300 Attend Fund-Raiser at Simpson Estate

The tables were set with white linen. The music wafted gently over the verdant grounds--past Kato Kaelin’s old guest house and the most scrutinized driveway in America. The host smiled and charmed.

It was almost like old times at O.J. Simpson’s Brentwood estate, where a crowd of 300 milled happily Thursday evening during a fund-raiser for an Inglewood anti-violence organization.

But this was not quite like yesteryear. The pounding of news helicopters made sure of that. So did the clutch of protesters down the street, some shouting “Murderer! Murderer!”

The crowd at Simpson’s had changed too. Now a group of African American community activists dominated the scene, and the A-list Hollywood celebrities who were on the guest roster--Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes and Sinbad, to name a few--were nowhere to be seen.

That left the organizers from the Stop the Violence--Increase the Peace Foundation concerned that their event would end up more Simpson media spectacle and less the fund-raiser they had hoped.

“We had to pay for all this,” said Mohammad Nassardeen, a Stop the Violence board member. “That’s why I don’t have a smile on my face yet.”

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By evening’s end, however, fears of a financial bath had diminished, with the assistance of a single $15,000 donation from an Inglewood real estate development firm, and organizers were confident the event would indeed provide funds for a July 13 Violence Awareness Run scheduled to begin at the Forum in Inglewood.

Last week, when Simpson, who was acquitted last year in the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman, offered his home for a fund-raiser of the anti-violence group, the former football great found himself at the center of yet another controversy.

Critics said this was merely his latest attempt to boost a flagging public image, and criticized him for not being more active in the African American community before the murders. They also criticized the foundation for holding the fund-raiser at the home of a man who pleaded no contest in 1989 to battering his wife at the time, Nicole Brown Simpson.

Reacting angrily to the Brentwood gathering, Tammy Bruce, president of the Women’s Progress Alliance, said Thursday night that the event was “pathetic . . . cynical . . . and shameful . . . sending a message that if you are rich, you can get away with anything. . . .”

“When you go to a man with blood on his hands to finance your efforts, your cause is lost,” Bruce told reporters before a Thursday evening meeting of her own at the National Council of Jewish Women building in Hollywood, which she organized to protest the Brentwood fund-raiser.

Feminist attorney Gloria Allred told the audience of about 50 at the Hollywood meeting that “it is grotesque and macabre that any group devoted to stopping violence would hold a fund-raiser at the home in which a murder victim’s blood was found, especially when that victim is the ex-wife of the party’s host and the mother of his young children.”

At the Stop the Violence fund raiser, Simpson seemed to acknowledge some of the criticism, at one point telling reporters: “I’ve been so late getting involved in this. You know how it is--you are doing your own thing.

“Until somebody puts it in your face, or until you become the victim of something, you don’t really open up your mind and heart to what’s going on. And what’s been going on for years is young people are losing their lives. . . . This is about saving lives.”

Simpson, however, also had some pointed words for the protesters.

“I was declared innocent,” he said, “and these people just won’t let it go.”

Simpson’s guests were funneled through a Los Aneles Police Department checkpoint a few blocks away on Bristol Court--as it happened, in front of the home of Mayor Richard Riordan.

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About half a dozen protesters staked out the far-off entry, waving placards with such messages as “Hey, O.J., Charity Begins at Home.”

At one point a shouting match broke out between supporters and critics.

But inside the now-famous gates of the Rockingham Avenue estate, the atmosphere was considerably more serene--at least once the helicopters rattled off into the night.

Guests, the most recognizable, perhaps, being Simpson’s friend Al Cowlings and City Councilman Nate Holden, mingled around a swimming pool, complete with waterfall, and on a tennis court-cum dining area.

Many in the crowd came dressed in tuxedos and formal evening wear, although some former gang members preferred a considerably more casual and baggier look.

Pointing to a group of the casually clad, Simpson said: “It’s about these guys. It’s not about Nicole and Ron and me. It’s about them.”

Toward evening’s end, remaining guests, including former gang members, pressed their faces against the windows of the mansion and watched as Simpson held court in his living room with Cowlings and other members of his inner circle. The fund-raiser was the first such event at Simpson’s home since he was acquitted of the murders nearly nine months ago. But the football great has tried in a variety of ways to assert his innocence.

Last month, he made a five-day tour of England, participating in a television interview and answering questions from a hall full of Oxford University students. A few days after his return to the United States, he made a surprise appearance before a student assembly at El Camino College in Torrance.

Simpson appeared at that event with Muslim cleric Sheik Hisham Muhammad Kabbani, who also attended Thursday’s gathering.

Later, at a public forum at a South-Central Los Angeles health food store, Simpson offered to help with projects in the African American community. He subsequently appeared at another Stop the Violence reception, where he said he would assist that group.

The group gained its first notice in 1989 when it helped broker a truce among South-Central Los Angeles street gangs. The mostly volunteer group has since sent counselors into a variety of neighborhoods in an effort to quell disturbances, including gang fights and domestic disputes.

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Khalid Shah, president of the Stop the Violence, said before Thursday’s event: “I don’t believe controversy is bad. Sometimes it is good and necessary and I personally think there needs to be more dialogue on the issue of violence.”

Shah’s fund-raiser had the support of several black elected officials, including state Sen. Teresa Hughes (D-Inglewood), county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Holden and Inglewood City Councilman Curren D. Price.

As the Brentwood gathering began, members of Nicole Brown Simpson’s family in Orange County concentrated on plans for an event to raise funds for another anti-violence foundation, this one established in her name. The event will be held Saturday at the Disneyland Hotel.

Times staff writers Eric Slater and Ann Conway contributed to this story.