Doomed to Fail - Ep 10 - Part 1: "If he did it" - OJ & Nicole Simpson

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Finally re-releasing the stories from Doomed to Fail Episode 10!!! We are finally telling the stories that are in our theme song - Farz starts out with the story of OJ Simpson & his ex-wife Nicole. If you were alive in the 1990s, this is all you talked about the entire time. It was either OJ's spectacular Football career, his acting, rumors of domestic violence, and the most famous murder in America. This story brought us the Kardashians, the most-watched live car chase in history, and decades worth of entertainment as we try to justify how a murderer is currently golfing.Join us for this epic re-release!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]   Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

My friends, Taylor from Doom to Fail. I'm super excited for this week's release, we'll be releasing episode 10 in two parts, part one in part two. For episode 10, we decided to do the stories that are in our theme song. So for this first part, Faris is going to talk about O.J. and Nicole Simpson. If you were there, you were there. And if you weren't, buckle up. It's crazy.

And O.J. Simpson's, you know, still around and out of jail. so let us know what you think let us know your theories and your thoughts and it's a truly american story of sports and murder and fame so yeah i hope you enjoy if you have any questions or any ideas for us doomed to fail pod at gmail.com please take a second to like us on apple podcast it means so much to us and we appreciate you the matter of the people of the state of california first is horthall james simpson case number b a zero nine so my fellow america Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Dume to Fail, the podcast where me and Taylor seemingly keep missing each other in Dallas. I'm Fars. I'm joined here by Taylor. Hi, Taylor. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm tired. I just got to Dallas.

got to Dallas and I missed you by a day but here we are but not on purpose it was I was trying to get out Thursday night and super annoyed my plane got canceled really late so luckily I have a friend that lives pretty close to the airport so I went and stayed with her I just like got to her house at midnight and then like left on a air mattress and then left at five to go back to the airport and I was on standby for an eight o'clock flight back to California and luckily I got on it otherwise I would have been there like the rest of the day. That's awful. That's so bad. Yeah. I'm happy to be home. Yeah.

That's good to hear. Um, we are going to be doing, this is our 10th episode, which is a special 10th episode for us. Woohoo. I'm kind of proud of us for getting this far. Um, and making it. I am too. It's very exciting. Yeah. And you had a suggestion for what we should do for our 10th episode. Do you want to tell folks what that is? Yeah. I thought to celebrate. And it's a fun.

because I feel like a lot of podcasts when they get to the like 100th episode, they have a party, and I'm like, oh, my God, they feel so far away. But we're here at number 10. And I thought that we should do the relationships that are in our theme song. Fars's brother made it for us, and it has two pretty famous stories in it. So we thought we'd head over to those. Love it. You're going first.

I'm going first. Let's start with your drink. Okay, I'm going to try to do this. My drink is a Sam Adams Because it's a nice Boston Laga How do you? Boston Laga Just nail that accent That's how the Kennedy shock Boston Laga

So I don't have that All I have is a stone IPA So I'm going to drink that right now But sounds so good Hold on me see my parents I only have one beer I think oh no I have Budlights because whatever my dad visits

He leaves a trail of Budlights Bud Light Lines I can always have a bed light. No, just regular ones. Oh, man. There's no beer. So much for that. My drink is a screwdriver

because I am covering Orenthal James Simpson. And I feel like if you're married to him, you gotta be drunk on screwdrivers. You gotta pour some vodka in the OJ to maintain that marriage. for any bit of time. That's hilarious. I love it. It's real good.

Also, I'm totally aware that my audio quality is going backwards this week, and it is just because I'm traveling. That's okay. Yeah. So let's go ahead and dive right in. So I'm going to start with my side of the true crime side of things with OJ Simpson. I'll start by saying that this story has been covered to death, but in researching this episode, so many things came up that I just forgotten about or never really knew.

Some of our listeners, like ourselves, were old enough to remember watching the white bronco chase. If that is you, then you already probably know the broad strokes of what happened here, but we're going to go into it anyways. If you're too young to remember, in addition to this podcast, I would recommend checking out the People versus OJ Simpson on Netflix. Taylor, have you seen that? I have.

It's an American crime story, right? Or is it in the documentary? This is not the documentary. This one's the 10-part series. That really just starts with the murders and ends with the verdict. He would be getting juniors in it. He does an incredible job as OJ. And if you remember, John Travolta plays Robert slash Bob Shapiro.

I do remember that. Very nice. And Sarah Paulson is in it, too. She's the other lawyer. It's great. Marsha Clark. Yeah. Yeah.

She's so good. So obviously this is, you know, it is sad, spoil alert. Two people lost our lives. Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were the two victims and obviously it's a tragedy and all that, all that. But the one thing I would say is that this is going to sound really weird, but when I started researching this, I thought of Rambo for some reason. What I think I was really focused.

was really focused on there was that there are some things historically that produce amazing stuff as a result of it so for example i was thinking about i started going on this path i think about vietnam and how rambo the character is really a byproduct like it wouldn't exist but for vietnam and i started researching what are some other things that were a byproduct of that war and hendricks zappa dylan all of these amazing iconic musicians were completely influenced by that war. It's certainly back to the topic. Can I bring a hot take? Yeah. Bob Dylan is terrible. His song lyrics are like a five-year-old rhythm. Like, it's like he rhymes words like bird, nerd,

and like that's it, that's it. He's like not, it's really, really bad. And I saw him in person like 15 years ago, and even then he was too old to be performing, and it was just like... Oh, geez. I believe it. I'm not impressed.

Yeah, I'm not like a fanboy of Bob Dylan. I will argue that Hendrix is amazing, but you didn't respond to him. So we don't have to get into it. I said nothing about that. Yeah. Circling back the topic of today within this event, I went on Amazon and I looked up the books category and searched for O.J. Simpson, there were 16 books per page result, returned by Amazon, and there were 39 pages.

