick in her door during an October 1993 argument.

“I was just very unhappy with all this crap about drugs, about hookers,” Simpson said in seeking to explain the incident, which occurred eight months before Nicole’s murder. “And I wanted to know why she had brought these people into my kids’ home, and I’m mad today when I think about it.”

Yet, as attentive and assertive as he was on many details, Simpson grew vague during other parts of the questioning. And he repeatedly rejected attempts to depict him as an angry or jealous husband, even when he learned of his wife’s alleged fling with his longtime friend, football star Marcus Allen.

“With Marcus, with any of them,” he said. “[It] didn’t bother me at all.”

(Allen, whose wedding was held at Simpson’s Rockingham estate, has denied any romantic involvement with Nicole Simpson, but Simpson said during the deposition that his friend arrived unannounced at his home to apologize.)

Even when he admitted to arguments with his ex-wife, Simpson sought repeatedly to downplay the degree of his anger or its effects. He insisted that the door he kicked apart was already partially broken. And he acknowledged breaking the windshield of a Mercedes in 1984 with a baseball bat, but stated: “I wouldn’t characterize this as an argument. We were having a discussion.”

In the world of his deposition, Simpson almost always depicts himself as the stalwart and stable half of a troubled couple. While Nicole Simpson allegedly spun into drinking and verged on a nervous breakdown, he said, he counseled her calmly and worried over the phone with her mother.

When she talked of a “scheme” to avoid taxes on the sale of her San Francisco condominium, he said, he was the upright one. “I told her what I told everybody: ‘The government is your partner,’ ” Simpson recalled telling his ex-wife. “ ‘Just pay your taxes.’ ”

When he said he happened by her apartment late one night and saw her through a window engaged in a sex act with another man, he was upset--not out of jealousy, he explained, but because the Simpsons’ two young children could have stumbled upon the couple.

When he finally acknowledged vague thoughts of violence against Nicole Simpson, he said they were not on his own behalf, but because he said his ex-wife hit the housekeeper. “She struck a small woman in my house,” Simpson said. “I thought it was wrong and at the time I had thoughts that I wished the lady would hit her back.”

When he did turn to the physical evidence in the case, Simpson often dismissed it derisively. Take, for example, the socks that police said they found on his bedroom floor.

“I never leave socks on the floor in my bedroom,” Simpson said.

And on the Bruno Magli shoes that allegedly left prints at the murder scene: “The shoes they had in court, that’s involved in this case, I would have never owned those ugly ass shoes. . . . Aesthetically, I felt they were ugly.”

(At another point, Simpson acknowledged that he had bought a knife at a downtown Los Angeles cutlery shop, but insisted that it was only for its “aesthetic” appeal. He added, “I’m not really a woodsman.”)

And he sought to dispel the notion that his late-night golf ball chipping session, the night of the murders, was concocted. “I do this all the time,” he told the lawyers, saying that even the ball or two he knocked “40 to 70 yards” into the yard of a neighbor named Mrs. Nebeker were standard operating procedure for his frontyard duffing sessions.

Indeed, golf is a recurring theme throughout Simpson’s deposition. He even acknowledged doodling a diagram of a golf hole during a break in the questioning. He described his 15 pairs of golf shoes, his 12-handicap and his regular weekend rounds with his buddies at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. He said the $6,000 in cash he kept under a sweater in his closet was money won during a week of golf.

Simpson concluded: “Very little can keep me from playing golf.”

On the day of the murders, he told the lawyers, he was at Riviera again. And under Petrocelli’s persistent questioning, he described how he got into a heated exchange that day with one of his regular partners, movie producer Craig Baumgarten. (Both the lawyers and Simpson repeatedly called him “Baumgartner.”)

Baumgarten accused Simpson of moving while he was teeing off at the second hole. Simpson in turn accused the producer of moving when it came his turn to play. Both hit lousy shots. Then the shouting began. “I might have told him I would kick his ass if he did it again,” Simpson admitted to Petrocelli. But Simpson denied reports that his actual threat was to “kick [Baumgarten’s] white ass all over the golf course.”

In any case, Simpson said the incident blew over by the time the men reached the next hole and that the men never really intended to fight. “Among our group, there’s arguments regularly,” he said.

Portrait of Kaelin

Shaggy-haired guest house tenant Brian “Kato” Kaelin was never part of this macho golfing fraternity.

Kaelin comes across in the transcripts as a barely welcome sycophant. He is allowed in the main house only when invited, gets scolded for forgetting to turn off the Jacuzzi, and fails in his efforts as matchmaker for Simpson. When Simpson and Kaelin make their trip to McDonald’s for a hamburger on the night of the murders, Kaelin has to invite himself along for the ride and then ends up paying because Simpson has only $100 bills.

