You're Wrong About - The O.J. Simpson Trial: Kato Kaelin Part 1

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

Sarah tells Mike how an aspiring actor protected and then betrayed Nicole Brown Simpson without knowing he was doing either. Digressions include '80s movie tropes, ski-resort etiquette and the need for a process of "un-faming." Unfortunately, this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence and abuse. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

While you're doing that, I'm looking up Kato Kalen shirtless photos on Google. Oh, wow. Go on. No, he's just in like, he's super ripped. Oh, and now it's like the actor playing him who's like even more ripped. Because in the TV version of your life, everyone will be more ripped. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that takes stories out of the pool house and into the main residence.

Oh, I love how you have all these like moving on up type tag lines. I think anytime you let someone articulate their situation, that's a form of justice. I just want all of our protagonist to get their GED and go to community college and work in HVAC construction. That's what I'm trying to do, bettering the narratives of our youth. Oh, great. All right. The Kalen Barbieri HVAC Institute.

I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer at work on a book about the satanic panic. And today we're going to talk about Kato Kalen and I'm so excited because I decided this late last night as I lay a bed thinking about what was truly in my soul and it was Kato Kalen. Yes.

You're jumping on with me. You're joining me on this whole time travel trip obsessively back and forth over the same period of five days in 1994. So what's the period of time we're going to talk about today? Today we are going to talk about Kato Kalen, the life of Kato Kalen. So we're going back in time again as we did with the story of Nicole to 1959. It's not going to take forever. And then we're going to talk about Kato's life with Nicole and get as far as his life

intersecting with Marcia Clarks. Can I ask you an essay question before we get started? I suppose. Okay. So the question I've been wanting to ask you ever since we started this is what do you think happened? The actual murders and I know that it's hearsay and we'll never really know. But as maybe the country's leading expert on OJ Simpson at this point, what is sort

of your hunch and your feeling of just how the murders went down? I think OJ Simpson is the country's leading expert on OJ Simpson and that if we say publicly that I am the country's leading expert, Jeffrey Tubin will challenge me to a duel of manly arts, which I am very open to. So recently as I was driving across the country, I was listening to an episode of the Nancy Grace podcast where Nancy Grace is like shocking new footage of OJ Simpson confessing to the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and then like siren noises probably. Apparently at one time, OJ Simpson was making a TV special to go along with the publication

of his book, If I Did It, which was a very cynical cash grab. And so the TV special that he was making that apparently was shelved and then brought back out many years after the fact and talked about on Nancy Grace, there's a recording of him saying if I did this, if I did that, I would have looked in Nicole's window and then there's this part where like suddenly the if goes away and he's like, and Nicole really did have a lot of candles all. She really did. I always used to go to is that she wanted to keep utilities down, but Nicole really

did have candles everywhere. That's really dark. And he just suddenly seems to go back into remembering committing the murders. And I was listening to it and I was like, I can't do this right now. I guess like had this, this real feeling of not wanting to listen to it. But anyway, I know that, you know, for this, like I need to go back and listen to it in full and think about it and process it and think about, you know, how is he talking about the rest of the events?

Because he also maintained, you know, he had this theoretical person named Charlie there. There was speculation throughout the trial and people still speculate as to the idea that there was a second assailant, you know, how could he have killed two people at once? The answer is that it's, I don't think it's at all unimaginable to kill two people at roughly the same time. We have reason to believe and the prosecution will later argue that Nicole was actually unconscious at the time he killed her because he had rendered her unconscious and then murdered Ron Goldman and then returned to Nicole.

I kind of see it as when Ted Bundy does these similarly conditional descriptions of the murders that he did eventually actually in the first person confessed to Shirley before he was executed, he talks about what he calls the entity, which is this thing that takes him over and that he feels has complete control of him when he's stalking and killing someone. So I feel like if O.K. is talking about this other person being with him, I can see that being part of being able to describe it now only if he is able to outsource that to some other figure, some other part of himself. Do you think, because what we know from the police interrogation, it sounds like he went

out to hamburgers with Cato and then there's kind of this half an hour hour long period that he hasn't really accounted for? Much less than an hour. Okay. So do you think sort of he came home from hamburgers and was just in a rage and went over there to spy on her and saw her through the window and ended up going inside or like what do you think actually happened? Well, there's not a scenario I find most convincing.

There are scenarios that I find equally convincing, I think. So I mean, something I have thought about is like if he was so accustomed to spying on her, right? If he spent so much time looking in her window, you know, this is consistent behavior of his, he watches her having sex with other men and then harasses her about it. So it makes sense that he would say to himself, you know, after this dance recital where he felt that he had been pushed out and rejected by her and made to feel this way by her, made to feel rejected, made to feel unloved.

And then it's like, would he go over seeking a confrontation or would he go over saying to himself, I just want to go watch like I do all the time? I mean, let me actually read you something in the entry in her diary for June 3rd. Nicole quoted the exact words of OJ's threat, quote, you hang up on me last night, you're going to pay for this bitch, you're holding money from the IRS, you're going to jail, you fucking cunt. Holy shit. You think you can do any fucking thing you want.

You've got it coming. I've already talked to my lawyers about this bitch, they'll get you for tax evasion, bitch. I'll see you to it. You're not going to have a dime left, bitch, etc. No way. To me, the most heartbreaking part of all that is that she ends it with, etc. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like she's so used to this litany of abuse. Yes. They just like blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, etc. Yeah. And so forth, as we all know.

God. So, I mean, the way that he's talking to her, nine days earlier. I was also thinking a couple episodes ago, as you were describing it, that he might have also gone over there to spy on her and then he sees Ron Goldman arriving and then he reads all this into it that like, oh, she's having a guy over after she had dinner with my kids, blah, blah, blah. Right. And he goes in there and confronts them and then the interaction in some way escalates

because with the question of premeditation, I mean, you can't say anything is weird because as we've said a million times, so much about this is weird. Or it gets illogical. Yes. It's extremely illogical to plan to murder somebody when you really only have an hour and someone is coming to pick you up and take you on a flight. I love how the timing is the part that strikes you as weirdest. You're like, if I were going to murder someone, I would plan at least three hours, you know,

like taking a day trip to Bellingham. Well, it just seems like it's a much more risky strategy. Yes. Right? Yes. If you were a cannibal-elector type of killer, you wouldn't set up a scenario like that. You'd get something with an alibi, et cetera. And so, I mean, you know so much more about this than I do, but it makes sense to me that

he would have gone over there with a more benign intention than murder and then something would have sort of set him off once he was there. I think people very rarely commit murders by thinking to themselves, I'm going to go commit a murder now. Right. Right. I don't think that happens in the majority of these cases. I think it, you know, often tends to be a heat-at-the-moment thing.

And then I think it's like, how do we define premeditation? Because he obviously knew himself to be capable of harming her. Right. That he might have put himself in a situation where there were going to be more kind of triggers for that kind of impulse around him. Right. And so, even if you don't consider it like textbook premeditation, I don't know, it's like these are degrees of intent that like we don't have the legal language to really

talk about very well. Right. So, the binary between premeditated and non-premeditated, there's lots of ways you can put yourself into a situation where you know you're going to behave rashly, right? Yeah. Like I think of all those letters to Dan Savage where people write in and they're like, oh, there's like a hot fitness instructor who I'm really attracted to, but I'm married and I don't want to cheat on my wife.