Oh my gosh, he was at 16. I was like, there has to be more than 16, and there's like, also more than 16. 624 books on Amazon right now that you can read about the OJ Simpson trial. That doesn't include all the- Yeah, go ahead. No, I'm gonna say like, this is what I feel like

when people are like, oh, you're starting a podcast, everyone has a podcast. I'm like, yeah, everyone also has a book about OJ Simpson. Yeah. So this does not include and follow to just include O.J. Simpson in it, like, spouse killer, like all that, no of that other true crime stuff. That's not included in this. This is literally just about the trial. And actually, every character that we're going to discuss here has written at least one book on it, including the prosecutors, the attorney, all of them. And then in addition to that, I went found there were 20 songs written that reference the killings. There are five, like, shitty movies that came out immediately after this. case became a thing, not including the Netflix series I just mentioned, or the three movies that

O.J. Simpson himself starred in the TV prank show that he produced. So, like, there's a ton of content that came out of this case. One thing I read that isn't here that I didn't list here, but it is 100% believe it, is that the night of the murder, somebody already started trying to sell the book rights to a publisher. But the actual... night that they found out that this happened, somebody tried to actually capitalize on it. Fuck yeah. Good for that person. I know. Good for them too. Yeah. And one thing we can thank this case on is giving us the Kardashian family. Really, I'm not a Kardashian. I don't really care. Sure, happy for them. They're doing great. They're doing their own thing. Whatever.

I'm sure people have feelings about it. But Kim's, Kim Kardashian's dad, his father, Rob, was one of OJ's defense attorneys and a really, really close friend of his. We'll get into like how close they actually ended up being. And he was also like hilariously played by David Schwimmer in the Netflix series. He just always, I don't know what it is about David Schwimmer, but he just always looks confused. He played him. Fantastic. Yeah. You felt so bad for that man. Who, Rob. Yeah. Yeah. He was just so sad. He just like was like, this is my best friend. He couldn't have killed someone. And then he was like, I'm sure they intentionally did this, but they had him, like, with his kids and being like,

it's more important to be a good person than to be rich. And, you know, of course, like, after he died, his family, like, did their thing. So it's funny. Don't you feel like that was editorialized just to, like, poke fun of the Kardashian family? Oh, totally was. Okay. Absolutely. But it was hilarious.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So long story short, is that there are millions of cultural touchstones that come out of this event. We're going to just start by getting into the main characters here. Taylor, curious to know your take on this. you're you would have been of an age you watched this right like you I'm assuming you kept up with this okay yeah was was OJ Simpson a name you would recognize before this happened I only not as like

anything else and I don't know I don't know if it's before after birth there's this movie that we used to watch when I was little with a net funicello from the Mickey Mouse club where she's older and it's called Back to the Beach and it's like her and her family Lori Loughlin is in it It's like very bizarre. But I used to watch it all the time with my family. And in that movie, they're at the airport and they see O.J. Simpson and they say, is that O.D. Simpson? But then they see he like runs and trips over a bunch of suitcases and they're like, oh, no, it can't be. It actually sounds familiar.

I don't know. It's like a totally random cultural point. But so I might have known, like, of him, present of that, but like not like a lot. Like, we weren't like Bill's fans. Yeah, I might have been too young. But the name O.J. Simpson, man. absolutely nothing to me before this all happened. But apparently, I mean, people treated this guy like Messiah almost. There's a funny story that is debunked now about how James Cameron

originally cast OJ as the Terminator in the movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said that OJ wasn't believable as a killing machine, so they recast the role for him. All this isn't true. So James Cameron actually has come out. It was relatively recently. I read an article that James Cameron came out and said, no, this was literally just one phone call, some executive who was on the production company side of things, called James Cameron and said, hey, we recommend you cast OJ in this role. Wasn't true. But obviously, his name was big enough to where it's being battered around in Hollywood hallways to the likes of a James Cameron, right?

So there's, he was like a cultural phenomenon. Yeah, yeah. He was like one of the first football, like, superstars. Because I feel like before, there's like a lot of terrible stories about men. who were like in football in the 60s who didn't get paid a lot in the NFL and now have terrible brain diseases or brain injuries and people are like oh but you were in the NFL and they're like it wasn't like I was a superstar of those endorsements it was like kind of like a regular job you know yeah so he didn't get paid this extraordinary amount so he was like one of the first

I think he did all those Hertz endorsements right the Hertz cars he was just like I think maybe the first really really really famous one especially the first black one that I I think, like, as a black man being super, uber famous. You are nailing everything here. That is a really good encapsulation. Again, I wasn't aware. No, no, I wasn't aware of any of, like, I'm going to get into it.

But that was actually a really good way to phrase it. So going back to the characters, the main characters of the story, we have Ornthol James Simpson, O.J. himself, who was a former professional football player and an actor. We have Nicole Brown Simpson. She has no work history to speak of, really. Her and O.J. met when she was a waitress at 18 years old.

And we have Ronald Lyle Goldman, who was a waiter who had the misfortune of being friends with Nicole. Or having some sort of relationship with her. Like, I don't, we don't know, but whatever. Doesn't matter, right? Yeah, I agree. I'll start by saying, I love football, but America's hero worship of football is kind of insane. There is no doubt OJ was a phenomenal. athlete, but this guy's hero status got him into and out of so many things that are completely

closed off to normal human beings. I mean, think about it, it's literally the reason why we know his name. I mean, murdering spouses is nothing new. And yet this guy has been dominating the public consciousness for almost 30 years now. I'm going to go, I'm going to list off OJ's achievements. Not because they're meaningful to me or probably really the listeners either, but it helps me a picture of just how respected this guy was at that time. These were just bullet points I'm going to rattle off.

He played for USC when he graduated. They retired his jersey. For context, this actually has only happened six times. So it's only six players, including OJ, in Trojan history, ever had their numbers retired. He won All-American twice in college. He won the Heisman trophy. He was basically in every what is essentially now the Pro Bowl of his era.