Asked why he didn’t give much attention to Kaelin’s report of hearing thumps behind his guest house the night of the murders, Simpson said he was in too much of a hurry to get to his flight to Chicago.

Simpson’s complicated personal life was never more evident than in the weeks leading up to his ex-wife’s murder.

A little more than a year earlier, Simpson told the lawyers, he and Nicole Simpson had resolved to try to reconcile. They would live separately, but would try for one year to make the relationship work.

The couple’s other previous romantic entanglements always seemed to intrude, though. Nicole Simpson would become angry, according to Simpson, when she found evidence of his relationship with Paula Barbieri. Once it was the arrival of a lavish Christmas basket from the model and actress at Simpson’s home. Another time, Simpson said, his ex-wife found a picture frame from her wedding to Simpson, with a picture of Barbieri mounted inside. Simpson said he told his ex-wife that the picture was no different than her pictures of other men.

Despite all the problems, Simpson reported that he felt at one time it might all work out, especially after an idyllic vacation in Cabo San Lucas in the spring of 1994. But shortly after that, Simpson was off to Puerto Rico for work and he reported receiving several phone calls in which his ex-wife seemed near nervous collapse.

He said when he returned in May of that year, she declined his repeated attempts to get her into therapy, or for them to go as a couple. He said his ex-wife could not really put a finger on the nature of her distress.

When they parted on Mother’s Day 1994, he said, it was amicably. He said that despite years in the relationship, the split finally came easily; the “emotional distance . . . was instant.”

The next day he went to surprise Barbieri at the airport in an attempt to rekindle that relationship. He said he carried on a monogamous romance with the model for about a month, up until the weekend of his ex-wife’s murder.

His relationships with his ex-wife and Barbieri sometimes became unintentionally tangled, though. He went to Cartier and bought a cigarette lighter for Nicole Simpson’s birthday and got a $5,000 or $6,000 diamond and sapphire bracelet for his new flame. At the last minute, though, he decided that the Simpson children, Justin and Sydney, were such staunch anti-smokers that they would not approve of the lighter gift, so he ran out to the car for the bracelet, which he gave to his ex-wife in their name.

The children gave the bracelet and, at first, Nicole Simpson was thrilled. But then she got suspicious, Simpson said. “It wasn’t the type of jewelry I buy her. It was totally different than anything I had bought her and she sort of knew that,” Simpson conceded at his deposition. “She said, ‘Did you buy this for someone else,’ and I said nothing.

“And she gave it back to me.”

Simpson said that he, in turn, delivered the gift to Barbieri. Petrocelli asked: “And did you tell her you had given it to Nicole?” Simpson replied: “No,” with his lawyer Baker joking: “He’s not stupid. Come on.”

Barbieri Romance

Unaware of the bracelet’s unusual chain of custody, Barbieri’s romance with Simpson progressed nicely. Simpson painted a glowing picture of his last date with Barbieri before the murders, a society party at which the two strolled through the host’s expansive home and talked about how they could fill it with children. “We were feeling good and we were being very romantic,” Simpson said.

Not so romantic, though, that he wanted to stay the night with Barbieri. He told the lawyers that he went home because he was tired and had to get up early the next day to play golf.

After his round with Baumgarten and the rest of the group June 12, he called Barbieri repeatedly but could not reach her, Simpson said. He denied that he ever checked his messages that day of the murders, to hear the recording in which the model told him she was ending the relationship. (Petrocelli suggested that the split had served to inflame an already angry Simpson.)

Simpson did acknowledge in the deposition that he “suspected, when she didn’t call me, that she was upset when I went to play golf.”

That same day, at Kaelin’s urging, he was placing a call to Playboy playmate Tracy Adele suggesting “you know, come over and eat or we can have lunch or something.” Later that day, he was on the phone to Gretchen Stockdale, a former Raiders cheerleader and lingerie model. He said he “possibly” was interested in dating Stockdale and that “possibly” he uttered a line to Stockdale first repeated in public last year by prosecutor Marcia Clark: “I’m unattached for the first time in my life.”

Simpson stumbled a little when Petrocelli asked him how he could be monogamous with Barbieri and still calling Stockdale, the onetime cheerleader. “I didn’t consider Paula and I an attachment or an unattachment,” he said. “. . . But I don’t think I was really thinking about Paula at that time.”

Stockdale never called back, Simpson said.

Just hours later, he was rushing to catch a flight to Chicago.

* THE SPIN: Simpson’s relations with the media are a sick love affair. B1