But, you know, it would be awkward if I stopped taking her exercise class and like stopped getting massages from her, right? And it's like, well, you're putting yourself in a situation where like you kind of want to cheat. You know you're putting yourself in a series of situations where if you were to take a rational approach, you would be able to think it through and understand like I'm asking for my will to be compromised by the situations I'm putting myself in. When maybe that means that I want this thing to happen, right, actually, but I can't own

that desire. So, is that sort of your general theory? Yeah, in a general way. And I can also imagine him, I mean, he had to have had a knife with him at the moment that things escalated. Right. I think like I don't see a scenario where he like starts an altercation and then leaves and gets a knife and comes back.

Right. Or grabs a knife from her kitchen counter or something. Well, yeah, I guess, yeah, that is, you're right, that's possible. Or she could have come out holding a knife. That seems unlikely to me based on what we've seen before. But who, I mean, what do I know? I can also see him bringing a knife and just thinking like I'm not going to kill Nicole. Right.

Or he could have intended to just threaten her, right? He could have brought it as like I'm going to brandish the knife to scare her so she won't see other guys anymore. Right. I won't do anything with it. Like that could have been what he was telling himself on his way over there. Yeah. And I think he also could have been telling himself that very loudly.

Him telling himself that could be seen as evidence of the fact that on some level he's like I kind of want to use this knife on Nicole. Yeah. I don't do it, but I'm just going to have it. Yeah. I want to go to the buffet, but I'm not going to eat anything. Like my willpower will kick in at some point in the future. Right.

I mean, I think a lot of our planning as humans gives our future selves more credit than we give our present selves, right? You're like, oh, I'll be able to resist this later. Absolutely all of mine. That's why these calls always start 15 to 30 minutes late. Okay. So that's sort of the working theory, but with a lot of the details still left quite murky.

Yes. I've learned from Marcia Clark's mistakes. I'm not going to commit myself to anything before I absolutely have to. That's fair. So, yeah, rewind us. Where are we meeting Kato? Yeah. Yeah.

Why don't you tell me every single thing you know or think you might know about Kato Kailin? I will tell you that when I was watching Saturday Night Live when I was like 11 years old, which was my introduction to OJ Simpson really. Yes. I had very few actual memories of the trial itself because I was six and seven years old at the time. I remember watching Saturday Night Live reruns and getting a sense of what America at least

thought it was. And what's interesting about that is that I don't remember learning who Marcia Clark was. I don't remember learning who Bob Shapiro was. I don't remember learning who Ron Goldman was. Yeah, that's totally true. Yeah. But I knew that there was a guy named Kato Kailin.

Yeah. And it was always interesting to me that like out of this clearly very big story with a big cast of characters and a lot going on, this sort of like doofy guy with a perpetually confused expression received so much coverage. Yeah. It is actually interesting. We seem to find this in a lot of these stories that people who play a very marginal role end up somehow being centered like Fawn Hall.

Right. Fawn Hall is totally the Kato Kailin of Iran Contra. Yeah. Very similar hairstyles also. Kato Kailin also is interesting because he was like a male bimbo. He was maybe one of the people in the whole OJ Simpson Fiasco who got the most bimbo treatment. That's actually the most of what I remember him. I remember he was just kind of this like goofy dude who was around, but it never was clear

to me what part he actually played in the murders. And I remember mentally at the time, I always replaced him with Fabio whenever anybody brought it up because they had kind of the same hairstyle. And it was, I think Fabio was the first time we had like a male bimbo figure, right? Like a kind of airhead. He's buff, but he's dumb, et cetera. He played that role. And for some reason, even they don't really look the same.

In my head, Kato Kailin sort of was Fabio sitting on the stand. They were both wildly out of their depths in the 90s. I mean, yeah. I mean, what do you know about Kato Kailin? Like tell me everything. Well, according to the previous episodes, you have learned me that he was originally a friend of Nicole's and she moved him into her guest house as a sort of, you know, having a guy as a buffer zone against OJ's abuse.

And then OJ managed to OJ Kato from Nicole's house and Nicole's trust into his. And so eventually Kato ended up moving into OJ's guest house. And so he becomes important because the night of the murders, he had hamburgers with OJ and then later that night he hears sort of vague thumps, something when OJ is returning, rushing home from committing these murders. So he's partly an alibi witness and he's partly a incriminating witness, I guess. Right. Which is very interesting because he's someone who at the start of all this has equal capacity

to implicate or exonerate OJ. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. This is an acceptable introduction to Kato Kalin prepared for you, which is a highlight reel. Oh no. Well, really of the whole movie, but prominently featuring Kato of a movie he was in in 1987

called Beach Fever. Oh, I forgot he was like a actor. I totally forgot about that. He did get opportunities by fraternizing with OJ Simpson. But here's an example of what he was up to kind of in his prime. He made this when he was 27 or 28. Oh no. We're going to watch it together.

Okay. This was straight to video, by the way. All bet it is. Three, two, one, go. Beach Fever. We're opening on women's boobs. There were so many movies in the 80s where just in the box art in the opening they were like, don't worry, you're going to see lots of boobs.

One boob. Oh, there's Kato. Oh, is that Kato? He's on a motorcycle. Yeah. Oh, he's driving a motorcycle and there's a dude in the sidecar. The main characters in this movie are Kato Kalin's dude and an Asian-American stereotype. Oh.

Oh, no. Yeah. He's speaking like replacing his Rs and Ls with like a really offensive accent. Yeah. Kato Kalin reminds me of like Kevin Bacon in Tremors a little bit. Oh, his hair. So he has like the Rachel. Yes.

I think Kato Kalin inspired the Rachel. I've been thinking about this. I think whoever did the Rachel on Friends was watching the preliminary hearings in the Simpson trial in July of 1994 and was like, I know what I'm going to do for Jennifer Aniston. Oh, now there's like a montage. Okay. So they've invented a love potion that makes women really attracted to them. Okay.

Yeah. Oh, and now there's like a bad guy in a limo like every 80s movie. Yes. Yeah. This is the Cobra Kai guy. Oh, there's Kato wearing just Nike's and tiny shorts. Kato seems miscast for this role because he looks much older than his compatriot. Yeah.

He looks like mid-30s. Okay. So they've accidentally turned the area of women into sex zombies. Of course. Oh. Yep. It worked out for Kato. And then we had like an eight frame shot at the end of Kato walking away with his arm

around a girl. Yeah. Ooh. That's what his career has been to this point. Straight to video, high concept, racist comedies. Yeah. But like, I don't know, what did you think of his presence in that? I don't know.

He's cute. He doesn't necessarily like command the screen necessarily. No. I can't take my eyes off him kind of person, but he seems a sort of Luke Wilson type of actor where he's just like, he's there. He's fine. He's just kind of like the guy they need for movies sometimes. They're about women.

