Without a Doubt (2 page)

• Every year, 4,744,000 women in the United States are physically assaulted by their partners.
  
• Every day, three women are murdered by their male partners.
  
• Twice as many women were murdered by current or former male partners between 2001 and 2012 as there were troops killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  

There is hope. Three Violence Against Women Acts have been signed into law since 1994. As a result, victim advocates and government agencies can work together more effectively. These laws have also enacted harsher punishments for certain violent crimes and created new prevention and victim assistance programs.

Domestic violence support groups and hotlines have multiplied since the Simpson case. There are now over fifty shelters in Los Angeles County alone. This is a very real step forward because without such resources victims often have nowhere to turn. I want to take this opportunity to applaud all the workers whose tireless efforts help the survivors of domestic violence. You save lives every day.

But what can we ordinary citizens do? We’ve learned the right words to say. We now know better than to blame the victim. We no longer pretend it’s just a family concern or a normal part of relationships, but we clearly have a long way to go. Fortunately, one of the most effective ways to stop this abuse is well within our reach. Boys who see their fathers beat their mothers will likely grow up to be men who beat their wives. Conversely, boys who are taught that physical violence is never acceptable will likely grow up to resolve their marital differences peaceably—or at least without their fists. If we, as parents, set a good example, we’ll make tremendous strides toward wiping out intimate partner violence.

I’m glad that the Simpson trial continues to provoke debate about these critical issues, but we should also not forget that two innocent people were brutally murdered. So I want to end this foreword by honoring Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. We owe them a great debt.

By documenting the years of torture she suffered at Simpson’s hands, Nicole helped pave the way for new laws and organizations that aid the victims of spousal abuse. And because Ron Goldman surprised Simpson that night and fought so valiantly, we wound up with much of the evidence that proves Simpson’s guilt.

This edition is dedicated to you, Nicole and Ron.

—Marcia Clark,

February 2016

P
rologue

April 30, 1996

This is painful. I don’t even know where to begin. When I try to find a starting place, headaches, backaches, this damned cough that won’t go away, all pull me down. My confidence collapses out from under me and I have to curl up on the couch until I feel better. I hope for sleep. But sleep won’t come.

I drink Glenlivet, but then you probably know that. And you know that I smoke Dunhills. And you know, or at least you think you do, that my “addictions” include crossword puzzles and detective novels, and that I have “unpredictable” taste in men. I am reading now from
People
magazine. I’ve never talked to anyone from
People
, but they seem to like me. Funny—when the media likes you, they can take scraps that your friends toss out, and spin them into flattering fairy tales. (But when they don’t like you, they take the scraps from ex-husbands.) God, don’t get me started. I look at myself in the
Globe
and see a man-crazy lush. And then I look at
Ladies’ Home Journal
and see a serene professional woman at the top of her game. And I look and look and look and don’t see myself at all.

All the attention I’ve gotten—it’s something I still cannot wrap my mind around. There was a time when I would have been thrilled by it. Back in high school, I wanted to be an actress. No fifteen-year-old wants to be an actress without wanting to be famous. Somewhere along the line, I outgrew wanting to be famous. I wanted to do something truly useful with my life. I wanted to make a real contribution. The irony, of course, is that the most serious job I ever undertook turned into a damned circus.

During the fourteen years I spent as a deputy D.A. for Los Angeles County, I believed in justice. To me it wasn’t an abstract idea. Before the Simpson case, I’d prosecuted twenty homicides. I’d brought cases against twenty defendants who I believed in my heart were guilty. And all but one jury agreed. I felt The Force was with me, if you know what I mean. Even in the difficult cases, it had been my experience that when people got onto juries they usually acted in better conscience than they did in their private lives. I had faith they’d rise to the occasion.

On the morning of June 13, 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found—their bodies butchered and discarded like grass clippings—all of that changed. Their murderer, O. J. Simpson, would turn justice on its head. By virtue of his celebrity, he would be coddled by worshipful cops, pumped up by star-fucking attorneys, indulged by a spineless judge, and adored by jurors every bit as addled by racial hatred as their counterparts on the Rodney King jury. O. J. Simpson slaughtered two innocent people, and he walked free—right past the most massive and compelling body of physical evidence ever assembled against a criminal defendant.

