An Issue of Anger and Intent

The courthouse on Hollywood Boulevard is not overcrowded with spectators, not overheated with emotion. A dainty, well-dressed woman on the witness stand is dabbing at her eyes, though, with a tissue handed to her by the judge, while a muscular man in an untucked, short-sleeved shirt sits face in hand in the defendant’s chair, choking back sobs.

“Have you ever seen the defendant angry?” a prosecuting attorney asks Shirley Hughley, a widow whose husband was Jim Brown’s best friend.

“No.”

“In the 16 1/2 years you’ve known him, you’ve NEVER seen the defendant angry?”

“No,” the witness says. “Except watching a football game on TV. He gets angry at the game sometimes.”

Chuckles fill the courtroom.

The prosecutor presses on, asking, “Does Mr. Brown raise his voice?”

“When he’s watching football,” the wife of the late Big George Hughley repeats, “or losing to my husband at backgammon.”

There are more titters, until the attorney persists: “You’ve never seen him angry other than that?”

“I have never seen him angry at a human being,” Shirley Hughley testifies.

*

But of course Jim Brown and anger are not strangers. He has slapped women, and women have slapped him. This is not supposition. This is something Jim Brown has stated categorically, while addressing circumstances in his life when he “let my emotions overpower my intellect.”

His is a formidable intellect, as any character witness who has ever crossed the man’s path could also testify. Yet along with this gray matter comes a nasty streak of red, which Jim Brown sees and labors to control. Particularly when he is drinking.

Brown, 63, admits he shouldn’t drink, that alcohol alters his personality, makes him intolerant and aggressive. When the cops came to his house on June 15, danger was definitely in the air. Windows were broken on Monique Brown’s automobile, smashed by a man wielding a shovel. The man was her husband.

Does he deny this?

On the contrary, as Brown said during a lunch recess Friday at his trial, “I already said I was frustrated and I broke the windows. I told them [police] where the gun was in my house. They said I was a person who was excellent in the way I showed them respect. It’s not an issue if I broke the window. It’s an issue of: Is it legal to break your own property?”

Brown was booked for vandalism and a charge you don’t hear every day--making terrorist threats--because police, particularly L.A. police, cannot afford to let 911 domestic abuse calls slide by. Not after that other notorious case involving a football player. And also because Monique Brown gave the cops a real earful.

A detective testified that according to Monique, her husband “had to drink to pass out to avoid killing” her during their quarrel.

Brown’s young wife, 25, soon took back every word, insisting that she was neither harmed nor in fear for her life. That he had never threatened to “snap her neck.”

Authorities prosecuted anyway, and Brown’s attorney quickly speculated as to why.

“Since O.J. Simpson, there has been over-enforcement in these family argument cases,” William Graysen declared. “In the O.J. case, police didn’t do enough. Now they have gone in the other direction.”

Still, they cannot overlook the fact that Brown once struck girlfriend Eva Bohn-Chin and flung her wig out a window. There have been several other accusations against him. Brown maintains where there is smoke, there isn’t always fire.

*

In a parking lot outside court, he is talking about poise. Telling how it served him in dealings with gangs like the Latin Kings, Crips and Bloods, helping to negotiate peace talks.

“My forte,” Brown says, “is that I care about people.”

The man he cared about most, George Hughley, was a police officer from whom he was inseparable. It was Big George who looked after Marvin Gaye’s family after the singer was shot by his own father, Big George who drove Jim to the Sherman Oaks burn unit after Richard Pryor had nearly self-immolated.

Hughley died in February. He was like family to Brown, whose father and mother both abandoned him before he was 2. It pained him hearing someone ask George’s widow just how bad a temper Brown had.

He is trying now not to lose it.

“Regardless of what happens here,” Brown says, with closing arguments in the case expected next week, “you will never see this black man on his knees. I am not a slave. I do not have a slave mentality. I am a free, strong black man, and that may be an issue with a lot of people.”

The real issue is neither black nor white but red, and how much of it Brown saw on the night in question. To some, this is a clear-cut case of a man threatening his wife. To others, though, it may only be a case of a man attacking a car.

*

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com.