Like, oh, I got it. Like Luke Wilson is who you cast when you're like, this is really about Reese Witherspoon. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Which totally makes sense, I think in terms of the kinds of adventures he found himself in, where he was like, okay, Simpson apparently after Kato moved in with Nicole, he was like

very agitated. And then he finally comes to the house unannounced and meets Kato. And after that, apparently he was fine. And Kato like becomes friends with O.K. Secretary Kathy Randall, who's like, yeah, O.K. was really worried. And then he realized, then he met you and he called me and he was like, you're right. That Kato guy is all right. He's no threat.

Huh. Like everyone meets Kato and they're like, oh. That's actually kind of magical because he's a good looking guy. And he also was like, definitely like on the make. His biographer, Mark Elliott, talks about when he and Kato were working on the book together, they'd like interview during the day and then Kato be like, all right, let's go, let's go on the prowl. Let's meet some girls.

Yeah. It's actually amazing that he projects that vibe. Right. So it's like, so what is it exactly? And like we saw in Beach Fever, he has like very good definition. He ran 10 miles a day. Yeah. Right.

Like he used to do this thing when he was a struggling actor, like around the beach Fever days, he would buy pizzas. He said he spent like $50 a week buying pizzas for casting directors and casting agents and then he would put his headshot in a plastic bag under the pizza and write, the pizza's on me. And then he would like borrow a pizza delivery guy costume and like take the pizza to a casting agent. And he said he got work that way.

Like he got additions and I think he said he got a part that way. It's kind of genius. It's very, it really speaks, I think, to the kind of person he seems to have been where you're like, you're like, ah, look at that. Yeah. It's kind of, it's just, it's really, it's funny that he became such a joke because there's something tragic about him too, where like he was there. Yeah.

He was there for the 911 call, the horrible, horrible 911 call. Yeah. So you have to wonder about what his, his own hindsight of all this was and, and then the, you know, I think the criticism people have of him and the reason he was seen as kind of a bimbo was because fame came for him and he grabbed on and I can see doing that in the wake of a tragedy, you know, because he became suddenly like this, I guess this overnight celebrity less than a month after the woman he had lived with for a year was murdered by the man who he had was living with at the time.

Right. I mean, it's the kind of thing that would put you in therapy for years, depending on your capacity to, I guess, internalize the shame about that or to internalize your own role in that. I don't know to what extent Kato was sort of capable of that level of self-reflection or if that was something he was doing underneath the sort of bimbo exterior that everybody projected onto him. Right.

But if you were living with someone for a year, you've seen this level of abuse. You move in with her abuser. Her abuser then kills her probably. Yeah. That's shit that haunts you for decades afterwards. Right. Like in the world we want to live in. Like the Kato of the future would be someone who, when O.J. approaches him after this altercation

that he stopped, where he didn't see O.J. actually striking Cole, but he did see her yelling at her and threatening her and kicking in her door. This person, after O.J. invites him to come live with him, would be like, wait a minute. This seems like a tactic to separate the woman whose actions and life and sense of freedom you're trying to control. This seems like a tactic to control her further and it seems like you're using me against her and taking my friendship with her away from her as a resource and I don't want to be part of that.

Right. And I guess the question is like, what ingredients do we need to make the Kato of the future if we learn from the Kato of the past? Do you want to tell us about the ingredients of the Kato of the past? Is that what we're going with? I do. Do you read his entire biography? I've read it twice.

Yes. Amazing. Kato Kalen, the whole truth by Mark Elliott conceived with the cooperation of Kato Kalen based on hours and hours of taped interviews with Kato Kalen and then published after Kato Kalen abruptly bowed out of the deal for reasons which once again we will get to but which are very fun and very legal. I'm so excited. I want us to have a non-abusive childhood so bad like somewhere in this show.

I think you're where she's going to be granted. I'm going to read to you from Kato Kalen the whole truth because I feel that Mark Elliott has worked really hard on it to make it a literary book and I'm proud of him so I want to honor that a little bit. He was born 36 years ago, March 9th, 1959 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the next to youngest of six children. He has three brothers and two sisters. A fourth brother died at birth in 1967.

He first got the nickname Kato from the TV series The Green Hornet, which all the brothers watched as children. Kato is the Green Hornet's expert karate sidekick. For a while, all the boys in the family were called Kato. The nickname stuck to Brian in high school when he pitched for the baseball team. After that, no one who knew him ever called him Brian again. Plus his real name's Brian. Yeah, Brian Kalen.

It's not as fun to say. I'm convinced that at least 15% of Kato Kalen's celebrity came from how much people enjoyed saying Kato Kalen. It's like Benedict Cumberbatch. His father was by all accounts a very warm and humorous man. He owned one of those cask and cleaver-type steak houses and was also a sales representative from a major liquor distributorship. He did fairly well, as one might expect, since Milwaukee's major industry is the production

and distribution of hard liquor. Some might say consumption of it as well. Oh, rude. By Kato's account, he was a typically happy middle-class family. The Kalens lived in a comfortable home in Glendale, right outside Milwaukee. Kato remembers laughing an awful lot as a child. He claims to have been blessed with a set of parents who had great senses of humor and got a big charge out of having a house full of happy kids.

Maybe if Paula Barbieri is an example of what it does to you to grow up in an abusive household, Kato Kalen is an example of what it does to you to grow up in a happy, affluent household. Yes. Where are the people from happy homes because they don't know what's going on. Yeah. There are six, and they're all living in people's pool houses. Kato attended our Lady of Good Hope parochial school. He was always the class clown.

Because of his ability to make everyone laugh, including the nuns, he was able to get away with a lot more than most kids. I really love that detail. He grew up being able to make nuns laugh, which is like a great power in a society ruled by nuns. And then one of the things that he and Nicole used to do together is they would go to church. They were both raised Catholic. They were both ... Oh.

At least Nicole still took her religion seriously as an adult, and they would go to church together sometimes. Yeah, which I guess I like to think about because it's just like, yeah, they both like to party, and then they would go to church. Right. Right. So, basically, Kato grows up by his account, a happy home, happy family, bunch of Kato's running around, and his journey is that he's like, I want more.

I want to be the big Kato. The best Kato. I want to go forth and entertain people. He decides he wants to be a comedian, and if that doesn't work out, he'll try being a professional baseball player. Oh, okay. These are the thoughts we have when we are very young. Yeah, these are very like after-school special aspirations.

This is great. So, yeah, and he was a good athlete when he was a teenager. He made the varsity baseball team his freshman year of high school, which is a big deal. Okay. I'll trust you. Sports. Freshmen don't make varsity very often. I feel like the sense he got of Kato is that he had kind of a charmed life.

Making the nuns laugh, varsity baseball, and his freshman year of high school. Great hair. Great hair, I was just going to say. Yeah. And he also does a bunch of theater when he's growing up. He was in Oklahoma and Carousel when he was in high school, and he was the king of the senior prom. Oh, so he's popular.

Yeah, right. He seems like someone who was very successful at stuff that they tried until they were 18 years old, and was like, all right, the rest of my life is going to be like this. It's like people who grew up in Scandinavia. They're like, every country has functioning transport. So he goes to UW Eau Claire for two years. He has a weekly variety show on the school's public access TV network called Kato and Friends. Okay.