I am not bitter. I am angry. And I ask myself over and over again,
How could this jury fail to see? Was there something else we could have done? Something more we could have said?
How many times did I lead that jury along the blood trail? Following the bloody prints of that rare and expensive Bruno Magli loafer—size 12, the same as Simpson wears—leading away from the bodies, up the front steps to the rear gate of Nicole Brown’s condo. A blood trail leading right to the foot of O. J. Simpson’s bed, for God’s sake! On Ronald Goldman’s shirt, a head hair that matched those of the defendant. Simpson’s hair. On the navy-blue cap dropped at the crime scene, the same black hairs, as well as a carpet fiber matching those found in the defendant’s Bronco. Stop and think for a moment. How did all this stuff get there? The defendant’s blood is found where there shouldn’t be blood. The defendant’s hair where there shouldn’t be hair. There was enough physical evidence in this case to convict O. J. Simpson twenty times over.

Defendant “not guilty” on all counts.

I feel bad about a lot of things. I feel bad for the Browns and the Goldmans, for the way the system failed them. I feel bad for my fellow deputies, who so often stayed at the courthouse until two or three A.M., working themselves into a stupor of fatigue. I feel bad for all the
good
cops at LAPD who got a bum rap because of the transgressions of a few. I feel bad for the D.A. investigators who pulled off some truly extraordinary feats of behind-the-scenes investigation. I feel especially bad for our young law clerks, who poured their hearts into this case for fourteen months—only to have them broken by that unthinkable verdict. For many, it was their first case. How could anyone explain to them what an anomaly it was? No other criminal case in American history has generated such massive publicity. No other criminal defendant has entered the dock so perfectly insulated by personal wealth and public sympathy. What those fresh, idealistic young clerks saw, to their dismay, was a defendant who was virtually unconvictable. And that, quite understandably, shook their faith in American justice.

I’m ready now to do this. I’m upright at my laptop, ready to begin this story. Every time I feel overwhelmed by the desire to curl up on the couch and pull an afghan over my head, I’ll fight that urge down, because this is important. I just ask you to understand how hard this is. The event is so huge, it’s difficult to figure out how to shrink it into words, or even to make a start. The definitive account, I cannot give you. No one can. But I can tell you what the case meant to me. I can tell you about the strategies and the courtroom skirmishes. About moments of exultation and days of heartache. I can give you my private reflections. Particularly those. Because that’s what it all comes down to. Just as all politics is local, all good history is personal.

The Has-been

About the best thing you could say about my life before Monday, June 13, 1994, is that my problems were
my
problems. Nobody else was interested in them. No one except a handful of intimates, including my friend Lynn Reed, another deputy D.A. in the L.A. County District Attorney’s office. For weeks, she’d been urging me to file for divorce.

“Do it! Just do it!” she would tell me. I knew she was right. I’d been separated from my husband, Gordon, for about six months. In January he had moved out of our dilapidated tract house in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles. He was not deserting me; I’d asked him to leave. Our marriage had degenerated into the gray misery that appears vivid only in retrospect. I will not go into particulars because they are no one’s business but our own.

Suffice it to say that the previous year had been hell. I’d just left the D.A.‘s Special Trials Unit for a management job in Central Operations. That allowed me to spend evenings with my sons. Tyler was just a baby; Matthew was then a toddler. I enjoyed better prospects as a pencil pusher, but the work left me in a state of chronic discontent. The trade-off for a carpeted office and a shot at six figures, I discovered, is boredom. Absolute, brain-numbing boredom. Old line lawyers like me are adrenaline junkies. We like getting out on the streets with the police and arguing before juries. Scheduling cases for other attorneys to try is a drag.

So I was unhappy with my job and unhappy in my marriage. I knew I could limp along like this, or I could take some decisive action to turn my life around. In December 1993, I asked for my old job back. And I asked Gordon to leave.

