Lawyers Pan for Gold Simpson Depositions

They have asked O.J. Simpson whether he used underarm deodorant after he learned of his ex-wife’s death. (He didn’t know.) They have asked Simpson’s maid whether she folded his workout clothes or hung them in the closet. (She used hangers.) They have asked Simpson’s chiropractor whether he’s ever seen Simpson make his bed. (He has.)

They have asked all these questions, and more. They have received all these answers, and more.

And still, the lawyers press on, angling for any tidbit that might help them persuade jurors in the upcoming civil trial to hold O.J. Simpson liable for the stabbing deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman on June 12, 1994--despite his acquittal on criminal murder charges.

Attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli, who represents Goldman’s father, once said: “The truth is in the details.” And hundreds of hours of pretrial depositions have certainly teased out a frenzy of details. Some contradictions have surfaced, with witnesses rebutting Simpson’s assertions that he never took drugs and never beat Nicole.

“But have we found the smoking gun yet? No,” said Loyola law professor Laurie Levenson.

Instead, the 5,500 pages of deposition transcripts reviewed by The Times rumble with enough tales of sex, drugs and partying to fill a bookshelf of paperback potboilers. Onetime best friends have tattled tawdry details; maids have blabbed about explosive confrontations; relatives have let loose vindictive accusations.

It may sound seamy--and, at times, irrelevant. Simpson attorney Robert C. Baker complained at one point: “This is a deposition for ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ not this litigation.”

But lawyers for Goldman’s relatives and Nicole Simpson’s estate press on, determined to root out potential evidence as they prepare for the trial scheduled to begin Sept. 9. From the location of every phone in O.J. Simpson’s house to the name of every man Nicole Simpson dated, they want to know it all. Including--quite literally in a case that features bloodstained socks--everyone’s dirty laundry.

And that’s what civil litigation is all about.

Few cases go public with the splash and sizzle of the Simpson trial. Still, to the distress of many litigants, civil cases almost always start with probing depositions crafted to squeeze out every drop of evidence--and to persuade the opposing side to settle rather than face embarrassing questions in court.

“The urge is there among litigators to get every fact there is in the world and to push the other side so hard against the wall that they either squirm or squish,” said civil lawyer Stephen Yagman.

By far the most important deposition in the case to date has been the exhaustive questioning of O.J. Simpson--the first time the former football great had to state his alibi under oath.

Simpson never took the stand during the criminal trial. But his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination does not extend to civil cases, so he will be forced to testify as the victims’ families seek to hold him liable for the Brentwood stabbings.

With precision that Simpson’s lawyer said “redefined tedium,” Petrocelli quizzed Simpson on his actions the night of the murders. He focused on the stretch between 9:36 p.m., when Simpson arrived home after a burger run, and 10:54 p.m., when he contacted the limo driver waiting to take him to the airport. No one saw Simpson during that period. Prosecutors in the criminal case pegged the murder time as about 10:15 p.m.

Explaining his actions, Simpson said he chipped golf balls on his lawn for a while, then went up to his room to rest, pack and shower for the trip.

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Simpson said he first heard the phone ring while he was in the shower--and could tell from a flashing light that the caller was the limo driver, waiting at the gate. He decided not to pick it up. The driver then called again, and Simpson said he answered and told him, “I’m running late.” He flatly denied the limo driver’s account--that Simpson said he overslept. But Simpson did acknowledge that even after talking to the driver, he did not push a button on the phone that would open the gate.

Asked why he left the limo driver outside, Simpson replied: “I didn’t want my dog to go out.”

That response--just one line in hundreds of pages of transcripts--may have gained importance in future depositions, when Petrocelli quizzed Simpson’s former and current housekeepers. Both Michelle Abudrahm and Josephine Guarin said Simpson’s dog, Chachi, was trained.

“When the gates would open for people to come in and out, Chachi would stay on the property. Correct?” Petrocelli asked Abudrahm.

“Correct,” she answered.

It’s a minor discrepancy, to be sure--not the kind of evidence a lawyer could brandish with a Perry Mason flourish. Still, it’s just the kind of quibble that civil litigators love to dig up.

If either Simpson or the maids try to change their testimony on the witness stand, lawyers can whip out the depositions and ask why. “You can impeach them with their depositions. At that point, they look like liars,” UCLA law professor Gary T. Schwartz said.

In the quest to undercut potentially damaging witnesses, lawyers on both sides bluntly sought to dig up dirt.

Cora Fischman, once a good friend of Nicole Simpson, faced insinuating questions about whether she had dated O.J. Simpson since the murders. She said she had not. Later, Denise Brown was asked whether she had slept with TV host Geraldo Rivera--a question she refused to answer on her lawyer’s advice.

“You hear some of these questions and you kind of roll your eyes,” Levenson said. “[They spark] the complaints people have about our system. They want to resolve a legal matter, but they don’t want to expose their entire life history [to questioning], as happens an awful lot in civil matters.”

A judge may eventually rule some of the questions out of bounds. But depositions rarely halt to await a judicial decision; usually, the witness must answer an offensive question on the spot. Even if a judge later orders the exchange deleted from the transcript, the damage has been done: The lawyer knows the answer, and sometimes the media do as well.

Well aware of how tabloids have seized on juicy deposition questions, Baker at one point chided Petrocelli for asking Fischman about an adulterous affair. “Do you want to mark that [in the transcript] so Geraldo can find it easier?” he asked.

Undeterred, Petrocelli answered: “I am entitled to probe, and I intend to.”