Let me read to you. Kato recalled making fun of a dean one time and having his show canceled. The next day, a petition appeared with 3,000 names, and it was promptly reinstated. Whoa. Kato also discovered girls in college, and when he did, determined to make up for lost time. You get the sense that his upbringing was like very Catholic. He used to go from dormitory to dormitory in search of his next great conquest.

In his freshman year, Kato developed mononucleosis, the so-called kissing disease, which, being a good Catholic, he took as a direct warning from above. That's when I decided that no matter what, I would not actually sleep with a girl until I got married, and that was one promise I kept. I stayed a virgin until at the age of 23. I met a woman who was to become my wife. Wow. What a waste of a torso.

That's actually interesting that he had like a brief period of womanizing and then settled down very early. Yeah, and then this marriage didn't really last, but he attempted to reign himself in and be like, no, I'm going to be the kind of man I was raised to be, and I have done too much kissing, and then spring break this sophomore year in 1979. He and a buddy go to Redlands, California. He's never been to the West Coast before, and he arrives and looks at the mountains and looks at the fact that it's 80 miles from LA, and is like, I'm going to come back here.

I'm done. It's time for Kato to go West, and so he basically goes back home long enough to get his stuff together and then drives West with $900 in his pocket in the summer of 1979. So he doesn't graduate from college? He goes to school in California. He goes to Cal State Fullerton. He stops eight credits shy of graduating, because he's basically putting all of his energy and trying to make his show business career happen, and the job that he gets immediately

after getting to California and the industry that he is in for several years is like comedy waiter. Oh, I didn't know that was like a special kind of waiter. The jobs Kato gets is basically like, you can say whatever you want, you can do whatever comedy stuff you want, just like bring them the food they asked for. Oh, so he's doing comedy and waitering? Yeah, he's a waiter who he waits on you comedically. What?

Wait, what? This sounds insufferable. What are these restaurants? Do you think millennials killed the comedic waitering industry? Like that's another thing we killed and we didn't even notice it? So somebody comes to your table and they're like, what's the deal with Brussels sprouts? Do you want to hear an example? Oh my God, please.

Okay, so this is about a place called Bobby McGee's in Brea where Kato works. When she'll the wiper slept in time. Kato says, my routine was something like this, I go over to a table of customers, introduce myself and say hi. Our special tonight is lobster tails, 50 cents a piece. Really? Sure. Once upon a time there was this lobster.

Oh my God. It's like dad jokes and not great food probably. And this is what people say about what Kato is like to be around that like he wasn't that funny, but he was just always trying like he was always telling little jokes and stuff and his testimony during the preliminary hearings and then the trial really speaks to that. Oh no. What?

He's doing puns in a murder trial? No, he's like, you know, he's asked, wouldn't you think that OJ could get you parts in movies maybe? And he's like, we weren't going out for the same parts. Okay. When you watch his testimony, you're like, oh yes, this is like a career comedy waiter doing his best to be serious. Oh my God.

That's the meanest thing you've ever said about someone on the show. I don't think it's mean. I love that he was a comedy waiter for so many years. I think that that would really affect how you relate with people. I mean, I'm glad Kato liked doing it. Yeah, he seems like an extrovert. He seemed to really like the comedy waiting. Yeah.

I think he's also trying to make his comedy career happen and so he would drive to clubs like the comedy store in LA on their open mic nights and get there at 6 p.m. and wait to go on at two in the morning. No way. And he said he'd perform for like three people and quote, I'd wind up buying breakfast for them after the show. I got absolutely nowhere at an incredibly slow pace. Nice.

So I feel like this would be like a great slightly bleak but also fun indie movie. Yeah. I mean because this could also be the plot of like a super dark movie, right? Of like some like incel dude. Yeah. He could be the Joker. Yeah. Right?

This could be a story of like desperation and dash dreams but it sounds like Kato is such a sort of upbeat dude that he's enjoying it or like making the most of it. It sounds like he just has like a great attitude about everything. This is why I identify with Kato. This is sort of like untoward optimism and just the sense of like, I don't know what's going on. I'm totally out of my depth and I probably won't be helpful if you like really need someone helpful but I'm doing my best and I care about you.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said I'm smiling because I don't know what's going on. I feel like that's somewhat what's happening. So he marries Cindy, who's the woman who he's saving himself for. They meet and get married and his family comes out from Milwaukee for the wedding and the night before he's talking to his dad about how you know, I don't think I want to get married. I don't think I'm ready to get married.

This might be a bad idea. And his dad's like, no, no, we're all here. So just get married camp. I already use my miles. No one wants to get married anyway. And then after two years, they decide to get divorced and it's hard on Kato's family because it's the first time in recorded history that a Katelyn has gotten divorced. Huge, yeah.

Yeah. And they have a kid together. Kato has a daughter named Tiffany and Kato's dad tries to convince Kato to get an annulment and it's like, no, I think if you've had a kid, you can't really. Yeah, it's harder that way. It's kind of proof of that some things have happened at least once. This is very poignant. Looking back, Kato realized he never should have married in the first place.

I was only 23 years old, looked like I was 12 and most of the time acted like it, had no career to speak of, no permanent place to live, and no real prospects. I was a tender babe in a very prickly woods. That's a description of him that will continue. So I picked Kato Katelyn going through life just like, ow, ow. There's something so interesting too about somebody who grows up in like a pretty privileged, pretty stable home having to have these revelations about the way the world works that other people have much younger.

He also thought that everyone in the world was Catholic until he went to high school. Oh, wow. His biographer says and suddenly went to a majority Jewish high school and it was like, oh, wow. Hmm. There's such a thing as minorities. There's such a thing as not being the dominant group. Yeah.

He seems like someone who life had treated gently. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of sad that so much of the way that we form our personalities is in response to hardship. Yeah. We wish hardship on people so that they'll be cooler or whatever, but it's also so interesting that these sorts of hardships that he's experiencing in his 20s are what a lot of people are experiencing when they're 11.

Yeah. I really see the great innocence of American ambition in a way in Kato Katelyn because I think the fact that we forgot but have kind of retained the effect of is that Kato Katelyn was kind of aging out of the life he was in. He was 35 when he fell into the spotlight, which is like 35 is not 25. Yeah. If he had been a 25-year-old, beach fever, pizza, delivering, comedy, waitstaff guy, I think he would have been received differently.

He did get a lot of flack in the media for just the fact that he was a grown man whose career was like babysitter slash around the house guy. Yeah. He's like a millennial coin, he should be honest. It's like the first millennial. He's like the pioneer, the millennial Magellan. According to him, he has on multiple occasions the experience of getting cast in a big commercial. It's going to be a big campaign.

He'll get residuals from it. Then his part is cut from it. He's one of those people who I think there are a lot of people like this who are always almost making it in an industry, always feeling like they're about to break through. You're close enough to making it happen that it's like you can convince yourself that it will happen. Yeah. Then in 1987, he makes beach fever, which is like his biggest project so far.