I’d spent most of my adult life with a man under the same roof, and now, trying to cope with plumbing problems, cable bills, and the furious demands of being a working mother, I was constantly terrified. It was, I knew, a hell of my own devising—I had no grounds to complain about it. At times I was ready to break down and ask my husband to come back. Yet I resisted the temptation to return to a lousy marriage just for the sake of expediency. Even so, I let the separation drag on for six months before I took Lynn’s advice: “Let him know it’s over.” So I went out and bought myself one of those do-it-yourself divorce kits. Money was tight; it seemed like a good idea at the time. But the lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client.

There were no reporters in the bushes, no paparazzi peeping through the windows, when I filed the divorce papers on June 10. Three days later, O. J. Simpson crashed into my life like a meteor.

On Monday morning, June 13, 1994, I was struggling to get out of the house. Any parent with a preschooler knows the drill.

Honey, we’re late.

I don’t want to go!

Shoe!

By the time he reaches nursery school, that same child will run off happily to play with his pals.

I had a parking space in the lot behind the Criminal Courts Building, and that morning when I pulled in I waved to one of the attendants, Arturo.

“
Mucho trabajo hoy?
” he called out to me.

“
Sí, como siempre
.”

In fact, that morning, I had no court appearances, no witness interviews. There was nothing on my calendar to indicate that this would be anything other than a short-skirt day. No need for a “believe me” suit.

It was 9:30, and I was late—as I usually am when I don’t have to make it in under the gavel. Well, the truth is, I am just chronically late. It’s a character flaw, but one I can’t seem to rectify. My friends even have a term for it: Marcia Standard Time.

I’m not proud of being late, but it does afford a slight advantage at the CCB. It allows one to avoid the crush at the elevators, which are, by far, the slowest in L.A. County. During rush hours, attorneys who are headed for Special Trials on the eighteenth floor and imprudent enough to arrive on time often find themselves fifteen to twenty minutes behind schedule for court, because the “express” elevator—specially designed by outside consultants—inevitably stops mid-route. Latecomers, however, running on Marcia Standard Time, often enjoy a clear shot.

At the eighteenth floor, the elevator doors open upon Mordor, Land of Darkness: my private name for the courthouse’s dreary labyrinth of smog-soiled cement hallways. On some mornings a touch of claustrophobia leaves me breathless until I open the door of my high-ceilinged office, where I find sunlight streaming through the window. For seconds afterward, motes of dust swirl like snowflakes in that strong, welcome light.

No civil servant takes a window for granted. Certainly not me. During my early years on the job, I toiled away in sunless, airless cubicles in a series of far-flung outposts of the L.A. District Attorney’s dominion. West L.A., Beverly Hills, Culver City. In my early days as a baby D.A., I caught mainly deuces—drunk driving charges. Every once in a while I’d get to do the preliminary hearings on a homicide. That was what made the overtime worthwhile. Murder is so much more compelling than other crimes. There’s more complexity, more sophisticated forms of evidence. You get tool marks. You get blood markers. There’s stuff to play with.

I was always itching to get beyond the preliminaries to trials. Real trials. Criminal trials where you have to think quickly, react quickly. I wanted to be drawn into an experience that was totally absorbing. Trial work is especially appealing to the workaholic. I’d go through the docket like Pac-Man, grabbing cases no one else would touch, putting in ten- to twelve-hour days in the process. What gave rise to this fervor is hard for me to explain. Work offers a defensible escape from a private life on the skids. Working myself to the point of exhaustion left me feeling purified. Exhilarated. I think it also gave me a sense that I was cheating mortality. Ever since I was small, I’ve been dogged by the premonition that I would die young. I couldn’t imagine living past forty. Forty-five, tops. That kind of deadline adds a sense of urgency to everything. It’s like—I can keep on living if I run fast enough.

Beyond that, the courtroom is the ideal venue for someone who likes to argue. For most of my life I’ve been contentious, and it’s gotten me into a lot of trouble. But verbal dexterity and strong opinions are welcomed at the bar. There are clearly delineated rules of combat, rules that favor reason. Humans may be capricious—but, to my naive way of thinking, justice was not.