Doomed to Fail - Re-Release: He 10000000% did it - OJ Simpson

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Let's revisit one of the most famous murders of the 20th century - and a highlight from our tenth episode! So, OJ Simpson absolutely killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. It's a tragedy that there was no justice and his poor poor kids. Anyway! Does anyone even read these descriptions?? This is the first of several murder rereleases!  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 american Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Doom 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. nice Boston Laga. How do you do 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 um, this sounds so good. Hold on me see my parents have a beer. Um, but I only have one beer. I think, oh no, I have Bud lights because whatever my dad visits, he leaves a trail of Bud Light. But Light Lines. Worst comes to Ross. I can always have a bedlight. No. regular ones oh man there's no beer okay so much for that my drink is a screwdriver because i am covering orenthal james simpson and i feel like i feel like if you're married to him

you got to be drunk on screwdrivers you got to 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 O.J. 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, we're 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 up by the American, 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 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. She's great. Marsha Clark. 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. When I started researching this, I thought of Rambo for some reason. And what I think I 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 down 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 in Hendricks, Zappa, Dylan? All of these amazing iconic musicians were completely influenced by that war. And 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 then 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, eh, eh, eh, yeah. I believe it.

I'm not impressed. Yeah, I'm not like a fanboy of Bob Dylan. I will argue that Hendricks 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. She was at 16, I was like, there has to be more than 16, and there's, like, also

more than 16. Oh, my God. 624 books on Amazon right now that you can read about the O.J. Simpson trial. That doesn't include all the- Yeah, go ahead. No, I'm going to 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 O.J. Simpson.

Yeah. This does not include anthologies, it just include O.J. Simpson in it, like, spouse-killer. Like, all that. none 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 OJ Simpson himself started 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, the actual night that they found out that this happened, somebody tried to actually cap on it. Fuck, yeah. Good for that person. I know. Good for them too, yeah. 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. 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, he just always, I don't know what it is about David Schwimmer, but he just always looks confused. He played him. It was amazing. 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. You 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 really 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 gonna just start by getting into the main characters here Taylor curious to know your take on this so you're you would have been of an age you watch this right Like you, I'm assuming you kept up with this.

Okay. Yeah, for sure. Was O.J. Simpson a name you would recognize before this happened? I only not as like anything else. And I don't know if it's before or after birth. There's this movie that we used to watch when I was little with a net Funitello 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. 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. They actually sound 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,

so. Yeah, I might have been too young, but the name O.J. Simpson meant 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-

Yeah, 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 at 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. They're like, it wasn't like that. It wasn't like I was a superstar. I always 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, 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 like, that was actually a really good way to phrase it. So going back to the characters, the main characters of the story, we have Ornthal 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, 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 an 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 and 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 it felt like they were just inventing awards to give to this guy but he actually was that exceptional his players like his player 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 and note at all of 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. OCH 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, um, sports history. White America saw OJ as just this non-threatening, very affable, 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 married 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 you marries Nicole, he's lived a complete life. I mean, everything I just listed off that he did, that happened five years before this marriage came about. He marries Nicole, and as he's involved in his life, he's involved in his life, he's, he's, 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 Thimson 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 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-scal 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 to it 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 again 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 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. 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, poor babies, yeah. There were obviously claims of spouse, 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. Nicole, 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 up and she was calling the police and she'd called them probably several times and she like 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 o j simpson you know she was very like you know who this is like stop trying to like make me say it she's like you know he's not on 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 believe her maybe or like who wants to get into that who want

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 Nicole'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. This is such an L.A. story.

I'm bringing that up because as I researched this, I remember 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 incredible.

He lived in O.J.'s like. guest house, some burnt-out actor. Anyways. So 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 it 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. I heard. Ron's body was, yeah, 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 Hertz executives. A limo driver arrived at his house and waited firm until sometime around 10.40 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 OJ in Chicago the next day to tell him about Nicole's death. He sounded upset, but like I said, he was mostly disinterested um according to what's being reported what's been reported first 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 like probably because he's famous i guess and they wanted to talk to oj 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't

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 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

the day before i left for chicago i forgot like it was like 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 manson murders one of the girls that was like stabbing ebbledger 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. Okay, 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 for him. 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 and stayed at Rob Kardashian's house with him and his family for several days for the moral support, I would assume. and in the in the in the show they make it clear that when he did that he had a girlfriend yeah remember that yeah yeah i can't remember that's just that's bananas yeah barbriere or something yeah she became um i don't remember so what but that woman had to like share a bed with him at the Kardashians so weird i mean give me a break that's terrifying there was one one piece of this which 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, what was it? It was a who's that artist that's Norman Rockwell? They replaced all these things 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. Right. They would go get him. Yeah.

Yeah. They, this actually is like a huge part of the Netflix series is 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 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. They're like, this is enough, finally. By this point, O.J. and his friend and former teammate, Al Cowellings, 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, 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 were 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 God, 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 this was taking on but this this wasn't like a high-speed thing. It was just like it's meandering around the 101 110. 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 pretrial side, I think, OJ pled not guilty, obviously, and a trial was set for January 24th, 1995. They really harped on the fact that 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 was 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. Judge, 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 the 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 done? I don't know. I know that, I know that, I know that, I mean, it's sad. Like so many of his lawyers died like weird tragic deaths. Like Rob Kardashian famously died pretty soon after this trial and so did Johnny Cochran actually. Yeah. So going into the trial set of it, it would be tough to discuss this without discussing race.