Back then, it was called the all-time teams. He had the most touchdowns in 1975, the most rushing touchdowns in 73 and 75, the most rushing yards for four seasons. He won the offensive player of the year three times. The Associated Press named him athlete of the year in 1973. Once they started actually having Pro Bowls and naming it that, he played in five of them. He won offensive player of the year in 73, and he won the NFL most valuable player in 73 as well. What a year. It felt like they were just inventing awards to give to this guy, but he actually was that exceptional.

His players, like, his player's stats are way too boring to go into. Again, tons of hero worship here. But if you want to, you can go look on his Wikipedia page, and somebody has meticulously gone through every year, everything he did, every game he played in note at all. it. I mean, even if you don't get to the murders, it's like 50 pages of content just by going off of that stuff. I would say that every publication I looked at listed him on the top 50 best players in the history of football. Bleacher Report, which is probably one of the more respected, you know, content creators on the on the sports front, actually has enlisted number 16 all time, which is actually ahead of Tom Brady. That's the status of person that we're talking about

here i don't know why i feel i said good to that but like i feel like i feel equally unimpressed with tom brady as i do with oj's upset even though he has not killed anyone and i hope he never does i think i think you're just over boston in new england people after your research this week for real so that's fair that's you did really good on that that's enough of his NFL stats oj always also had a passion for acting he actually started doing bit parts and shows while he was still in college at USC. His most famous roles were obviously the naked gun movies, which are amazing. People should go watch those. He also hosted SNL. He was a commentator for the NFL on NBC. And as you had actually mentioned earlier, he was also a spokesperson for Hertz, the rental

car company. OCHI was actually kind of shrewd when it comes to business. He knew, like exactly what you just said, Taylor. He knew he had the it factor that had evaded black athletes for most of sports history. White America saw OJ as just this non-threatening, very affle, good-looking, charming guy. Ironically, he also had, he never had scandals. And like I said before, he literally won every single war that existed.

Totally. So he had a ton of endorsement deals. He had allocated resources from his football, you know, time days making money doing football, to buying hotels, buying restaurants, Outside of football, he was making about $1 million per year, which converted to today's money, about $2.1 million. That's away from football. That is literally just endorsements, side hustle businesses that he had.

Like I said, OJ. and Nicole met and started dating when she was 18, and he was actually still married to a woman named Marguerite, whom she had three kids with. Two years later, in 1979, O.J. Marguerite divorced, and he would eventually marry Nicole in 1985 so by my count that puts Nicole at 26 and him at 37 years old when they get married yeah so at this point he'd retired by the way at this point he'd retired so at this point by telling he marries Nicole he's lived a complete life i mean everything he just listed off that he did that happened five years before this marriage came about he marries Nicole and as he's as she's involved in his life, he is ramping up to the next round of being this successful actor, spokesperson,

multiple business owner, all the rest of it. Oh my God, imagine if we would have played like Thimpson instead of Madden. Wait, played OJ? Yeah, imagine if like he had been madden and like made the game and like had not done anything bad. Like he could have just like done so many more things. I've thought about that so many times because the way this guy's life derails after this case we'll get into that. Talk about like complete 180, right?

From the most actual, charming, non-offensive, non-scaneled person to, like, anyways, we know who he is now, right? Like we always say, we're the only podcast advocating not to kill your family and these are the consequences. Nothing good happens. Nothing good. You turn to OJ. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know how smart I think OJ or Nicole are in comparison to one another.

But still, I mean, I would be intimidated by his success, like, never mind a 26-year-old. I mean, think about this guy's like going to, he knows everybody who's, everybody who's rich, famous, powerful in Hollywood, knows your husband and like is very, very close. He wants him to like them. That's the status that we're talking about here. That's the power dynamic we always talk about. Yeah, yeah. And this one goes so much deeper.

So I wrote here that, yeah, sure, there's the power dynamic that we always talk about, 11 year age difference, wealth, so on all the other stuff. But it's also different because there's a cultural dynamic at play here. If you're Nicole, you don't just have a husband in O.J. Simpson, you have a national hero, like literally Mr. All-American. Like, who will ever care about the faults that you have with this person, whether they're abusive or not? How could you have any issues with your marriage? Right. He's untouchable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

They're married in 85. They have two kids together, which we never talked about, thankfully. Like, I'm researching this. You never hear about the kids ever. There's one part of the story where you hear about the kids and that literally had to do when the police called OJ to tell him that Nicole was dead and you're just like, how are the kids? That's the only time they really come up. So kudos to the media for a change for not being horrible about this situation with them.

But poor kids, right? Yeah, part babies, yeah. There were obviously claims of spousal abuse. One claim in 1989 actually went to court. In total, there were 62 incidences of abuse, of which Nicole actually only reported eight. Mostly, this was because she was 100% financially dependent on OJ. Part of their marriage included a prenuptial agreement. Part of that prenuptial agreement included a stipulation that said that she's legally not allowed to take on employment.

She was 100% dependent on OJ. That's part of why they think that she never, I mean, again, only one of those, one of those situations actually went to trial. There were many stories that were told about. I mean, this was a classic, I fell on the doorknob story, right? So she always made excuses for him. But you can talk about the 911 calls. Have you heard them from her?