He befriends the director of the film who later on introduces him to a guy named Grant Cramer because he's making another movie called Little Red Corvette. He wants Cato and Grant to team up and cast it for him, basically, which is how Cato gets into the casting business and also, ultimately, how he meets Nicole because he meets her in Aspen when it's Grant's idea for them to go there for New Year's. Cato and Nicole, in a way, were brought together by beach fever. Yeah, so Cato and Grant Cramer drive to Aspen on Christmas morning of 1992. On December 30th, they crash a celebrity party at the Ritz Carlton.

It was a very exclusive affair filled with the upper echelon of Aspen players, movie stars, producers, directors, the Donald Trumps, and other regular members of the rich and famous cast. Grant and I decided to sneak in through the kitchen. We got dressed in our best clothes and simply rode up with the waiters in the service elevator. Nothing to it. Couldn't they get invited to these parties anyway? I mean, if his partner is like kind of a mover and shaker dude?

Well, but like a mover and shaker with the beach fever filmmakers. We were into talking to as many great-looking women as possible, Cato said. At one point, Grant saw someone he thought he knew. It was Nicole Brown Simpson. The book says Grant had been introduced to her at a party at OK Simpson's house a while back. As soon as he saw her, he went for it. He told Cato he had, quote, always wanted to do her.

Oh, I know. They went over, said hello, Grant introduced Cato to Nicole. It was obvious that although Grant thought he knew her, neither she nor the friend she was with, Faye Resnick, remembered ever having met him before. Nice. It didn't matter though. For within minutes, they were all laughing together as if they were old friends. One of the weirdest things about being super attractive is that everybody remembers meeting

you. Yeah. I feel like that would be very surreal. Yeah. And then the book says, in Aspen, the four got along well. Grant and Nicole had really hit it off. I could tell there were sparks flying, Cato said. I liked Faye, but only as a friend.

I was really more interested in Catherine Ochsenberg, an actress I had recognized as soon as I walked in. I excused myself and went over to talk to her. We struck a harmonious chord and I wound up spending the night with her. Well, Grant returned to Jerry's condo with Nicole and Faye. Nice. I just love this Catoism. We struck a harmonious chord.

I think that says a lot about Cato, right? He's just, he maybe he has kind of like Jeff Bridges as the dude energy where like, you recognize that he's so oblivious to what's going on that it's hard to blame him. Yeah. He seemed genuinely well intentioned. Yeah. I know it's difficult to dislike him, but it's also difficult to really like him because there's also, you know, they talk about active protagonists and passive protagonists in stories.

Right. Cato Kalin is definitely a passive protagonist. Yeah. So it's like, it's always difficult to get sort of engaged in these stories where it's not clear like what the protagonist wants or really what's driving them other than just circumstance. Yeah. And just that he is just kind of open to follow other people along on their adventure.

Yeah. And I'm sure Cato Kalin has anxiety and worry and I'm sure he experiences all sorts of emotions. Of course. But the major choices in his life do seem marked by like a lack of self-reflection. Yeah. Cato says he notices that Nicole has been seeing a guy back in LA, but he's calling her while she's an aspen and she's not calling him back. Yeah.

So it takes her a while to feel comfortable having sex with Grant. She and Faye call it playing, just like sexual stuff short of that. As you said on the show before, there's only like four things you can do. So she's doing the other things and not the main thing. So yeah. And so apparently Grant's telling Cato that they'd done a lot of quote fooling around, but he still hadn't actually made love to Nicole. It was Nicole's choice, he said.

She wanted to get to know him a little more before they actually quote did it. This, according to Cato, only made Grant more determined. So on January 2nd, Cato and Grant drive back to LA and then a couple weeks after they all get back, Nicole invites him to an engagement party that she is throwing and Cato goes out in the backyard and Nicole shows him the pool and the guest house and he's like, Nicole, who lives here? And she's like, nobody. And he's like, boy, I'd sure be able to love in this neighborhood and she's like, oh,

you can live in there. Oh. So they barely know each other at this point. Yeah. They've spent a few days together in Aspen. So Cato moves in. The original agreement is that he's going to live rent-free in exchange for childcare and dude about house-ness.

And then after a while, Nicole starts charging $500 a month. My sense is that she knew Cato and she knew him well enough to know he possessed that very Cato. Really, he wasn't entirely unlike Cato the Akita. He was someone who was big and strong and formidable and fundamentally very cuddly. Right. Like non-threatening. Yeah.

If you think about someone who could be like, who you just feel better about having around, you know? Yeah. And also probably that Cato had hung out with them and kind of like watched and facilitated his friend hooking up with Nicole and like apparently not been weird about it at all. Like that seems like a good litmus test of like, can I have this person around and they won't make it weird because they want to start something with me? Right.

Right. Dudes who don't make it weird get very far in life. Yeah. Yeah. And Brentwood sometimes. So it takes Cato several days to move all his stuff because he just has a little sports car. Okay.

She has a very cute picture. Cato driving back and forth between Brentwood and Hermosa Beach. Yeah. With like one backpack at a time. And when he arrives, he's greeted at the door by Nicole's housekeeper, Maria, who Nicole's daughter, Sydney, peeks out from behind and says, who are you? And it says, Cato Grin put on a funny voice and said, I will be your new neighbor. She broke into a big smile.

What is your name, young Ladi Sydney? She said and added that it was okay with her if he moved in. So this is the kind of relationship that he has with the kids to where like he does funny voices for them. He plays video games with them. He plays softball with them. Like he does spend a lot of time with the kids actually. It's so interesting because yeah, I mean, in any other circumstance, Cato would have been

like a great dude. Yeah. Well, and they all lived together for a year and there was no, you know, there were no real issues. Yeah. He says the only issue actually when he first moves in from his perspective is that she will often sunbathe nude by the cool and I know, poor Cato. Must be nice.

Must be nice. And she notices that he gets uncomfortable when he like passes her when she's like face up because she wants to get an even tan so she's like turning around a lot. And so after the first few days, whenever he comes by, she like flips over so that she's on her stomach and he doesn't have to see anything he doesn't want to see. God, by the standards of the story, though, it's like for all the dirtbag behavior that she's experienced in her life, like this is extremely undirtbag behavior, right? That like, I don't feel super appropriate about you being naked around me and like instead

of being fucking weird about it or like trying something with you, I'm going to in some way signal that let's keep this platonic basically. Yeah. I feel like it's unfair that like Cato Kalin and Faye Resnick were like two of the people who were kind of the most mercilessly roasted in the press. And also they seem to have been people who were like genuinely interested in being Nicole's friend. Right.

And like despite whatever limitations they had, like they did really try and they did really care about her. Yeah. Yeah. So like why are they the ones that we're taking this much out on? Yeah. And even that feeling of like if I'd been there, I would have known things that I still clearly, culturally don't know about domestic violence because look at how people are talking

about Nicole's marriage even after the murder. It's just amazing these tiny little moments of grace and it's like such a in some ways inconsequential moment of grace, but just like an extremely attractive woman who a man is around who doesn't try to take advantage of her. Yeah. It's just like, wow. Like by the standards of this story, we're like metal of honor for Cato. Right.

