Simpson’s Dim Future Grows Bleaker

In the end, O.J. Simpson was resigned to it. Not just to the verdict. But to the loss of stature, of considerable wealth and, certainly, of public adulation.

A civil jury’s finding that Simpson was responsible for the deaths of his former wife and her friend could only reinforce the former football idol’s feeling that his hopes of a public resurrection have vanished, a close confidant said.

“He can’t win, as far as he is concerned,” said the associate, adding that in the days before the jury’s decision Simpson predicted that the verdict would go against him. “He knows he is ruined by all of this. Now he is just going to go on in the best way that he can.”

In the ranks of Simpson’s boosters, the jury’s decision heaps injustice on a man wrongly accused. For his many attackers, $8.5 million in the first round of damages is a pittance; only life in prison would have been fair punishment.

But for Simpson himself, in a very real way, the court’s judgment comes as just another reversal in a life already constrained in almost every sense, even without the presence of prison bars.

He is likely to lose most of what remains of his fortune. The considerable resources he will maintain will constantly be within striking distance of the court’s judgment. He will find it difficult, if not impossible, to work, or trade on his once-golden persona. He has been rejected by many of the country club friends and golf buddies who once embraced him. Even in the black community, generally a bastion of support, Simpson’s attempts to fashion a new life are likely to be haunted by the slayings.

What Simpson will try to fall back on, according to friends, is a rekindled family life, an undying obsession with golf and the support of a few allies, like lifelong friend Al Cowlings.

In the “suicide” note he left before leading police on the now-infamous chase around Southern California, Simpson himself predicted: “No matter what the outcome, people will look and point.”

As Mari Womack, a UCLA cultural anthropologist, said after he was acquitted in the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman: “When the paragon falls, he falls with a heavy crash.”

It is a measure of the considerable stigma surrounding Simpson that almost everyone interviewed for this story, including his backers, insisted on remaining anonymous.

Now, an expected appeal of the jury verdict could drag on for months. Soon, sources said, he is likely to file a malpractice suit against his onetime buddy and erstwhile defense team member Robert Kardashian, for Kardashian’s alleged breach of legal ethics in assisting in a book that detailed many of the Simpson defense team’s tactics. (Kardashian declined to comment.) Simpson can expect his former in-laws to renew their challenge of his custody of his children, Sydney and Justin. And Simpson potentially could be forced to return to court for years as the Brown and Goldman families attempt to collect the judgment.

Simpson could very well lose his Brentwood estate and his Bentley automobile. A San Francisco condominium where his mother lives also could be seized.

Still, Simpson will be left with substantial assets, principally pension accounts that total about $2.5 million.

There has been some speculation that Simpson might give up his longtime base on the Westside and relocate to Florida, where the law would make his principal home not subject to court seizure.

Simpson has said little, however, about his plans.

The one theme that he has repeated is that, at 50, he intends to devote much of the rest of his life to rearing Sydney, 11, and Justin, 8, the children he had with Nicole.

“I think he will spend more time with his kids than he ever has,” said one associate, who speaks to Simpson regularly. “He loves them and wants them. I just know that is where his heart is on this.”

But his former in-laws, Louis and Juditha Brown, who raised the children during the protracted criminal trial, have said they will press their efforts to get the children back.

Several legal experts predicted Tuesday, however, that even the finding that Simpson killed two people might not reverse an Orange County judge’s decision to give him custody of his children. Orange County Superior Court Judge Nancy Wieben Stock did not wait for the verdict in the civil case before ruling in December that Simpson should get the children.

Simpson is said to worry that his efforts to build a relationship with the children will never be freed from the intense public scrutiny that follows him. “I just wish they would leave them alone and let him do the best he can under the circumstances,” said another Simpson ally.

Even at the private school where they are enrolled on the Westside, the presence of the Simpson children will raise controversy. “It’s a Catch-22, because people don’t like him but they don’t want to hurt the kids,” said one parent at the school, who also asked not to be named. “It’s not about the [Simpson] kids at all. It’s the press, the pressure, everything” that their presence could bring to the campus.

The parent predicted, however, that Sydney and Justin will probably just be treated like the other children.

At home, O. J. Simpson’s sister, Shirley Baker, will help out with much of the child-rearing. Simpson and the children have made a few forays into the Brentwood community where he was once a fixture.

At the quaint Brentwood Country Mart, Simpson recently paused for a visit in a bookstore. He stopped in a gift shop with the kids and Cowlings.

Portraits of Simpson as unmitigated pariah are overblown, noted one acquaintance. “There are still people who ask for his autograph and he still gets dates.”

But even in this old stomping grounds, he is sometimes met with disdain. One merchant recalled how two women in a neighboring store recently turned on their heels and walked out when Simpson came to shop. But for most, in a community that is studiously disinterested in celebrity, Simpson is simply ignored.

That experience might be welcomed by some, but is painful to a man who once reveled in his fame, friends said. Even in the bastions where he held court with a band of other athletic, garrulous men, Simpson now finds himself persona non grata.

He has not visited the Riviera Country Club--previously the scene of high-stakes golf and gin rummy games--since he was freed from jail 16 months ago, members say.

“He called once when he got out of jail, but I haven’t seen him at all,” said one former golfing buddy.

Only one of his regular foursome still goes out with him now, but to public courses at Griffith Park and the Hansen Dam Recreation Center, rather than at the tony Riviera, the golfer said. “The other guys don’t even want to hear his name or have anything to do with him,” he said.

With such sentiments so widespread in his own neighborhood, Simpson has in the last 16 months occasionally signaled that he would try to rebuild some of his life in the African American community, where he was seldom seen before he was put on trial for murder.

He visited Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.’s church. He went to the Crenshaw district and strolled Martin Luther King Boulevard greeting well-wishers after his release from jail. Last summer he had a veritable coming-out party, hosting a fund-raiser at his Rockingham Avenue home for an African American charity.

And his forays into the black community would still seem to have a receptive audience. A Times poll recently showed that fully 70% of African Americans believe he did not kill his ex-wife and Goldman. (Seventy-one percent of whites, in contrast, believe that Simpson is a killer.)

But black Los Angeles is not a monolith and Simpson’s attempts to make a foothold in the community are not without dilemmas. Although he held the white-linen June fund-raiser for the Stop the Violence, Increase the Peace Foundation, for example, even that gesture met with mixed results.

An A-list of African American invitees, including Wesley Snipes and Sinbad, did not show up. The event raised about $30,000, instead of the anticipated $200,000 or more.

“The way his public persona is being perceived, I don’t think it would be wise for any nonprofit organization to do something with him,” said a businessman close to the event. “It can only bring negative energy to that cause. That is just the reality of it, whether that is just or unjust.”

John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League, said he would have to think twice before accepting an offer of help from Simpson. “He brings quite a bit of baggage,” Mack said.

Unwelcome in his old haunts, viewed with reservation even where he once seemed welcome, Simpson’s future is uncertain.

It’s difficult to say how much Simpson’s feelings have changed in the 2 1/2 years since he penned what many people thought was a suicide note. Wrote Simpson: “Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.”