Analysts suspect that some of the probing comes, as one put it, because “turnabout’s fair play.” Lawyers for the Goldman and Brown families may want to make the depositions uncomfortable for the man they believe is a killer on the loose. Simpson’s attorneys, in turn, may try to humiliate Denise Brown and others who have spoken angrily against their client.

But if the questions contain a smidgen of revenge, they also serve a legitimate legal purpose.

In many civil cases, lawyers try to embarrass participants in order to get them to drop their claims or settle before trial. “They want to make the case as unpleasant as possible for the other side,” UCLA’s Schwartz said.

If the case does go to trial, lawyers seek to discredit hostile witnesses in front of the jury by returning to the same invasive questions.

“If by any stretch you can make the case that the life and lifestyle of the other party is relevant, you can be sure lawyers will try to go into it in civil cases,” Stanford law professor Robert L. Rabin said. “Civil cases tend to turn into morality plays, which makes these questions of credibility enormously important.”

The deposition transcripts indicate that lawyers are focusing on one aspect of the morality play: the whipsaw relationship between O.J. and Nicole Simpson.

They have managed to turn up some fresh--and sensational--tidbits.

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The Brown family asserted that Simpson tried to bribe his ex-wife to have sex with him on Mother’s Day, 1994, just a few weeks before the murders. Kato Kaelin said Nicole Simpson told him she feared that her ex-husband would kill her with scissors and get away with it. On the other hand, Simpson’s maid said she thought Nicole had fabricated the abuse stories.

The most lurid accounts of domestic violence came from Faye Resnick, author of a steamy memoir about her friend Nicole.

Resnick said under oath that Nicole told her O.J. Simpson bashed her with wine bottles, kicked her during her pregnancies and beat her more times than she could count. One time, Resnick said, Nicole confided that Simpson beat her, locked her in a closet while he checked out a football game, then came back to beat her again. “He continued doing that all night long,” Resnick said. “Nicole thought she was going to die that night.”

However gripping, Resnick’s tale is unlikely to air in court. Like many of the abuse allegations--all of which Simpson denied--they are hearsay, rather than firsthand accounts.

“One should never say never, but I would be shocked beyond belief if that kind of testimony would be admitted,” veteran civil lawyer Doug Mirell said.

The judge picked to preside over the case in the Santa Monica courthouse will have to separate admissible evidence from titillating gossip.

In general, evidence must be more “probative” than “prejudicial” to be admitted. Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito used that test in the criminal trial when he ruled that prosecutors could raise only a few allegations of domestic abuse and could show jurors only some of the gory autopsy photos.

Although much of their most inflammatory evidence may not make it to jurors, lawyers continue to press the domestic abuse angle. They are not talking about their strategy. But outside analysts are more than willing to speculate.

Lawyers for the victims’ relatives may be hoping to provoke more firsthand witnesses to come forward and confirm abuse. Alternatively, they may be stirring up outrage to “poison the atmosphere in which jurors will be selected,” Mirell said. Or they may be trying to irritate or agitate O.J. Simpson for tactical reasons.

Along with probing abuse allegations, the lawyers who have conducted more than two dozen depositions over the past six months have also begun to delve into less salacious aspects of the case, questioning forensic and police witnesses. Among the most important: Thano Peratis, the jailhouse nurse who drew Simpson’s blood for DNA testing and may have inadvertently fueled the defense’s conspiracy theory.

Peratis testified in the preliminary hearing for the criminal case that he had drawn about 8 milliliters of blood from Simpson’s right arm. But LAPD records accounted for just 6.5 milliliters. The defense pounced on the discrepancy--about a third of a teaspoon’s worth of blood--and suggested that the “missing blood” could have been daubed on crime-scene evidence to frame Simpson. Ill and weak, Peratis nonetheless sought to rebut that theory by testifying during the trial from his hospital bed that he had been mistaken, and in fact had drawn about 6.5 milliliters from Simpson.

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Under questioning by Simpson lawyer Robert Blasier last month, Peratis explained for the first time why he switched his testimony.

He said a friend of his called him up mid-trial to tell him about the missing blood theory. As Peratis recalled, the friend told him: “Oh, boy, did you mess up.” Chagrined, Peratis said he “sweat[ed] a bit, got a little upset and said a few nasty words.”

“What am I going to do now?” he said he wondered. “And then I got to thinking,” he told Blasier, “if I made a mistake, I better correct it now.”

So Peratis said he conducted an experiment: He filled a vial with 8 milliliters of water. Although he admits he has had memory problems because of repeat heart surgery, Peratis said he could tell his test vial looked much fuller than the tube of blood he had taken from Simpson. He called prosecutors to say he had erred in his initial testimony.

Other important witnesses have been less forthcoming.

Former Los Angeles Police Det. Mark Fuhrman, who was tarred as a racist bent on framing Simpson, invoked the 5th Amendment and kept quiet. Simpson’s best friend, Al Cowlings, refused to answer any question about the five days between the murders and Simpson’s arrest. He would not talk about the infamous Bronco chase or relate anything Simpson told him during that tumultuous week.

In upcoming depositions, lawyers will question witnesses who saw Simpson on his flights to Chicago the night of the murders and back to Los Angeles the following morning. They are also planning to interrogate Marcus Allen, the football player who allegedly had an affair with Nicole Simpson.

As the questioning continues, analysts caution that it is tough to judge a case based on the deposition transcripts. Skilled lawyers can mine winning strategies from seemingly trivial questions, and some of the jaw-dropping revelations may never be introduced to jurors.

“Any ultimate judgment about the wastefulness or the value of the proceedings,” Mirell said, “cannot be made intelligently until we see the use that’s made of the depositions at trial.”