We're grating on a curve. Yeah. My God. And Grant basically breaks things off with Nicole after he does finally, quote, do it with her. Oh. And then Nicole gets pretty hung up on Grant, according to Cato Kalen. Okay.

Here, I'll read this to you. Grant invited Cato to a party to watch the game and Cato asked Nicole if she wanted to come along. It apparently never occurred to him that Kathy's presence might create a problem. Kathy is Grant's new girl. Fair enough when Nicole showed up, she became annoyed when Grant paid more attention to Kathy than to her. And when she and Cato got home, she said she wanted to talk to him about what had happened.

It was the beginning of a new phase in their relationship, one in which Nicole would confide her innermost secrets to her new house guest. That night she told him that for the first time in her life, being at the party had made her feel self-conscious about her age. After all, she told Cato she was in her early 30s and Grant's girlfriend was only 19, 20 tops. Oh. She was not only the other woman in Grant's life, but the older woman.

And that's when she tells Cato that she doesn't want Grant coming over ever. And that's also when he kind of proves himself as someone who she can be like, hey, please don't do this. Right. Like, here's how I feel about this and this is why I want you to do this. And he's like, okay. Right. I mean, it also illustrates sort of in some ways his obliviousness.

Yeah. That he's like, this will be totally fine. Yeah. So I went to a party that my ex were having with their younger, more attractive new partner. I don't think I would care. Yeah. Yeah. I'm Cato Kalen.

Right. Yeah. I was a Far City baseball player when I was 14. Yeah. But it's also like, it's also a deepening of the relationship too, right? Like a nice deepening that she's now telling him stuff and has a man that she's confiding in and who isn't using that against her the way that OJ has. Yeah.

So it really sucks that we have to have spent so much time speculating and, you know, and that some people will continue to speculate about like, what was the nature of her relationship with Ron Goldman or Cato Kalen and were they having sex or where they got in? It's like, well, we could focus on that, but we could also talk about how like, isn't it interesting that it was seemed to be this meaningful, maybe even therapeutic thing for her, for her to have just like platonic friendships with men. Yeah. And to be able to be a man in her life who she trusted and who were worthy of her trust.

Like that's actually kind of amazing that she was doing that. Yes. And who also were considerate in that you're asking me not to bring my friend Grant over. Okay. I'm going to respect that, right? Right. It's the kind of thing that OJ wouldn't do. Right.

I think just the experience of like saying someone like, hey, like it would mean a lot to me if you would do this thing for me and to have someone like just do it. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Cato. There was so much that he couldn't do, but then there were things that Cato Kalin could

do. Yeah. I mean, I guess as with so many of these things, it's like what can people offer other people and then what are the limits of what they can offer other people? Yeah. And then what are causing those limits? Yeah. And how do we design the Cato of the future?

Does he mention the abuse other than the 911 call? Does he see it? Like does he see signs of it everywhere or is that a unique case? I mean, it's a while before he even meets OJ. He goes like, here's a tell of him. She tells Cato that she thinks OJ has people spying on her. She tells him that she feels her life is in danger and that he could kill her and get away with it.

I mean, yes. But then at other times, she's reconciling with OJ and she's like, let's not talk about all that other stuff we talked about before. Hmm. This is like too much emotional complexity for Cato Kalin to handle, I feel like. It's too much complexity for any of us to handle, you know? I mean, the people at the top of any field in the United States like have historically really struggled with these concepts.

Why do we expect Cato Kalin, you know, baseball star of Nicolay High to be able to do what the LAPD couldn't do? I mean, Ron Schiff also knew about a lot of this and he was the one who did domestic violence training for Los Angeles cops. So the degree of ignorance here is really feels hard to overstate. And so the football season ends in 1993 and OJ is working less because that's kind of the bread and butter of his work aside from golfing for Hertz type stuff is football announcing. And so he's around more, he sees Cato more, he and Nicol are attempting this reconciliation

that they began in the spring of 93 where, you know, she decides, I really want to be back with OJ. I really want to make this work again. And so Cato starts seeing OJ a lot more too. And so OJ does stuff like he takes him on the set of the naked gun 33 and a half, which he's making. No, 33 and a third. At that time.

Oh, sorry. It's two and a half. Yeah. OJ. Sarah. I'm sorry. We insist on accuracy in this podcast. 33 and a third.

And Cato is like really dazzled and delighted by this and he especially enjoys that Leslie Nielsen has a battery device where he'll like, he can start just like fart noises emanating from his person. Okay. And at the end of the day, OJ in a casual, almost joking manner, reminded Cato that he was still living at Nicol's and of course there were certain things he just couldn't tell her. Cato reassured him that he had nothing to worry about, that he would never do anything

like that. Besides, he said, why would it matter? After all, they were no longer married. It matters, OJ said. And this is about, you know, OJ taking Cato out in his adventures with other women and, you know, not still needing to deceive Nicol about that. Oh, so he wants Cato to keep his secrets, basically. Yeah.

In May of 1993, at the start of this attempted reconciliation, Nicol and OJ go to Cabo, which is where a year later they're going to have their other terrible Cabo trip where OJ makes his frog man comments. Right. But a year earlier, Nicol comes back from this 1993 trip to Cabo and according to the book, Nicol told Cato how awful the first two days had been. It began as one of the worst trips of my life, she said. The reason, she explained, was that OJ had set out to prove that he was still able to

satisfy her sexually. He insisted upon making love to her five times a day. She said violently, all while screaming, I'll do you like no one else can do you. Oh my God. She told Cato she begged him to ease up. OJ, please give me a break. She said it wasn't until the third day that he just physically wore himself out. Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah. Ah, for real. As painful as this may be for her, like if she's to try and say no, like we know that the 1989 New Year's beating starts with her refusing to give him oral sex. So what would happen if she said no? Right. There's no consent when the alternative to sex is something even more violent. Right.

And you don't have to make a physical threat to someone in that situation, it's just understood by both parties. Yeah, which is just harrowing, and so Cato hears all this and his first meeting with OJ is after he learns about this Cabo trip. And he still hangs out with OJ, he still goes to the sets with him, he still strikes up this friendship with OJ knowing all this. Yeah, it's like he knows that OJ did this and he's also able to go hang out with him and Leslie Nielsen.

Right, right. And I feel like the question is just like, why? Right. What were the factors that allowed this bystander who like hadn't been part of this relationship for years and years at this point to be like, well, I guess you're telling me that it's fine and so I guess I, okay. Or like I went because he invited me. Right.

Lots of people agree to do things that they're asked to do without really thinking them through, especially people that have this kind of Cato like obliviousness. Right. Or just like, you know, you like Nicole says things are fine with you now. Yeah. We're just getting at the fact that like we won't always know what to do. Right. We're going to have dreams in all of us, which says hopeful things for our hair.

Cato also says, I don't really know what to think of the story. Cato says that there's one night when he and Nicole are drinking and she's drinking pretty heavily. And she says, I don't know how to tell you this, but I'm falling in love with you. What? Cato felt the blood drain from his face. He couldn't believe what he was hearing. No, you're not.