I have heard the 911 calls, but I didn't actually include them in this outline. Do you want to talk about them? Well, just the one that I heard is he was like beating her. her up and she was calling the police and she'd called them probably several times and she told them her address and they were like she's like my husband like he's hitting me and they were like who's your husband and she was like you know who it is it's OJ Simpson you know she was very like you know who this is like stop trying to like make me say it she's like he's not stop making him untouchable like you know who it is you know so it sounds like she I mean I'm

sure that there were like you said like tons of times where she didn't call anyone because also like who would leave her maybe or like who wants to get into that you don't want to like step into that puddle yeah it's so it's so hollywood to me because everybody's such a grifter and they're all trying to saddle up to power which is just the dynamic of people in hollywood yeah and so why would you go against oj like that's i mean outside of moral obligations obviously but to nico's credit she did finally file for divorce. She cited irreconcilable differences. They apparently tried getting back together. That obviously didn't work out, and the divorce was finalized somewhere in 1992. Let's get into the crime itself. I'll start by saying that OJ was obviously acquitted of the murders

in criminal court. He was, however, found guilty of wrongful death when he was sued in civil court. Not going super into the procedural side of things, but in criminal court, the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil court, it is much lower. It is proponents of the evidence. Hence why the results are different. All that being said, OJ. did it. Like, we all know that, right? Yeah, I was going to say after that, but he did it. I do have a fun conspiracy theory that I'd like to share with you later. But no, he 100% did it. Yeah, I'm calling that an indisputable fact. Yes. So on June 12th of 1994, this would be two years after the divorce, OJ and Nicole attended the recital of their daughter. After which they parted ways, Nicole went to a restaurant with her

family, a restaurant where Ronald Goldman was a waiter. Side note, I kind of hate how much I love the characters here. It is, this is such an LA story. I'm bringing that up because as I researched this, I remembered Cato Caelin. Do you remember him? I was just thinking, I was like, characters, I was like, Cato. Yes. Oh my God, totally. He's incredible. He was He lived in O.J.'s, like, guest house, some burnt-out actor. Anyways. So in this, on this night, while Nicole is having dinner with her family, OJ was getting McDonald's takeout with Cato. At some point in the night, OJ's, sorry, at some point in the night, Nicole's mom calls the restaurant they ate at and told them

that she was missing her glasses. The manager found the glasses, and apparently Ron was supposed to go to Nicole's house to return them. That was the game plan. Around 11 p.m. on that night, a man in Nicole's neighborhood was out for a stroll when Nicole's dog came up to him covered in blood. Apparently, yeah, apparently this guy didn't find that suspicious. He just like walked home and the dog followed him. Eventually, one of the neighbors, some couple said, hey, I'll take the dog in. The guy didn't want to hold on to it. They knew was Nicole's, and then they went back to the house to Nicole's place to return the dog and that's when they discovered her body. So she had been stabbed to death. Apparently, she was

nearly decapitated. It was a pretty gruesome scene. Yeah, that's what I heard. Ron's body was found nearby and had also been stabbed multiple times. It was assumed that OJ was killing Nicole when Ron showed up and he took Ron out basically to avoid witnesses. At the scene, police found a blue cap and a leather glove, which will come up very famously later on. The night all this went down, OJ was actually supposed to be flying to Chicago to meet with Harts executives. A limo driver arrived at his house and waited a firm until sometime around 1040 p.m. or so to take him to the airport. Apparently, the limo driver stated that he loaded four pieces of luggage in the car, but OJ only flew with three. So the assumption was that he went to LAX and he took a piece of luggage with him that had incriminating evidence and just disposed of it there in the public bins.

Police call O.J. in Chicago the next day to tell him about Nicole's death. He sounded upset, but like I said, he was mostly disinterested according to what's being reported. Why? Is that normal? Like, if would someone call, like, your ex-wife if you were murdered? No, right? That is weird. Like, why would they call him? Like, I just think, probably just because he's famous, I guess, and they wanted to talk to O.J. Simpson, but, like, that feels really weird. I feel like, why would you call someone's ex if they were murdered? You would call, like, anyone else well well what I what I can guess is that the kids were in the house when she was killed and so maybe oh yeah yeah as a parent okay that

makes sense because he was the parent and the poor kids oh poor babies okay yeah that's the only thing I can figure they ended up asking him to come in for questioning which he did and he was caught immediately lying immediately like the first thing coming out of his mouth he like he's such a dope well also I I think that he's also probably, like, in shock about what he did, maybe, to an extent. But he lies about a cut on his hand. And he says that he got it in Chicago. Yeah, like.

Yeah, like, he said that, like, he was so stunned when he heard the news. But they found, like, blood prints in his vehicle. And they're like, and then he was like, oh, no, I got it the day before I left for Chicago. I forgot. Like, it was like, why? What a weird thing to lie about. Before you said that his hand, they had a cut in his hand, I was thinking, like, his hand would hurt. Because I remember in, like, this is gross, but I remember in the man.

and murders, one of the girls that was like stabbing Elbel Gildo Fulger to death was like, I was surprised how much my hand hurt because it's not easy to almost to cap-a-date someone, you know? Like, what a, he just did something so traumatic, you know? I mean, you can't, I don't know. But like also remember Taylor, like he's like a super athlete. He's not a normal weightlifter. No, I know, but that's like a different, it's a different muscle to do a bunch of stabbing. I guess. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. Keep going. The next day after OJ comes back from Chicago goes to talk to the police, he hires Rob Shapiro, who's a lawyer basically tasked with assembling a defense team forum. They call this defense team the dream team. He hired a who's who of the most expensive lawyers in Los Angeles. They all became ancillary characters in their own right. It was reported during this time OJ was very, very distraught and super depressed.

He actually went in state. went and stayed at Rob Kardashian's house with him and his family for several days, for the moral support, I would assume. On Jews- And in the, in the show, they make it clear that when he did that, he had a girlfriend. Yeah. Do you remember that? Yeah. I can't remember.

That's bananas. Barbary area or something. Yeah, she became a- I don't remember. So what- But that woman had to like share a bed with him at the Kardashians. Wow, I mean, give me a break. That's terrifying. There was one piece of this, which, like, OJ apparently had a bunch of naked pictures of this girlfriend up at his house.

And the jury went to his house to, like, look at the scene of him being at the house or whatever. And apparently, Johnny Cochran and Rob Kardashian went to the house and replaced all the naked pictures of this woman that he was dating with, like, was it? It was a, who's that artist that's Norman Rockwell? They placed all these same pictures with Norman Rockwell paintings. That's so funny. On June 17th, the LAPD concludes that they have enough and they ask OJ to surrender himself. They ask him to surrender himself. Like that's what we're talking about here.