This murder in the trial happened two to three years after the LA riots happened, which were sparked by the LAPD beating the shit out of a black band named Rodney King. Obviously, things like this, like the LA riot don't happen overnight. This was a powder keg just waiting to explode. For years, it was obvious that racial tensions in LA 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 way. 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. There 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 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 research showed that black women disproportionately disapprove of interracial marriages. The jury ended up being 10 women, 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. Yeah. 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 obviously that he did it but innocent people don't do that yeah never right beyond beyond that and this part's really i'll harp on this here in a minute but uh 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 nico and ron were in the white bronco There's like eight more of these. Yeah, yeah, I'm not, like, 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 jury just wasn't properly educated on how where it is to have mistaken DNA evidence in this situation.

It was so new. Yeah. I feel like now I've seen like 7,000 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?

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So maybe they were educated on this and it's, they still dismisses. 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 standout among the police yes okay i think it's like the next paragraph or two paragraphs here um 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. Do you think that you should start a judicial, you should start a judicial judicial judicial procedures podcast? There's part of that's interest. There's, there's parts of it that'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 preserve 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 the. 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 that would have been in 94 money. Yeah. So that would have been like probably 10. Yeah. Could you? Um, I'm so sorry. I'm doing this wrong. Three. I'm going to guess 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.

So like if he, so if you do that conversion for like the high range of that, the six million, and you're looking like a $12 million defense, it's crazy. Yeah. Was it worth it? You live the rest of your life as a prior? Like is it really? Maybe it is. I don't know.

Well, what are you going to do? go to jail? I mean, I guess he could have been, like, the coolest guy in jail. I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I do know he goes, whatever. Can you 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 fake fakes. So, to your point, Mr. Incredibly famous LAPD racist, we're getting to Mark Furman. 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 a thing.

I mean, I didn't even know this was a thing. So nine years before the murders, a screenwriter named Laura McKinney wanted to write a screenplay of 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 men against women, which literally sounds like Al Bundy created it. Like this sounds like a- That is so stupid. That 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?

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. Like they would put them in harm's way. So for example, if the female officer is in a shootout and asks 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 l-a pd officers that were a part of this organization or organization a bunch of fucking morons just hanging around um men against women like what does it mean like what i know do you like that what that's cool guys really cool guys So stupid. Like, oh, they're out there. They're all alpha males. Such idiots. 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 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 not 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 we 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 y'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 there were great dominoes to fall they should fall yeah good fuck those guys yeah yeah totally um mark was recorded on this saying the n-word 41 times on the tape which is what you think was happening yeah this 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 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 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 in this defense the prosecution famously asks O.J. to try on the glove to show that it fits him. O.J. probably was making a display of how hard it was. I mean, there's video that you can watch this. We all watch 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.

expanded 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. 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 size gloves, to have him 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, well, that is suspicious. One of, um, for fuck's sake. Yeah, so one of the, uh, one of my favorite parts about this, which again, I didn't write this down, but it was, I, I, I admire his attorneys so much because they're like schoolyard kids. Apparently, they've been planning this.

They, they didn't want to be the ones that call OJ up to try on the gloves. They wanted the prosecution to do it to do it. make them look foolish because they had assumed that because of the blood, because of the freezing and de-frosting, because they literally, he didn't take his office right, they knew it wasn't going to fit, right? And so apparently while they're at 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're so sure. Like, it was like, it was like, it was in schoolyard tactics. Exactly. Like get them, oh my God. And yeah, this. 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, like, 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 the 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 trying oh 100% 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 it's yeah That's incredible. 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 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 counter

the arguments of the prosecution. They're not painting a picture of all the other thing, what their theory is of what happened. They are just. Right, there's no, yeah. 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 Furman 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 it, really.

And frankly, because two years prior, all these people, again, think about the makeover of 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 LAPD. It's 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. 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 for were illustrating just how much race played a factor in all of 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, you are, what are you like, what are you, 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. Yeah, definitely. That is mostly it. What followed was a string of other legal and financial battles. OJ was sued by Fred Goldman, who was Ron's incredibly mustache of father. And he lost a $33 million judgment, because again, it was a wrongful death. Like it was a different burden of 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.

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 know i i was o j simpson memorabilia that he owned it but he was found guilty of armed robbery and kidnapping you ultimately served nine years 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 pranked style reality show where things happen to people and then oj jumps out 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 yeah 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 what's going on like like we do we know 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 um 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 macdonalds are you familiar with norm mcdonald taylor i knew i knew you were going to say norm macdonald keep going did you okay so I don't know the joke, but I knew that he'd be the person that you were 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 S&L 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 a YouTube visit. 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, 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. I remember. Yeah.

I wrote one of these down because, so 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, his picture of Charles in the book cover read, of course, O.J. 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 O.J. Simpson. And so, yeah, it goes to Norm MacDonald. But that's my story.

Wow. Wow. The only conspiracy theory that I've heard that I kind of like is I did hear from I'm junkie, I think, another podcast they did, like a special where there's a theory that, like, O.J.'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 is, 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, watching 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 today being like, yeah, he'd do it. And he's lived 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 like you're, that is the only thing you're known for. I mean, it's crazy to think that like all the accomplishments, all that bullet point and list it off of all the things that he did, all have it gone. He's the guy who killed his wife. Yeah.

Like, that's basically it. 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, Fars. Taylor.

Thank you.