He said, yes, I am. She insisted. I've had dreams about you. He remembered now how sometimes in the mornings he'd meet Nicole in her kitchen for coffee and she'd say, whoa, you don't want to be around me today. I had a dream about you. Okay. Come on.

He'd say thinking she was teasing him. Were we doing things? Was I good? He remembered how she'd laugh and that would be it. Now though, she wasn't laughing. No. Hey, listen, Nicole, I love you too as a friend, but we could never be romantically involved. I couldn't do it.

He meant it. He insisted he wasn't sexually attracted to her and was canny enough to know it could never work any other way between them than the way it was now. But Kato, she went on. It's perfect. The kids love you. Nicole, he said, groping for excuses. I'm not a wealthy guy.

I live in a guest house. Remember? I'm the guy who was late with his rent. You're going to be very famous one day soon, Kato. She replied, I can feel it. Yeah. And I'll be able to afford to move into a larger guest house. Nicole sensed his unease.

I know you're uncomfortable about what I've said, she told him, but I had to say it. With that, she smiled and went back into the living room. What do you think about that? I mean, I like imagining Nicole running off with Kato and having just a normal LA life together with this nice guy who, as long as the circumstances don't put him into terrible situations, is a pretty dope husband. Yeah. I mean, they would get divorced too eventually, but he would be the ex-husband who you're

like, oh, it's Kato's weekend with the kids. Yeah. I hope he doesn't take them dirt biking again. For all his faults, it doesn't seem like he has temper issues, impulse control issues, violence issues. It doesn't seem like he would be an agent of chaos in anybody's life. When I first read this, my first thought was like, hmm, did that really happen? I've never, and also because other people were like, oh, no, yeah, she wasn't interested

in Kato. Nope, no tension between her and Kato. Right. I think because of that, I was like, did Kato, Kailin just throw this in here because this is a self-aggrandizing thing, but now, reading it again this week though, because I spent a couple days in this book really, really thinking about Kato Kailin. I was like, I believe that. It does seem to me completely possible that if you're living with this guy who's sweet

and harmless and ripped and loves your kids and your kids love him, and there's a scary guy chasing you around that even if you didn't necessarily have a ton of romantic tension with him at any other time, would have a moment of like, Kato just like, fuck everything. Let's just do it on me. Yeah, I mean, it's not nuts. You know, like people are attracted to each other in some moments and not at others. Yeah, these are like two hot people doing hot people stuff. But you know, the on again, off again reconciliation continues between Nicole and OJ.

And then Kato talks about the incident on October 25th, 1993 that we heard part of in the 911 call. Right, when OJ came in and kicked in the back door. Yeah, Nicole is on the phone with the 911 operator and OJ is terrorizing her. And Kato at first decides to just head to his guest house. And then before he closes the door, he takes another look and decides he needs to go in and try and calm OJ down, which he does. And he kind of distracts OJ.

And when the police come, they ask Kato to fix the French doors that OJ has kicked in. And Mark Elliott writes, after the police left, Kato continued to try to make repairs while Nicole still upset, began talking. She said she couldn't believe the kids had slept through the whole noisy altercation. When she was still married to OJ, she told Kato they used to fight all the time in front of the children. It got to the point where Sydney and Nicole's words was so used to the fighting, it became a normal part of her life, which is why she had to have a security blanket and continually

sucked on her fingers. Kato asked Nicole what had happened to provoke OJ into, quote, the kind of rage I'd never experienced before. Absolutely nothing, she said. OJ is just we're fighting again. She told Kato OJ had come over a few nights earlier and had seen some photos of her and a man she used to date on the den table that had kicked off a new round of fights between them.

This is the man who's sleeping with a photo of Paula Barbieri nude by his bed. Right. And probably cheating on Paula Barbieri with other people, too. Yeah. In light of OJ's repeated concern for what Nicole is doing while the kids are sleeping upstairs, the kids are sleeping upstairs at Nicole's house the night that she's murdered outside her front door. Do they hear anything?

What what what happens with them? Officer risk finds them sleeping, apparently sleeping in their rooms when he is the first officer at the scene. And then after the murder, do they go live with OJ's sister or something? Like what's the custody situation afterwards? They live with Nicole's family after OJ is taken into custody. I wish there were some way for courts or somebody to order that like some people shouldn't be famous.

I feel like with kids like that, they go through something so terrible at such a young point in their life. I feel like the best thing that everybody can do is just like unfame them. Like a witness protection program. Yeah, the way we do with like the sons and daughters of presidents. Right. I wish there was a way for everyone to just get together like a Slack channel and just like, we're going to leave these kids alone forever.

Yeah, that's what the Illuminati should be for. I know, I just like talking about who we're going to leave. I know. And also like if Sidney Simpson wins a flower arranging competition today, the headline will be like daughter of this tragic situation. Yeah. So after Nicole and Cato talk post fight, Cato goes back to his guest house. And OJ calls and asks him to come over to his house and have a little talk about what

just happened and what Cato just saw. Oh, wow, like the same day? Yeah, that very night. Oh, wow. And Cato says, OJ, I don't know. Let me call you back. OK. And then he goes to the main house to talk to Nicole and told her about OJ calling.

And she and his words freaked out. If you go over there, she cried, I'll hate you. Don't you dare go over there. Yeah. Cato was surprised, although he should have expected that reaction. He hadn't. OK, he said. But he really sounded upset on the phone.

Cato, she said on the edge of tears, he's trying to manipulate you. Don't you see I don't want you going over there. OK, he said, I won't. Should I call him back? If you have to, Nicole said quietly. Cato ultimately decides not to call OJ back just to do what Nicole says. Good. What do you think of that little interaction?

It's just again, it's like you have to keep telling this guy like basic stuff, right? You're like, no, Cato, you're being manipulated right now. Right. I mean, at least he asked her, my God. He does well if he's given direction. Right. Right.

Constant direction. Yeah. And then Elliot writes, looking back on the incident, Cato recalled, by the time I saw OJ again, he and Nicole had made peace. The incident seemed completely forgotten by the both of them. At least that's the way they acted, as if neither wanted to admit it had ever taken place. Later on, when I began seeing OJ more frequently, he did mention it to me one

more time, although not in any apologetic or explanatory way. I don't remember how it came up, but he breached it off, insisting it had been no big thing. So there's also living in this kind of mini society where for as long as Nicole and OJ are together, Nicole has to respect OJ's needed reality of like it wasn't a big deal. Right. You provoked me.

It doesn't count. And then Nicole decides that she needs to downsize and move out of the house on Gretna Green with the guest house. And when she finds the Bundy condo, she writes Cato a note saying that he can move in with them. They all really wanted to live with them. He can pay the same rent and she would only let him move out. But when you find a wife, oh no, she signed the note, love me.

At the same time, OJ is talking about maybe selling his house on Rockingham and moving Nicole and the kids to Florida starting a new life there, which to me is a little bit sinister given the context of what we're seeing from this reconciliation with him trying to kind of control her friends and spy on her and follow her. But they don't do that. She does decide to move into the house on Bundy. And then we're going to jump ahead to Cato's testimony in OJ Simpson's trial,

March 21st, 1995, being questioned by Marcia Clark. And Marcia says, did you ever move into the Bundy townhouse that Nicole purchased in January 1994 that you were going to? Cato, no, Marcia, why not? Why did you do that? Cato, because OJ asked me to go to his house. I mean, it was part of a deal. I went there instead of moving in with Nicole.

