Nicole Simpson Called Her, Hotline Counselor Testifies

A battered-women’s counselor testified Wednesday that a woman she believes was Nicole Brown Simpson called a shelter hotline on June 7, 1994, and, in a frightened tone, reported that her ex-husband was stalking her and had threatened to kill her.

Volunteer counselor Nancy N. Ney described her 20-minute conversation with the caller, who said her name was Nicole, in chilling detail.

“She said that her ex-husband had been calling her on the phone . . . begging her to please come back to him,” Ney recounted. “She said he was stalking her. She would be in a restaurant, and he’d be sitting at the next table, staring at her. She’d be in the market, he’d be there in the next aisle, looking at her. She’d be driving down the street and look in her rear-view mirror, and he’d be there.”

The defense team had fought hard to keep out Ney’s testimony, which was excluded from Simpson’s criminal trial on the grounds that it was improper hearsay.

But Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki ruled that the plaintiffs could present it. Fujisaki did not explain his reasoning in detail, but he apparently agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that the defense had opened the door to the hotline testimony by asserting that the Simpsons’ relationship was loving, not frightening or threatening.

The counselor’s account of that call was the most dramatic evidence presented to jurors in the O.J. Simpson civil trial on Wednesday, but the plaintiffs also offered less titillating testimony that they contend is just as important--because it directly contradicts Simpson’s sworn statements.

Jurors heard from a wardrobe stylist who said she gave Simpson a black sweatsuit as a gift after he wore it to shoot an exercise video shortly before the June 12, 1994, slayings of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. Simpson testified that he returned it to the production company after the filming, but Leslie Gardner, who was in charge of all clothing for the video, said, “He never returned anything to me.”

The plaintiffs contend that Simpson wore that sweatsuit as he committed the murders.

Testimony from two other witnesses--a housekeeper and a limousine driver--challenged a key aspect of Simpson’s alibi.

Simpson testified that he was home resting, showering and packing for a trip to Chicago the night of the killings. He did not respond to repeated buzzes on his intercom from the limo driver waiting to pick him up, he said, because he was afraid his dog would run out if he opened the gate to let the driver onto his property. But Simpson’s housekeeper and his regular limo driver, who had picked him up at least 100 times over the years but was unavailable the night of June 12, both testified that the dog never left the property.

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Jurors appeared attentive throughout the day as the plaintiffs zipped through six witnesses in an attempt to wrap up their case this week. Much of the evidence they heard had not come into Simpson’s criminal trial--including the hotline call five days before the murders from a woman who identified herself as Nicole.

On cross-examination, lead defense counsel Robert C. Baker tried to discredit Ney’s testimony about that call by suggesting that she embellished her account of the hotline conversation after learning of the murders.

For example, Ney testified that she remembered the caller telling her of a death threat: “She said [her ex-husband] had told her on several occasions that if he ever caught her with another man, he would kill her.” But Baker pounced on the fact that Ney had not recorded that threat on a form she filled out during the call, or on notes she jotted two weeks later. “In hindsight, it should have been written down,” she acknowledged.

Similarly, Ney testified Wednesday that the caller said she was a white woman in her mid-30s who lived in West Los Angeles, had a son and a daughter under 10, and had been married to a high-profile man for eight years--all characteristics that fit Nicole Simpson. Yet on the shelter’s hotline form, Ney wrote down only that the caller lived in West Los Angeles and had been in a relationship for eight years.

Baker wondered aloud whether Ney might have concocted the additional details to make sure the caller was identified as Nicole Simpson. And he raised questions about the date Ney received the call. On her form, Ney initially wrote 5-7, indicating May 7, but she said she later realized her mistake and corrected it to 6-7.

Though slightly rattled by Baker’s aggressive and accusatory tone, Ney stood by her account of the call. And she testified that the frightened voice on the hotline resembled the voice she later heard on the widely publicized tape of a 911 call that Nicole Simpson made eight months before the murders. “It was the same,” she said.

Ney’s testimony capped the plaintiffs’ two-day effort to prove that O.J. Simpson lied to jurors when he swore under oath that he had never hit or stalked Nicole.

On Tuesday, two witnesses said they saw Simpson slap Nicole in separate incidents. And Ney testified Wednesday that the hotline caller spoke of repeated beatings over the years. “She told me that [her ex-husband’s] behavior frightened her to such an extent . . . that she was asking my opinion about whether I thought it would be safer for her and her children to move back in with him,” Ney testified.

After Ney’s testimony, one of Simpson’s close friends, Dr. Ronald Fischman, testified that the ex-football great was unusually withdrawn, subdued and tired at his daughter’s recital hours before the murders. “In all the years that you knew O.J. Simpson, he never appeared the way he appeared at that recital, true?” attorney Michael Brewer asked. “It’s true,” Fischman responded.

On cross-examination, the defense pointed out that Fischman was not watching Simpson throughout the evening of the recital and had no idea whether he had good reason to look so tired.

Other damaging testimony came from Simpson’s former girlfriend, Paula Barbieri.

The plaintiffs contend that Barbieri’s decision to break up with Simpson the morning of the murders helped propel him into a lethal rage. Simpson, however, testified that he never got the message she left with his answering service jilting him. Barbieri testified Wednesday that she “assumed” Simpson had in fact received her message, since he left her three messages of his own that day asking her what had gone wrong.

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Barbieri also contradicted Simpson’s assertion that he did not deliberately pack his passport in the black travel bag he took with him while fleeing arrest in his friend’s Bronco five days after the murders. Simpson had testified that the passport just happened to be in the bag and that he did not pack it. But Barbieri said she saw the passport on the night stand next to the bed Simpson was sleeping in the evening before he fled.

The plaintiffs contend that Simpson packed his passport and nearly $10,000 because he may have been planning to flee the country. On cross-examination, however, Barbieri testified that Simpson customarily carried both his passport and lots of cash wherever he went.