Nobody else. Nobody else would this happen. They would go get him. Yeah. Yeah. This actually is like a huge part of the Netflix series. It's like this saga of getting OJ to the police station. They, the police tell Shapiro this, who then relayed this to OJ. At this point, formal, formal murder charges have been filed by the state.

Somehow, I don't know, maybe it's the fame, maybe it's really good lawyering, but his lawyers keep delaying him going to the police station to surrender himself. Up to a point, the LAPD eventually has enough, and they just go to the Kardashian house to arrest him. not like this is enough finally by this point oj and his friend and former teammate al tallings who will refer to here going forward as ac had apparently disappeared from the kardashian house and an apb was put out for both of them for their arrest as fugitives hours after the disappearance rob finds a suicide letter from oj which okay like i get it suicide sucks this one was so woe as me like it's the ramblings of somebody incredibly privileged and not understanding how badly he fucked everything up he just really felt sorry for

himself going to the bronco chase the famous famous bronco chase this was such a big deal if you're old enough to remember this they interrupted i remember for sure yeah like the details of it like rereading i was like oh my i can't believe this they interrupted an NBA finals game just to air this. I remember when this happened my parents were having a party at our house and we all everybody literally stopped everything to go watch this chase. It also reminded me of like again how LA this is. I mean you remember this when you lived in LA like it was a past time to watch car chases. It was just like oh yeah oh my gosh there's so many that's really funny. I just someone at my office we were talking about it recently and she was born that day in Englewood and I was just like oh my

my god your parents your mom has been like what are the doctors doing they're not here helping me you know that's wild there are so many details here some of the fun ones are that what the way they got to oj during this car chase was they would have all these people go on the news and start talking like they're talking to oj but it's being broadcast across the entire country right um they would have his coaches all these famous friends he had these former famous teammates and players all of them would go on news shows and literally be talking to oj on the radio apparently yeah apparently he had a gun on him as well ac calls this out and says hey he's got a gun he's basically sitting in the back seat he was wailing about Nicole about how he's ruined his life just every indicator of how

guilty this man actually is this thing made a mistake i should not have killed someone yeah Basically that. So this thing drags on for hours. Apparently, the police helicopter had to stop and go back and refuel. Like, that's how long this was taken on. But this wasn't like a high speed thing. It was just like it's meandering around the 101, the 110. Yeah, it totally was. Eventually, A.C. and OJ make it back to his estate. And he goes in the house for about an hour before Rob Shapiro arrives, or Bob Shapiro arrives, and escorts him out to be arrested finally. Getting into the pre-trial side, I think, OJ pled not guilty, obviously, and a trial was set for January 24, 1994, 1995. They really harped on the fact that he really wanted an expedited trial for some reason. I'm not entirely sure why he was so in need of that. Maybe it would just go back, get back to normal life.

Let me get acquitted and move on. I love how literally everyone in this trial became their own celebrities just by association. Oh, yeah. Well, was it the first trial that was on TV or was at Menendez Brothers? It was like one of the two, right? So I thought the McMartin thing was first. The preschool? Yeah.

I don't know. It's one of the first, I guess. It had to be one of the first. So for example, the judge in this case, Lance Edo, he was lampooned on S&L. Marcia Clark. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, the dancing Edo's. So, Marsha Clark, she was the lead prosecutor.

She became a television personality who basically now reports on legal matters. OJ's own defense team became superstars in their own right. I don't know if you know this, but Bob Shapiro became like the face and founder of legal Zoom. Oh, that's funny. The founder? Well, they bill him as a founder. I'm sure he wasn't. I'm sure the actual technical founder really needed like a famous lawyer to like attach it to.

But yeah, that's how he's billed. That's hilarious. I love it. Is he still alive? Is he dead? I don't know. I know that, I know that, I know that, I mean, it's sad. So many of his lawyers died, like, weird, tragic death.

Like, Rob Kardashian famously died pretty soon after this trial, and so did Johnny Cochran, actually. So going into the trial set of it, it would be tough to discuss this without discussing race. This murder and the trial happened two to three years after the LA riots happened, which, which were sparked by the LAPD beating the shit out of a black band named Rodney King. Obviously, things like this, like the L.A. riot don't happen overnight. This was a powder keg just waiting to explode. For years, it was obvious that racial tensions in L.A. were on the rise, and the police just weren't helping anything. There's video of Rodney King's beating that everyone saw.

And this is the part that I didn't remember that came up as I was doing the research. But the officers were responsible were tried and the jury was mostly weighing. They were all acquitted. So that's actually what started the riots, which I didn't actually remember any of this. OJ. I remember. I've seen the video. I remember that.

It's awful. Yeah. OJ was obviously a very prominent, very successful black man. Nicole and Ron were both white. was an obvious racial divide and a racial tension in the city at the time interestingly both the prosecution and the defense had a very similar strategy regarding who they wanted on the jury but for very very different reasons so the prosecution wanted women because they assumed that domestic the domestic violence component of this would resonate with them the defense also

wanted women but they were very specific they wanted only black women because their their research showed that black women disproportionately disapprove of interracial marriages. The jury ended up being 10 women, two men, nine were black, two were white, and there was one Hispanic man. Which, you know, given how this trial played out, they were, the defense was right, I think. So the reason I say that it is almost impossible to believe he did not do this, Here's an example of some of the evidence that they had outside of the circumstantial stuff of like he disappeared in a car chase, tried to kill himself, was wailing about, like all these stuff that make it obvious that he did it. Innocent people don't do that.

Yeah. Never, right? Beyond that. And this part's really, I'll harp on this here in a minute, but his DNA was identified near the bodies of the crime scene. His blood was left as a trail leaving the crime scene. The blood of him, Nicole, and Ron were in the white bronco. There's like eight more of these. Yeah, yeah.

I'm barely scratching the surface of how much forensic evidence and DNA evidence that was here. But I will also say that this was one of the first trials where DNA was being introduced as a mechanism of matching people to crime scenes. So there's a part of me that thinks that, well, maybe the judge. jury just wasn't properly educated on how where it is to have mistaken DNA evidence evidence in this situation it was so new yeah i feel like now i've seen like 7000 episodes of bones where i'm like oh the DNA is like the hard truth you know but if you don't if we hadn't like we hadn't really heard of it yet that's true and then i also wrote down that this is a jury pool of citizens who regularly

see the police just doing messed up things to prove minorities guilty right so that's true yeah so maybe they were educated on this and it's they still dismiss he's like i'm not going to believe the cops that like you know they're like a really racist cop involved in this oh we're going to get to him we're going to get to him okay like more racist than most yeah he was he was phenomenally racist yes right we will stand out among the police yes yes I think it's like the next paragraph or two paragraphs from here. Okay. Okay.

So this argument about the police doing shady things is actually the route the defense took themselves. They said the LAPD basically botched this either deliberately or accidentally. There's a ton of back and forth on this. I read all of this stuff and if we went over at point by point, you'd literally just pass out listening to this. There was- I do you think that you should start a judicial, you should start a judicial, judicial, judicial procedures podcast. There's parts of that's interest.

There's parts of that it's like, yeah, I am kind of a nerd when it comes to that stuff, but I think I'm rare in that way. But in this case, there was issues with how they preserved the DNA evidence. There were discrepancies on how much blood there was, where it was, when it was there, there are claims of mishandling evidence, yada. This drone's on. Basically, the defense poked holes in every part of the prosecution's case, I mean, frankly, because they could afford to do so. Most people don't have that luxury, right? Like you come up with a theory and then you try and argue that theory to counter the prosecution.

In this case, they had whatever, however much money they needed. So they could literally just spend all their time finding ways to poke holes in everything, hiring every expert they could to poke holes in every detail of the prosecution's case. I just, far as I just looked it up, but I was looking up, so Robert Shapiro is still alive. I just looked it up. He's 80 years old. But he, oh, but in reading that, I saw a little paragraph that the dream team cost $50,000 a day. I think the total, yeah, I think the total I looked up was it was somewhere around $3.5 to $6 million to how much OJ ended up spending for his entire defense.

It's crazy. Yeah. That's in, that's, hold on, that would have been in 94 money. Yeah. So that would have been like probably 10. Let me look it up. Yeah. Could you?

I'm so sorry. I'm doing this wrong. I'm going to guess it's. No, it had to be like seven. So if you're doing 3.5, I would assume it would have to be somewhere around 7 to 8 million. Yeah, I think it's like seven. And that's on the low end. Yeah.

Yeah. So like if he, so if you do that conversion for like the high range of that, the 6 million, and you're looking like a $12 million defense, it's crazy. crazy yeah um was it worth it you lived the rest of your life as a prio like is it is it really maybe it is i don't know well what are you going to go to jail i mean i guess it could have been like the coolest guy in jail i guess i don't know i don't know i do know he go whatever can keep going so many opinions about oj i try to find his instagram because apparently he got on instagram and i think that the ones i found are fakes so i'm to your point mr

incredibly famous LAPD racist. We're getting to Mark Furman. Peace to chin, for sure. So a little background on Mark, like I said, he was an LAPD police officer, and he was one of the very first officers at the scene of OJ's estate. In 1985, so nine years before the murder,

I mean, this is the stuff that I started looking at was like, I totally forgot this was the thing. I mean, in this guy, I didn't even know this was a thing. So nine years before the murders, a screenwriter named Borah McKinney wanted to write a screenplay about the experiences of female officers. She met Mark and asked that he provide consulting services about his experiences of police officer, working with women in the police force and all that good stuff. Like, we have been saying, Mark sucks. Mark is what a stupid person thinks a man's man is. Yes.

Ugh. He's the definition of punching down and feeling good for doing so. Laura recorded all these conversations she had with him. And amongst the amazing character traits that Mark exhibited, these are the beliefs that he held. He was a leader in a group called M.A.W. Ma, which stands for for men against women, which literally sounds like Al Bundy created it. Like, this sounds like this. That is so stupid.

That is a, that's just sounds dumb. You sound dumb. They can't think of a worse name. Did it, I could have sworn this is a part of married with children, right? Did Al- It might be. Oh my God. Whatever.

It does sound like that. Yeah. The whole point of this was this is a group of male police officers who would harass and intimidate female LAPD officers. They would put them in harm's way. So for example, if the female officer is in a shootout, then ask for a backup, they just won't show. Like, it was, it was crazy levels of just trying to make these women's lives a living hell. And this was a big group.

I didn't write the exact number down, but it was somewhere like 140, I think, if I remember correctly, was the number of LAPD officers that were a part of this organization, or organization, a bunch of fucking morons just hanging around. Men against women. like what does it even mean like what do you know cool guys really cool guys though stupid like oh they're out there they're all alpha males such idiots uh so he obviously said a ton of misogynistic things on these tapes and i won't go into them except one thing which was he he was quoted as saying you've got to be able to shoot people be people beyond recognition and go home and hug your little kids. Women don't pack those qualities, which good. You shouldn't think that beating someone beyond recognition is a good thing. Like, why you're an officer? Why are you doing that?

You're not the jury. You're not the judge. You're not the institution that is meant to punish these people. Like you should be just taking them and putting them in the places where they can be prosecuted. Like, why are you being someone beyond recognition? Do you think, I know that like you said earlier that you were talking about, you know, you're not against the police. But I do think that a lot of police reform wouldn't hurt you know and like there's kind of it's always been the case yeah so um little sensitivity training yeah so what happened so much happened to lAPD police force because of this trial because all this stuff came out right like all like there was investigations and oh wait are you all really not showing up as backup for women like a lot of the reforms came as a

downstream impact of this case. There was another scandal that happened called Rampart, which I'm not going to get into, but there was multiple dominoes that fell because of this, which were great. There were great dominoes to fall. They should fall. Yeah, good. Fuck those guys. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Mark was recorded on this saying the N-word 41 times on the tape, which is- What do you think was happening? Yeah. This is actually really important. This is a critical part of this case. And it comes up later on in the trial because Mark is asked if he has ever said that word. And he tests by, he perjures himself saying, no, he hasn't.

So this is going to come up later on and is a big part of the defense's case, actually. Again, the reason why all this is relevant is because of the crime scene where they found Nicole and Ron's body, there was a bloody glove that was also found there. At OJ's estate, there was another pair that was found by Mark. The defense states that Mark planted the glove because of his racial animus. That's why all this kind of ties together, right? The defense said that Mark found the glove at the crime scene and then took it back to OJ's house. So we've concluded here that Mark sucks, right, Taylor?

He's not smart enough to do that, right? That's what I'm getting at. Like, as shitty of a human as he is, this almost sort of. certainly did not happen. Part of the reason why it's so obvious that this did not happen, despite his horrible, horrible character flaws, is that the crime scene was combed over for about two hours before Mark actually arrived at it. And nobody there ever said anything about seeing a second glove.

They only saw the one. That's an obvious hole in this defense. The prosecution famously asks OJ to try on the glove to show that it fits him. OJ probably was making a display of how hard it was. I mean, there's video that you can watch this where, I mean, this was, we all watched this happen live, I think, but part of the glove basically is too small to fit him. But part of the assumption is that he had arthritis, which makes your joints flare up, and that part of the medication for it is an anti-inflammatory, which he had stopped taking, so his joints would flare up, expand in size, and make it difficult to put the gloves on easily. Like, realistically, it could have been the fact that the gloves were, had been completely soaked in blood. The fact that they'd been frozen.

Yeah, like, and also because of preservative issue, preservation issues, they'd frozen and defrosted the gloves multiple, multiple times. And also, the thing I did in detail I forgot about was that he was also wearing latex gloves underneath the gloves when he was, when he tried them on at trial. He was? I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why they... Yeah, I don't know why they did it that way.

Well, Jesus. Yeah. One thing I didn't know until after researching this was they also brought in a brand new pair of these gloves, the same-sized gloves, to have them try them on, and they fit perfectly. But nobody remembers that, right? What? Yeah. That's ridiculous. I didn't know that.

And I didn't know the... Like, what? That is... That is suspicious. For fuck sake. Yeah. So one of my favorite parts about this, which again, I didn't write this down, but it was, I, I admire his attorneys so much because they're like schoolyard kids. Apparently, they've been planning this.

They didn't want to be the ones that call OJ off to try on the gloves. They wanted the prosecution to do it to make them look foolish because they had assumed that because they had assumed that because they, the blood because of the freezing and de-frosting because they literally he didn't take his authorized medicine they knew it wasn't going to fit right and so apparently while they're at in the middle of like the trial they're basically goading the prosecution saying yeah if you're so confident someone to try the gloves on go ahead do it you you're so sure like it was like it was like school yard tactics um exactly like get them oh my god and yeah this is another part of it that I actually really really loved was again they were so

good at the psychology of litigation, which is like its own separate area of study. They mind fucked Marsha Clark and Chris Darden, the co-chair, the co-prosecution. During closing arguments, which Chris Darden is the one who did on the prosecution side, this is a time for each side to tell their story. Because at this point, you've heard so much about like DNA enzyme this and expert that like you've glossed over so much this is a time when you can kind of wrap it up into this really nice clean package and like it's theater like that's really what it's meant to be who chase lawyers during the closing argument of the prosecution objected 71 times 69 of these were overruled they were just trying to mess up the flow because this

guy's oh 100 percent yeah he was trying like he probably sat there in front of his like mirror in practice all his gestations and movements of the hands and all that and they were just like objections and you just stop okay now we got to just be jerks yeah just be jerk so at one point judge edo threatened to hold the defense and contempt if they kept doing it which is like a huge that's kind of like the last straw right like that's yeah yeah johnny cochran who was the lead counsel for oj he made this whole thing about race and racism of the LAPD he compared Mark Furman to Adolf Hitler and I think the best part of all of this is that he offered literally zero proof of a cover-up he just said things but he said

them with the kind of conviction that a good really good storyteller can say and that was it it was literally like there was again they're during the trial they're just trying to to counter the arguments of the prosecution they're not painting a picture of all the other thing with their theory is of what happened they are just right there's no yeah there's no there's never been like an investigation to see who else could have done it oh that's yeah i'm glad you brought that i'm gonna bring that up here in a second too that doesn't exist yeah yeah all this was painted is racism so mark firman basically tanked the state's case against oj because he perjured himself saying i'm not racist then he's caught on this tape so that's that's it really

and frankly because two years prior all these people again think about the the um the make-over the jury all these people saw the la riots happening and they framed all in the rodney king meeting and everything else that went on with the la pities like they were right for this story to resonate with them to again remind everyone how big of a deal this was bill clinton who was president at the time of this trial. He was being updated regularly about the jury deliberations because he was ready to deploy the National Guard if another right were to break out. That makes sense. So the jury deliberated for four hours and obviously like I said up at the top they returned

a verdict of acquittal. One of the jurors did the Black Panther Fist Race thing at OJ when the verdict was read further illustrating just how much race played a factor in all of them. this. It's seriously because there's, again, one of the 50,000 documentaries that were made about this case, that guy, the guy who did the Black Panther, the juror who did that, he was in a documentary about the case in 2016. He came out in that documentary saying on retrospect, he should have voted for guilt. So that's where he, yeah, it's like, man, you are, what are you like, you're 22 years too late. But yeah. Oh my God. That's hilarious. driving the point even further 75% of white America thought that he was guilty, 70% of African

Americans thought that he was innocent. It's worth noting that the numbers narrowed since then. So in 2016 again, another poll was taken where 57% of African Americans think that he is actually guilty. So that swayed further that direction. There was so much tension. Yeah, definitely. That is mostly it. What followed was a string of other legal and financial battles. O.J. was sued by Fred Goldman, who was Ron's incredibly mustachio father, and he lost a $33 million judgment. Because again, it was a wrongful death. Like it was a different burner proof, and he lost that. He went on to try and publish a book called If I Did It, which the Goldman family sued him over. They later published the book,

but reduced the if part to such tiny font that the actual print of the cover read I did it in 2008 yeah in 2008 he was sentenced to 33 years in prison for breaking into the hotel room of a sports memorabilia collector and stealing a bunch of stuff which admittedly it was like his stuff i though i i was o j simpson memorabilia that he owned it but he was found guilty of armed robbery and kidnapping he ultimately served nine years um in prison and then was parole in 2017 i put some fun facts here that are kind of just add some color to this. Like I said, we talked about a little bit before. Man, this guy was such a different human before this happened and such a different person

after it happened. He went on to host and create a prank show called Juiced, which is the worst concept I have ever heard of. It thankfully died a quiet death after just one episode, But basically, it was like a prank-style reality show where things happen to people, and then O.J. jumps down and says, you got juiced. And it's like, I hate print shows are so stupid. And also, that is so dumb. Like, do you think people are happy? Because you imagine, you'd be real scared. You'd be like, are you going to murder me? You'd be terrified. Like, O.J. Simpson jumps out of nowhere, and it's like he's laughing,

and he's still like a huge dude. And it's like, what? What's going to? on? Like, like, should we do we? No, that'd be real. You'd be real confused. So, thankfully, that died quietly. The LAPD later on refused to reopen the case. The police chief came out of the time and said, quote, the acquittal doesn't mean there's another murderer. Like, again, everybody knew he did it. So. Yeah, they didn't like, no one ever tried to find anybody else. Yeah, exactly. I, there's another fun fact that I wrote down here around around one of my absolute all-time favorite comedians ever. I learned about this after his death recently. I think it was maybe a year or two ago that it happened. But Norm McDonald's, are you familiar with Norm McDonald's, Taylor?

I knew you're going to say Norm McDonald's. Keep going. Did you? Okay. So I don't know the joke, but I knew that he'd be the person that you're talking about. Yeah, totally. So if you, if you're unfamiliar with him, he is this hilarious deadpan comic who rose to fame on SNL in the 1990s. I would describe his comedy as kind of the embodiment of just really not giving a shit about consequences. Norm anchored the joke news show on SNL called Weekend Updates. He was apparently told by executives at NBC, who is the company that produces SNL, to stop making jokes about OJ. This exec named Don Olmeyer was apparently super close friends with OJ. And all these jokes were written by

Norm himself. And one writer on Estenl called Jim Downey, Jim was actually fired outright, and Norm was fired from doing the weekend anchor role. He was still on SNL, but he very shortly had to leave that as well. I watched all these segments he did. It's totally worth of YouTube, is it? Not because I think making fun of OJ is particularly funny or that, you know, or any of that. It's more like you watch him knowingly sink his career with this grin on his face and just being like, guys, this is looter.

You know what it reminded me of was. Even at NBC, the executives, they are trying to protect this guy. And there was something indignant about Norm McDonald's attitude that was like, I don't even think he was doing it for the comedy. I think he was doing it for like, this is insane. Why are we trying to treat this guy with any sort of reverence? You know, like, like. I remember, I remember right after.

I don't know if it was him or if it was someone else, but on Weekend Update, they did the thing with like the picture of OJ. and they said, well, murder is legal in California. Yeah. A joke I remember. Yeah. I wrote one of these down because, so he, he would deliberately interject it in just total non-sequitur ways.

Again, just pointing out the lunacy of why are we trying to protect this guy. He did a segment on Charles and Diana's divorce, which was going out of this at this time, and he threw this graphic up that was like, and Charles wrote a book about it, and his picture of Charles in the book cover read, of course, course OJ did it, come on. Like, it just has nothing, like, he's talking about Diana and Charles, but he made it a point to do this. And yeah, I just thought that was absolutely fantastic, kind of like speaking truth to power

in a way, that nobody did Joe Simpson. So, yeah. Yeah. It goes to Norm MacDonald. But that's my story. Wow. Wow. My, the only conspiracy theory that I've heard that I kind of like is I did hear

from crime junkie, I think, another podcast. they did like a special where there's a theory that like OJ's son from his first marriage was is or was like a little unstable and he was not invited to that dinner after the recital and he was really mad and that's why and then he went and killed her but obviously that's not true but that's like the only thing I've heard that it's like has like a little bit of like maybe that could have happened but really like man he definitely did it. Have you ever met anybody who has said he didn't do it? I remember when I was like seeing it, I was in like middle school and I was like, people talked about it all the time and I was like maybe he didn't do it also,

but I mean, I was 12. What am I supposed to know, you know? But I don't think, I don't know who I was hearing that from or whatever, but no, I don't know anybody now who would say that he didn't do it. Yeah. I can't imagine someone to me like, yeah, he'd do it. And he lives in Florida and he's out of jail and just like goes to Costco. It's weird. So weird.

So weird. like he's just a national like it's you're that is the only thing you're known for i mean it's crazy the thing to like all the accomplishments all that bullet point i listed off of all the things that he did all of it gone he's the guy who killed his wife like that's basically it so and you can't even like celebrate him for his sports achievements because you just can't so there doesn't matter you know his jersey still retired which i was kind of surprised by but i don't know So that's my story and yeah, yeah, wild times. So, ours.

Taylor.