Marcia, what did the defendant say to you about moving into his house instead of Nicole's condominium? Cato, I mean, we talked about it. And it was sort of like the right thing to do, not to be in the same house that I should probably not go there. And OJ offered me his place. It was free. And he said, you can stay as long as you want.

And when it was time for you to go, he'd let me know. Marcia, did he indicate with you with respect to what he thought of the fact that you'd be living in the same house with Nicole? Cato didn't like it, but it probably wouldn't be right. So again, he asked me to do it. I didn't really think it through. Right. According to Cato, he's already thinking, I'm not going to have my own little dwelling anymore.

I used to have a lot more privacy. Yeah. And at the same time, OJ is like, listen, I just don't think it would feel right for you to be living in the same house, according to OJ. Like that's where he's going to draw a line. And Cato is like, sure, I understand. I was kind of maybe not super keen on staying there anyway. So can I just stay at Nicole's until I find a new place?

Because I do have to find a new place now. And OJ is like, oh, no, you can live with me. And Cato is like, well, I can't afford to live with you. And OJ is like, just come for free. In Cato's mind, it's probably just an uncomplicated lateral move. I'm going from one place to another. This one has lower rent. Maybe it's bigger.

Maybe there's a better TV or whatever. And I think he's also like primarily looking out for Cato. Like I think maybe in the moment, he's like, I kind of wanted to find a new place to live. This is a better deal for Cato. Like in these like big decisions, like we do tend to maybe think that way first. Yeah. And according to Cato, he goes in to talk to Nicole and says, guess what? OJ doesn't feel it's right for me to move in with you and the kids.

So he's offered to let me live in his guest house for free. Oh my God. Isn't that great? Oh my God. And Nicole says, he's manipulating you, Cato. Don't you see what he's trying to do? Cato think it through. Cato claims he couldn't believe what he was hearing and couldn't understand what she was so upset about.

Apparently, the idea of betrayal never entered his mind. Instead, he tried to explain to her how perfect this seemed to him, but Nicole didn't want to hear any of it. She became extremely upset and cut short the discussion. Cato went back to the guest house and started packing. A few minutes later, Nicole came by to tell him she was sorry for blowing up. That she was okay with his moving in with OJ and that she wasn't even angry for him for doing this to us. She said, every time I make a friend, he takes them away from me. And then apparently a little later, Nicole's friend, Cora Fishman comes over and Cato's talking to Cora about how Nicole's much more upset than he thought she would be.

And Cora says, maybe it's that Nicole was counting on him for the rent money every month. And he's like, oh, oh my God, Cato. And he goes and talks to Nicole and is like, wait, Cora said that you might need me for the rent money every month. So if that's true, I'll go, I'll live with you like I understand. And according to Cato Kill and the Whole Truth, Nicole, without emotion, said to the house guy she had once declared with happiness and conviction she'd wanted to be friends with for the rest of her life. It's okay. Go live with OJ. Aww. It's so sad that she is perceiving the situation exactly as it is. Right.

I mean, as in so many chapters of her life, it's like she gets it. Everyone around her is like, uh. Yeah. No one is able to take her seriously when she's just stating the truth of what's going on. Like he's manipulating you. He is taking you away from me. He is taking one of my strengths and turning it into one of my weaknesses and you're letting it happen. And this is what always happens. Yeah.

You can feel her like deep sigh just sort of watching all of this of like, of course, right? Like, of course, Cato is leaving. Of course, Cato is leaving to move in with my abusive ex-husband, like of fucking course. Yeah. And like, why would I think that I could possibly have someone on my side? Like, why even try? Right. I feel like what's saddest for me about thinking about that little moment is that Cato actually like kind of cluelessly signs on for this clearly bad idea and then is like think

and then actually thinks about it for a second. It's like, oh, oh, Nicole, I'm sorry. Like, I'll totally live with you. I didn't realize you might be counting on me, you know, and he's thinking of rent. Yeah. But like, that could be a stand-in for anything. She's just like, yeah, just go, just go. The kind of privilege that you need to go through life, this oblivious is really fascinating.

Yeah. It's like a sort of easily attractive, friendly, varsity baseball team kind of guy. Right. You're just like, I just do what people tell me to. And then when they tell me, like, hey, that was mean, I'm like, hey, okay, sorry, it was mean, but he's never thinking of what does it mean for me to move out? Or that he's like, like so many other people in the story, he understands that they're like, he sees that he sees the way OK is breaking into her house. So she's making this 911 call. He sees this fury in him that he says is unlike anything he's ever seen before.

So like, he's registering what's going on. He's not like, oh, OK, he's just got kind of a short fuse, but it's fine. Like, it seems like he's genuinely scared of him. Right. But just, you know, in the absence of overwhelming evidence, the contrary is able to be like, well, I think, but in the end, it's fine. And they're reconciling and Nicole's not in danger. Right. Like, I wonder if, like, how much of this is denial and just the desire to believe that, like, if people say things are fine, then they really are fine.

Right, right. I also wonder, like, how many of America's lawmakers are essentially Cato Kalan? We're like, they're not bad people. They don't want to do bad things in the world, but they are literally or spiritually former varsity baseball players from Glendale, who just are well intentioned and need to be given direct instructions about everything in life that doesn't pertain directly to their interests, you know, who just like so many of the people who inhabit roles in America where they really do need to understand abuse dynamics and they really do need to understand what it means to have a complex set of obligations to the people around you and to your community and, you know, who just it's not a willingness thing, it's a capacity thing. Right. It's also so interesting thinking about it in context of what we consider to be the bystander effect, right, where there's this myth that all these people watched Kitty Genoves get stabbed to death and sort of shrugged and didn't call the cops. It's like we think of the bystander effect in terms of did you see it or did you not see it, whereas there's also things like this where it's like he did see it, but he didn't contextualize it.

Yeah. He saw what he needed to see. He just didn't do anything about it. It's so much life is so much less scary in this weird, dark, forensic files, informed worldview where you're like, people have the capacity to save each other, but they choose not to because they're evil. Like, that's much less scary. Yeah. I think this world where all these like hyper competent, yet evil people are walking around where it's like, no, the world is just full of Cato Kalens. Right.

The worst things that happen in this world happen because of just doofy people with a lack of capacity for what they're really needed to do in the moment when they're needed. Never trust good baseball players. Boom. Don't trust the prom kings. Yes. They probably don't want to hurt you, but maybe they can't help you very much either. Yes. Is that where we're stopping?

Are we done? Yeah. So tell us, what are we going to hear about next time? We're going to hear more about Cato's adventures because that is going to take us through Cato basically in his Cato way, hanging out with OJ on the afternoon of June 12th and cluelessly tagging along to McDonald's with him. We're all in some way cluelessly tagging along to McDonald's somewhere. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas.