You're Wrong About - The O.J. Simpson Trial: Paula Escapes From L.A.

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

This week we return to the  O.J. Simpson trial and learn what Paula Barbieri did after the Bronco chase. Digressions include fish, beef and grocery shopping while conventionally attractive. Neither co-host has a firm grasp on the meaning of the word "festive."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 PhaseLinks!Paula on "Primetime Live" The Time cover Support the show

I have decided that this New Year's, I am not going to say this is going to be my year. Oh. Because I think that all of this was just to spite me. All right, we, we're diving in. We ready? We got everything? Everyone's here? I've been working on this tagline all week. Here we go. All right, you ready? Hello, and welcome to Yule Wrong About. Yay. That's beautiful. That's all I got. We put in some sleigh bells. If you put in sleigh bells, it makes everything Christmasy. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post.

I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm working on a book about the Santa Nick Panic. Oh my God. And if you want to support the show, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about. And today we are talking about festive things. We are. And I told you we were going to do a Santa episode. Yes. And once again, I changed my mind and decided to do a switcheroo. But it's still festive and it still has a Santa theme because Santa has left a book in my stocking and it is Paula Barbieri's The Other Woman.

Oh. We're going to talk about Paula. That's festive? Is Paula festive? Well, people have been asking for OJ Simpson episodes for six months. So if it's not festive, then I have nothing for anyone. I think, don't you think that a festive gift is something that someone has been asking you for? I just thought festive was a synonym for Christmas. I think that's very offensive of you.

So we were originally going to be doing a Christmas episode because Mike figured out that holiday episodes are important to me and offered one to me as a Christmas gift. And then I was like, you know, it would be a better Christmas gift for me. Going off book again and talking about Paula Barbieri for two hours. Yes. I'm jingling my little reindeer boots over here, little bells. So take two. Today we're talking about Paula Barbieri and returning to the OJ Simpson trial. Yes? We are. I got you an OJ Simpson trial episode for Christmas.

00:02:16,320 --> 00:02:19,280 I've been up all night trying to put the little train tracks together. So Mike is to start on a smaller scale. Who the heck is Paula Barbieri? Paula Barbieri is OJ Simpson's girlfriend who decided to stay with him through the trial because she was convinced that he was innocent. And so she decided to support her boyfriend and stick with him. Meaningfully, she was not his girlfriend as of the morning of the murders because she had left him a voicemail breaking up with him and then flown to Las Vegas to be with Michael

Bolton. Yes. And then came back because he was in a crisis and she has a complicated upbringing that makes her respond to people in crisis and want to rescue them. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately her complicated upbringing could also just be described as like being a woman in America. But yeah. And OJ Simpson was having a crisis. And the crisis was that his ex-wife Nicole and Nicole's acquaintance, Ron Goldman, had just been murdered. Yes.

And so Paula comes back to LA and is like, oh my goodness, this man who I guess broke up with because our relationship was impossible. His ex-wife has just been murdered. And so we saw in her book, her description of her experience of the slow Bronco chase. OJ had sent her away from his house earlier in that day, put her in the car and told her to go marry some nice guy from her hometown. He was like stroking her cheek like Casablanca. Yeah. This book is a collection of men saying goodbye to Paula and putting her on various vehicles. And so OJ like tries to do maybe the right thing and send her away out of this mess and

also he doesn't want the media to see her. And so at the time that he is in the white Bronco, she is sitting in her friend's house watching it on TV and trying to astrally project herself basically into the car with him so that she can keep him alive, keep him calm, keep him from dying, which is basically her only concern at this point, which I think is, you know, like a week ago she had broken up with this guy after deciding that she couldn't handle the way that he was treating her anymore and just having her heart played with. And now somehow his having apparently committed two murders has been able to bring them closer together than ever before. I know. This, I've done this. You're like, oh, this isn't working.

And then some sort of external thing happens. And you're like, oh, I guess we will get back together even though it makes no logical sense. But you're just like there in crisis or I'm in crisis or whatever. And you just go back to what's comfortable. Yeah, you're just like, I'll find a time to break up later after we're both dead. Yeah. So I think of this as season two of our OJ episodes. Okay. We've done the first 10 episodes. We have done basically the history leading up to the night of the murders and then the week of linear time following the murders. I realize this is asking a lot, but can you just summarize a little bit? Like what have we been through? What is the story about? Oh my god. Who are some of the people in

it? Like just, you know, do a previously on. See, I can, I'll try to summarize our episodes at a one to 10 scale. So I'll talk for an hour and 25 minutes. Okay. So basically, we originally met Nicole, who met OJ basically as soon as she turned 18 and was in this horrifying relationship with him that started off abusive and just got worse and worse and worse. And eventually culminated in what we believe to be his murder of her and Ron Goldman, this kind of bystander guy who just happened to be there that night. And then we met Marsha and we met Mark Furman and we met all the investigators who start looking into the crime scene at Nicole's apartment. And it is again, what we consider to be crystal clear that OJ has committed this crime. I don't like to speak

confidently about anyone's guilt at a part of the story where they haven't gone to trial yet, but like it looks real bad. There is blood all over the goddamn place. Yes. I still think that the best evidence is the fact that this is a longstanding domestic abuse situation. And then she turns up dead, which like 99 times out of 100, it's going to be the husband who does it, the abusive husband. So I still think that's pretty open and shut, but there's a lot of other evidence indicating that he did it. And then the cops pick him up and he gets even more suspicious. There's like a cut on his hand that he like doesn't have a really very good explanation for. His alibi is super weak sauce, but because he's OJ and he's won the Heidelberg trophy or

whatever, the cops let him go after like 30 minutes. They're just like, okay, OJ says he didn't do it, so he probably didn't do it. And then Marsha Clark starts looking into this and is like, are you fucking kidding me? I can't do clapping because I'm holding a microphone in one hand, but she's really mad. And the cops are just like not taking this seriously. And she's like, shouldn't we be arresting this dude? He's obviously a flight risk. He's like a literal millionaire. And then eventually she impanels a grand jury and like takes over the investigation and finally this kicks the cops into gear and they take him into custody. Yes. And she meets Kato Kalin and they face off. That was a fun episode, Sarah. Thank you. I like that episode. Yeah, see,

there you go. You summed it up. Oh, and then we had a Bronco chase. Oh yeah. And then he's like in some sort of like mental health spiral and he gets in the Bronco intending to kill himself and his friend Al Cowlings drives him to Nicole's grave, but there's too many photographers there and then they come back and he's got the gun to his head. And eventually, I mean, like you said, we call it a chase, but it's really just like a follow. They follow him back to his house and then he pulls into the driveway and they arrest him and they take him to the police station. Yeah. So we ended our Bronco chase episode, our Bronco motorcade episode with O.J. stepping out of the car where he had been having basically an extended standoff

with the cops and he gets taken into jail and we are now going to go to Paula Barbieri and talk about what she is doing in the aftermath of the Bronco chase and as her man is being processed. She's at the North Pole. She's wrapping presents. Oh yeah. I'm sticking with the festive theme. Kind of because she flees LA to go to Tennessee for three weeks. Okay. So Paula is heading to Tennessee to be with her friends, the Whitehursts whose daughters Debbie and Terry are her good friends and who are kind of, I think, a second family for her. So they come and pick her up in Memphis on the morning of June 18th and Paula writes, my friends were sweet and affectionate as always and knew better than to mention O.J. The previous day's event soon seemed far away

until we stopped at a McDonald's drive-thru. We passed a newspaper box and there was the Memphis Commercial Appeals banner headline about O.J. His arrest was treated like World War Three. It was then that I started to realize that I could fly away but I couldn't hide. And so they head to a small town outside of Memphis and basically just take care of Paula. She's like someone being taken to Jimmy Carter's brothers ranch. Oh yeah. Deep cut. And they put her in Debbie's old bedroom and give her a canopy bed and she says, it gobbled me whole. I felt like a princess in a perfect world. But she has given the number there to O.J.'s assistant, Kathy Randa. And so that night,

O.J. called me from jail for the first of a thousand times. Oh man. I'm so sorry for scaring you that way, O.J. said. I should never have put you through all that. He was plainly remorseful about having taken off in the Bronco with a gun. That's all right, I said. And it was. I was just so glad to have him on the line. Are you okay? I'm not okay, he said. But you don't have to worry. I'll never try anything like that again. Wait, so did he, Casa Blanca, send her away and then immediately try to get back with her as soon as he gets access to a phone? I feel as if what's happening for him here is that this suicide attempt or suicide threat or whatever, I think it's both at once that this thing that he has just put her through has wiped this light clean.

This is a sign. Don't be with people that treat you like this. Like are just constantly calling emotional mulligans. Yeah. It doesn't count if they have to cut into an NBA final. No. It's so weird to roast him for being kind of a manipulative prick when we also believe that he murdered his ex-wife. It's weird. The scale of those two things is off, but also it is dickish to be emotionally manipulative? I feel as if it's more satisfying to me to just roast someone for being a dick than to be like, what an evil person. I know. Because A, I don't believe in the concept of evil as something that exists independently of human behavior. And B, I think that talking about someone's evil or whatever gives them a form of power.

We act as if destructiveness or the ability to do violence, I feel as if we've created a culture in America that suggests that that's worthy of respect. It's just sad and destructive and stupid and avoidable a lot of the time. And just talking about how awful and terrible someone is, it's like, I just rather talk about what a fucking dick I think this guy is because I think that that is belittling to him. It doesn't give him any respect, which making him seem powerful in any way offers him. I think one of the misogynistic critiques of women is that they're governed by their emotions, so we fundamentally can't trust them. I think this is underlying a lot of societal misogyny. But then when men are clearly acting according to the whims of their emotions,

we find ways of not calling it that. He is feeling things and he is doing things on the basis of his feelings right now and he has throughout this entire story, but we have these sort of like euphemisms for talking about that in a way that we don't with women. Well, and I think we've talked about this before, but I feel as if, especially now, we're living in a culture that refuses to recognize male anger and aggression as fundamentally emotional. I don't think that our culture of masculinity in America recognizes anger as an emotion and as an emotional response. Sarah, I'm glad we're back to doing this. I missed this. Are you going to miss OJ? I missed OJ. What did you miss about OJ?

Just talking about trash masculinity, there's so many fun, interesting dimensions of the way that sort of wealth and celebrity and masculinity warp the way we tell stories and it's all here. It's all here. It's Santa's bag. I know. I have a friend who keeps trying to talk me into doing a spin-off podcast about the history of fisheries in America. Do you know what he wants to call it? You're drawing a trout. That's good, but his suggestion is codpast. They're both winners, Sarah. It's got me hook, line, and sinker to be honest. Merry Christmas. I'm your dad. Ordinarily, I would cut that out, but I'm leaving it in. Back to Paula. Paula writes,

During the next three weeks I stayed in Tennessee, I spoke to OJ several times a day. We'd always know it was him calling. The operator would say, Collect from the county correctional facility. We talked endlessly for hours at a stretch. I put our past issues aside. They seem so trivial now. All that mattered was getting the man I cared about through to the next morning. He's putting all this emotion on her shoulders and she's just taking it. She's just like, yep, I'll wear this backpack. He is so incapable, apparently, of feeling or expressing any guilt about killing Nicole that Paula is feeling guilt for him. We've talked a lot in our other episodes about her, about her feeling like it had to be her fault.

It's her fault that Nicole is dead because when she and OJ were together and Nicole was always somewhere just around the corner, she just wished Nicole would disappear and now she has. Paula's blaming herself more for someone's death because she wished she would disappear in some twilight zone way than the man who actually stabbed her to death. I don't know. I feel like one of the reasons I love this book so much is that it's like this masterclass and how much can you possibly blame yourself for in a relationship that isn't your fault? How much can you apologize for a partner who isn't treating you the way that you deserve and just tough it out and peacemake and how much damage can you metabolize? It turns out a lot.

I'm sure nobody is thinking about those exact questions on Christmas Day this year as we all spend time with our families. Paula writes, OJ told me about his daily strip searches and how chilly his cell was. He needed a warmer sweater, he said, and some thermal underwear. His arthritis had flared up. His bed was so high he had trouble getting into it. When OJ talked about the bars staring back at him or his cold metal bench, I was right there with him. I melted into the jail as I had into the Bronco during the chase. No, it was more than that. I felt as if I should be in the jail. It would be so much easier if it were me instead of him. So basically when she's not on the phone with OJ listening to him complain, Paula says she is praying or watching CNN waiting

for someone to come on and announce like, this has all been a mistake. OJ is innocent. Sorry Paula. And instead on June 20th, she sees Marcia Clark's press conference where Marcia Clark says it was premeditated murder. It was done with deliberation and premeditation. Which Marcia Clark also talks about in her book as something that in retrospect, she was very deliberate and committed with that language about her belief in OJ's guilt in a way that was controversial. How does Paula feel about it? Does it make her second guess, OJ's innocence? Oh, I'm so glad you asked. That sure is some nerve, I thought. How could Clark be so sure so soon when I knew she was so wrong? I worried about how her statement would affect OJ who looked so weak

at his arraignment that morning. When he stood to plead not guilty, I worried that he might fall down. So she's like bought into the OJ narrative. Oh, yeah. She is completely strapped in. And I feel as if the deeper we're getting into this, the more I see that, yeah, this is a very weird choice for a Christmas episode. But like whatever, the whole podcast is a weird choice. So here we are. You know, something that people talk about a lot with regards to the show is empathy and how it tries to be empathetic with all its subjects. And that is really important to me. And it's important to empathize. But I also think that there's something that happens in relationships that I'm familiar with, where you can lose sight of yourself. And you can always be entirely focused

on feeling for the person that you're with, and trying to mold yourself into the shape you need to be for the relationship to be functional, and believing in good faith, the stuff that they say that they need from you, and the stuff that they say is your fault. And I don't know, I think that it's, I just would like to say that I think it's possible to live empathetically and also have boundaries and ways that you require people to treat you. There's also, I mean, I think this is something that being in a bad relationship does to you, is it makes you understand empathy as enabling, right, that the only way to show empathy for somebody like this is to stick with them as they go through this trial for a crime that they probably did commit. There are other ways to be

empathic of somebody and also break up with them. Yeah. I think that, okay, I don't attribute to him the kind of calculating forethought that would lead him to be like, I'm going to do this next fucking thing to get Paula on my side. I think he just knows how to do that. I think it's intuitive for him. The way it is for a lot of people were like, if you're backed into a corner in a relationship, you find a way to create a crisis that binds your partner to you again, even if it's your fault, that you have both just gone through something traumatic, because the point becomes not that you caused it, but that you've both been traumatized by it. Also, a lot of master manipulators are not sort of calculatingly manipulative. They're doing what feels good. You get on a bicycle and you

ride. You're not necessarily aware of every single thing that every muscle is doing at the time. I think that works emotionally too. Right. I also feel like given the situation Paula's in, obviously, she can't throw a consensual breakup, which is why she initially tried to get out of this relationship by leaving a phone message and then bolting to Bolton. I think that, thank you. I don't imagine OJ Simpson being capable of accepting her being like, hey, I care about you so much as a friend and you're so important to me, but the fact that you're having a bad time doesn't mean that you get to just be in a relationship with me again. Right. And just like you're going to have relationships with people who can't accept your reasonable

terms and the only thing to do is just accept them accusing you of being unreasonable. I think that's also something that Paula really can't handle doing, which I get. We're both projecting all of our own shit onto this relationship completely. I'm not projecting. I'm reading and I'm raising my hand at the parts I recognize. So at the same time that this is going on, Paula is also getting calls from Tom Hahn, who's one of her agent guys, and he's like, I think that a good way to address all of this press attention that I'm fielding for you in LA, you're welcome, is for you to talk to Diane Sawyer. So what do you think Paula does? Does she go on primetime live?

She does. What? I wasn't aware of this at all. You know, one carries about Paula. This is my whole thing. So the public is aware that OJ Simpson has a girlfriend. So she's becoming like a tabloid figure at this time. And she, and also by doing this, she is offering herself as a spokesperson. And I'm really curious about what didn't make it into the book. This is one of those areas where I'm like, there's just, there's a, there's a scene missing here, because here's what we get. Tom persisted. Just talk with Diane Sawyer. If you don't like her, you don't have to do a thing. Next paragraph, I reluctantly gave in. We arranged for one of Mr. Whitehurst's pilots to bring up the primetime live crew in Memphis the next day and bring them back to the

ranch. When I spoke to OJ that night, I didn't mention Diane. I felt guilty about hiding it, but I didn't want to upset him. Besides, I still doubted that I'd go through with the interview. Then I spoke to Diane and I changed my mind as Tom thought I would. She was one person I decided who could get my story across without destroying my integrity. I was still anxious about putting OJ's case at risk, but how could I hurt anything as long as I told the truth? Speaking of emotional manipulation, this is what journalists do for a living, is they talk you into doing interviews with them and there's no accountability afterwards. Can we talk about that a little bit because I think people really don't know what you're

agreeing to if you consent to be on TV. I mean, this is the thing is all of the power for an interviewer is in the edit. If you have an hour of footage with somebody and you have, you know, a 15 minute slot to fill, if you want to make somebody seem callous and out of touch and unintelligent, you can take almost anybody and make them seem that way in 15 minutes. Which is why you and I are screwed. I don't think people understand this, that when you talk to a journalist, you talk to a journalist and then you just open the paper a couple days later and you're in there. You have no input. And oftentimes you talk to a journalist, it's even worse in print,

you talk to a journalist for an hour and one or two sentences get into the paper and you are not in control of what those sentences are. It's like being a cow and talking to like the person who's going to make a meatloaf out of you eventually and being like, people are going to know that I'm a cow, right? It's like, oh yeah, sure. It's weird that her agent is telling her to do this, honestly. Well, so okay, I can imagine a few different scenarios here because what happens as we move forward is that Paula does kind of, she's useful to the defense team to the extent that she can be like the acceptable face of the OJ defense. And I do wonder if rather than this being something she totally went rogue on, which I buy because I can understand like not telling

someone that you're going to do something that you definitely shouldn't tell them that you're going to do because you fear their immediate reaction more than you fear the later consequences of doing that. That's a thing people do. I've done that. I do that weekly. Me too. But it also makes sense to me that potentially there were some defense team conversations that were like, listen, it's going to look good for your boyfriend if you can get on TV and talk to a nice lady like Diane Sawyer and show how you, a nice lady, feel in your heart that this man is innocent. It's a good weapon for the defense because they have this hot lady who's going to go on TV and say he didn't kill this other woman that he was dating. I believe he's innocent.

And who would know better than me? Exactly. Like that's a very powerful weapon. Yeah. So she at no point implies that this is something the defense team wanted her to do. But you know, there's a quick pivot there. Right. Would you like to see Paula on Primetime Live? Yes. Yay. Oh, clip time. I love it when we watch clips. Remember when we didn't do clips? Oh my god. Remember when we lived in the Blue House? I'm sending you this episode of Primetime Live and we're going to jump to the Paula part. But I think first we should watch the intro just to remind us what 1994 felt like. Oh no. Three, two, one, go. June 23, 1994. Tonight you've heard about OJ and Nicole Simpson, but now someone else comes forward.

He just gave me a big hug and he had tears in his eyes and he, um, he just said, thank you. The woman he said goodbye to in his letter. Paula, what can I say? You are special. I'm sorry. I'm not going to have, we're not going to have our chance. Tonight meet Paula Barbieri. She speaks by phone to Simpson almost daily and was with him the night before his wife was murdered. I think that we look like the epitome of happiness. I'm sure. An exclusive interview. Paula Barbieri comes forward with her story. Did OJ Simpson ever hit you? If I were OJ's lawyer, I'd put her on TV. She looks like an angel. Yeah, she looks gorgeous. Big eyes, big mouth. She looks like Dr. Ellie Sattler. She really does. Same shorts. This is

a weird episode because it's like mostly OJ and then they do a Julia Roberts interview. Like, and this, sorry. A double murder and Julia Roberts. So this is six days after the Bronco chase and just like the news is cascading out. Yeah. Do you want to watch a little bit more? Sure. Okay. Why are you talking now? I know he didn't do it. I know he didn't do it. He's, um, there's no way he did. Um, he would never, if he did it, deny it. Barbieri is circumspect when talking about Nicole, but says that people should remember they haven't heard the whole story, even about the alleged abuse. Did OJ Simpson ever hit you? No, he would never raise a hand to me. If he had ever done anything, you knew his weakness, right?

Well, just common sense. This is a football player, somebody with Joe Namath's, you know, the same situation with the knees going on. If you see him walk with his son, he's got a knee problem. If he ever came at me, common sense, I would kick him in the knee. Like all America, she watched as Simpson and his best friend, Al Callings, drove the highways. Simpson with a gun to his head. When you were watching the chase, did you sense that he'd make it? When I heard from the detective that he said he wanted to talk to his mom, that's it. He's going to be okay. Really? Why? Because the one thing that he just puts up on a pedestal is his mother, and there is no way once he gets on the telephone with her, or gets to see her face that he could

do that. How's she doing? Like, imagine that your John Q driveway, June 23rd, 1994, like, how is this landing for you? I'm familiar with John's work. We've discussed it many times. We have, yeah. We just watched the whole clip. We're not going to play the whole thing because it's like 15 minutes long, but it's basically a series of softball questions about how they met and what their last night at this black tie event was like. It's just a lot of easy questions that are just teed up to let her talk about what a great guy he is, and that's basically what she does. She just over and over again talks about how we were so happy, and Nicole was trying to get back together with him so we couldn't be together romantically. I think she's doing quite well.

She's making the emotional case for OJ. She's not exactly talking about why her blood was in his car, et cetera, but it's just like he's not the kind of person who would do this, which is hilarious because he absolutely is the kind of person who would do this. Yeah, and so Paula is seeing him sending her away as thinking first of her and protecting her because it would suck if she had to just be like, he's doing that because he doesn't want the media to see me, and because he thinks that would look bad for him right now. She thinks he's the last 10 minutes of Harry and the Henderson's. He's actually the last 10 minutes of the graduate. This to me is like one of the most interesting areas in Paula's book. I listen to that and I'm like, I believe that you believe

that. That's the part that I find most distressing, I guess. It's just like, I don't think she's lying. I think that she's getting up there and speaking to the version of him that she has created through a combination of plausible deniability, his good days, and the way she has to see her world to feel sane within it. Yes. It wasn't until watching it with you this time that I realized just how easy they're going on her, and it also feels like Diane Sawyer is trying to express a little bit of dubiousness, but not verbally. It's weird. That's why she's a pro. It's also weird when they keep asking, did he ever hit you or whatever when we know from the intro to this episode that they have the tape of the 9-1-1 call that Nicole made to the police. It's weird to be

grilling Paula about, did he ever hit you when it's not actually all that relevant if he ever hit her. We know that he was hitting Nicole. It's weird because the thing about the 9-1-1 call that they are talking about in this episode, there's two 9-1-1 calls of Nicole. There's two tapes. There's the one from New Year's Eve where she calls and the operator doesn't even hear human voice. They just hear her screaming and they send the police. That's the time Mark Ferman comes to OJ's house. Then there's the call that she makes from Gretna Green where you can hear OJ in the background breaking down the door and threatening her. The way that people are able to rationalize that later on is like, well, he's yelling at her, but it is about her giving a

blowjob to some guy which he knows about because he was spying on her at that time and staring in her window. Yeah, fucking hell. But people are able to be like, yeah, there's yelling and everything, but that's not proof positive that he was hitting her or that he would kill her. That's people yell, whatever. Paula does come off as a very good representative of the defense. She comes off extremely earnest, but the problem is she's being manipulated by OJ to be that earnest. It's sort of stacking the deck to have somebody like this representing the defense team and then also not asking her any tough questions about what does explain all the evidence. They never really press her on anything. Part of that is probably because she is clueless and I don't

know what even she would say in response to that stuff. Right. Maybe they did ask her and she was like, I'm in Tennessee. I don't know. Yeah. She does appear to be intentionally keeping herself ignorant about the evidence as it is coming out. The problem is all of that is very understandable, but then as a viewer, you come away from this with the impression of, well, there's this nice, hot lady with full lips and a symmetrical face who says this guy's really nice and he's being falsely accused of a crime and she seems pretty trustworthy. Yeah. Because she's never really pressed, she never really stumbles over any of these softball questions, you're just like, well, yeah, I don't see what the problem is. He seems like a nice guy. Right. I feel like it's also

interesting that this is at a time when ABC News is presenting in their week after the murders, week after the Bronco Chase coverage of OJ Simpson. They are, as their lead story for the night, putting together this interview that it's not making actively the case that OJ is innocent, but it's just without comment presenting the testimony of someone who loves him and who wants to believe that he's innocent. That is meaningful to where things were at the beginning, that people really wanted him to be innocent. I think that we've talked in previous episodes about just the love that America felt for OJ Simpson at the time and just, I feel like a lot of people were in Paula Barbieri's place. Something I've also really wondered about a lot recently

is how do you continue to love someone who is obviously never going to love you back because they can't? Why does that seem to get people addicted because of its very futility? It seems like people keep going back to the impossible person who can never return their loyalty or their love, not despite that, but because it's like that. What do you think the explanation is? Well, I mean, one thought that I have is that love is very scary. Experiencing intimacy with someone and feeling seen and being truly known is like fucking terrifying. Then there's also the thing of people only know to ask for something that they know to exist. If you just had bad relationships your whole life, then how do you believe that you could possibly ask for a good one?

Or imagine yourself worthy of one. Maybe we are partly drawn to people who can't love us back because we secretly feel that if someone really loved us, then they would see us as we are and then seeing us that intimately would make them decide not to love us anymore and they would leave. It's better to just be a tool for a narcissist than someone who's fully appreciated as a human. I don't think people have these thoughts consciously, but have I had them unconsciously? Yes. I've only ever made good romantic decisions, so I have no idea what you're talking about. It's also interesting the way that different people react to this quote-unquote threat of intimacy. It's actually something that comes up in a lot of the literature on domestic

violence that one of the reasons why people can be so charming and generous to people outside of the relationship and so abusive to somebody within the relationship is precisely that there's only one person who knows them this well and people can perceive that as a unique threat. It's just interesting how this perceived threat of somebody actually knowing you can tie you to that relationship, but it can also make you act horrifically within that relationship. Right. Here is what Paula says about the Diane Sawyer interview. While sidestepping Diane's questions about the nature of our relationship, I described OJ as sensitive and spiritual. He wasn't a drinker, I said, and he certainly wasn't a violent person. He never hit me. Has he

ever yelled at you? Diane said. Have you seen the rages? He's never yelled at me like that, I replied. In my mind, he never had. We'd had our share of shouting matches, sure, but I couldn't remember any of them being really scary. I wasn't thinking about our fight in Laguna or OJ's fit in Palm Beach. I had blocked those incidents so far out that they no longer existed. It was a time when I remembered only the good things. It's such a weird asterisk to be like, has he ever shouted at you? I answered no because I didn't remember all the times that he had shouted at me. It's not normal to have a lot of shouting in a relationship. That's a bad sign. Unless you're married to Bernie Sanders, then it's fine. I do think that you can be in

a relationship where you haven't metabolized how bad things are until you're out of it because you can't. You have to kind of peacemake so relentlessly that you can't remind yourself of just like, I get yelled at a lot, honestly, and I don't like it. But also, I do feel like she's in a middle ground between being in that place of genuine emotional denial about the substance of their relationship, partly because she has already broken up with him and now is diving back into the wreck because he's been arrested. She has admitted to herself that she's done and still is going back in. So I feel like it's a combination of her genuinely believing that and then also that being very valuable for the defense. She's the perfect press foil for this defense right now. Paul writes,

I worried that O.K. would be angry when I told him about the interview, but he was surprisingly philosophical. Well, it's done now, isn't it? A few days later, as he heard good reviews from his friends, he passed on their compliments. He was proud of me and that felt so good. I wanted to do more. I wanted to shout out my faith and O.K. to the whole world. If people could know him as I did, I thought he'd be out of jail tomorrow. So June 23rd, Crime Time Live airs, June 27th, we have the infamous Time Magazine cover. Do you know about this cover? Oh, isn't this the one where they artificially darkened his skin? Yeah. Let's pull it up here. Oh, yeah, it's bad. They're using the image of the mugshot,

which every press outlet has, and so people are trying to make their thing look different somehow. And it's just subtle for having the same picture as everyone else, but you'll get new pictures next week. Yeah, this is the Time Magazine cover next to a Newsweek cover, and the Time Magazine one is way darker. It also helps that they both come out at the same time, so you're just looking at what magazine to buy and you're like, huh, one of these pictures depicts the O.J. Simpson I remember. Yeah. And one of them does not. Although interestingly, the Newsweek cover doesn't darken O.J.'s skin, but the headline is Trail of Blood, which kind of makes him seem guilty. Whereas the Time cover, where his skin is darkened,

the headline is An American Tragedy, which kind of doesn't make him seem guilty. Can you talk about what this contrast has done to just our perception of his face? It's very weird. We can't see the corners of his lips. It's like his jawline sort of disappears into his neck because it's so dark. I mean, you can see his cheeks, the top of his cheeks, the middle of his forehead, and his eyes. Yeah, it's like Morticia Adams. You can only see that little window of his face. Yeah. So the argument, of course, is that he has become America's generic fear, the black criminal, and that's the ethos that Time is trying to go for, and the artist who made it says,

no and no and not at all. I guess what the statement we have is much like a stage director would lower the lights on a somber scene. I use my long, established style to give the image a dramatic tone. And I guess what I would like to say about that is that I think it looks bad, and there's obviously racist implications in this image that either Time knew about it, or perhaps more likely, given who worked there, they just didn't pick up on it. And that's the fault of their hiring practices. But also, I think it's just weird to think about lighting dramatically someone who is inside of a murder case. And it's a mugshot. No one's going to look at it and think that it's whimsical,

clown music playing in the background. It's plenty somber. Plenty somber. And here's what Paula says about this cover. When I first saw OJ's darkened mugshot on the cover, it didn't strike me as sinister. I found it heartbreaking instead, what terrible shape he must be in, I thought. If people focused on the color of OJ's skin, some might see darkness or shadows or mystery, but I looked at OJ's eyes, and they were very telling. They told me that this person was shattered, maybe beyond repair. When OJ found out that the cover had been enhanced by computer, he was irate. He thought he was being railroaded, not only by Marcia Clark,

but now by the press. And so Paula, you know, she stays at the Whitehurst. She kind of remains as distant from all this as she can be, but she isn't really eating. And she's having a hard time leaving the house because if she leaves the house, she might miss a call from OJ. And if she misses a call from OJ, she might not be able to, like, keep sustaining him emotionally. Bad. Get a pager, Paula. Oh. And so finally, she and Terry and Debbie go on a trip to the mall. And so she's trying on a floppy hat, and she hears someone say, that's Paul Barbieri. That's OJ Simpson's girlfriend. And then this is my favorite anecdote. Another time we went to

a supermarket in a little bitty town, the kind of place where you figured nobody watched Ted Coppel. We started grabbing pies and gallons of ice cream, all these great things that I normally loved, but now can bring myself to eat. As we piled our baskets high, our butts hanging out of the freezer compartment, I got the weirdest sensation. I stood up and turned around. And everyone in the store was staring back in total silence. After that, I mostly stayed in. Isn't it just a weird mental image? Like, can you picture that? Like, you're going into the freezer and you're like rummaging around and you want to find chunky monkey. And then you realize that it's like weirdly quiet and you turn and you realize that just the other shoppers are staring at you. It's

like a nightmare. I just assume that this is what it's like for hot people constantly. They're just like, there's a record scratch as soon as you walk into any room and everybody drops what they're doing. But then she's registering that this is more than normal getting stared at. So it must be a lot of staring. Yeah. So, okay. But finally, Paula leaves Tennessee to go to her mom's house. This is when she tells us that she is concerned for her own life still. Okay. And she says, my mother and I lived in terror. What if the murders in Brentwood had been drug related? What if I were the next target? I had the house alarmed and perimeter floodlights installed. I mean, it makes sense if she doesn't think OJ did it, somebody did it. And it's probably the

Colombian cartel lords or whatever. That's what Alan Dershowitz thinks. So, I mean, he's right about everything. Yeah. So, she's back in the house in Bay Point that she bought for her mom with her modeling money and the terror of this murder that her friend has. Based on even the evidence that we have at this point, very likely committed, that is driving them closer together. And OJ calls and when he's having a hard day, Paula's mom reads to him from the Bible. Oh, man. She writes, I couldn't explain what was happening inside me, not to myself, much less to mom. All I knew was what I heard on the phone each day, a man so distraught that he sounded like a wounded animal. Our old problems belonged to a life I could barely remember. When you love

someone who gets into a terrible car crash or comes down with a grave disease, you don't think about the person's faults. You don't dwell on what may have driven you apart. You're reminded instead of why you loved each other and what a hole would be left in your heart if the person was gone. I had to keep talking, talking, talking to him. When I heard how desperate he sounded, there just wasn't a choice. No other friend could support him the way I could. The weird thing is, she's being nostalgic for a relationship that never existed. They were never in like a particularly functional relationship. It sounds like it was always kind of off and on. It was always a little awkward. He was always sort of one foot with Nicole and wasn't really

committing to Paula in the first place. It's weird that she's now constructing like, oh, we can go back to the good times when it's not even clear that the good times were all that good. Well, these actually are the good times in a way because he's in jail. He can't cheat on her. This is the only time when he can't cheat on her. Yeah. And he needs her. She's his only option right now. Yeah. Well, and also he can't be ambivalent between her and Nicole because he killed Nicole. So Paula is the final girl. Yes. So in the midst of all this, eating spaghetti and crabs with her mom back in Florida and reading the Bible to O.K. Simpson, Paula's 10th high school anniversary happens. So does she go? She goes. She basically says that

she goes and then realizing that all these kids that she grew up with that she thought of as being from the normal families while she was from the family with the scary dad and the scary stepdad and everything else. Like other people have had a hard time of it too. She has classmates who have died. She has, you know, tragedy making the rounds. And she says, how I'd envy those normal Bay Point families. I'd assume they were immune to the violence I grew up with in St. Andrews. Now I saw they were more like us than I knew. Well, I didn't take pleasure in other people's pain. It was a relief to be able to think, pour them, pour them instead of pour me, pour me. Why can't we do this at the time? This is like everybody's experience

of reconnecting with people after high school or after these very distinct periods of your life where you're like, oh, everyone else was super fucked up too. But for whatever reason, we couldn't talk about it. It's such a bummer. I do remember having a philosophy class senior year, like spring semester of senior year that was kind of like this where I think because everyone was leaving, there was a sense of being able to kind of open up and be honest about our experiences of having been in high school together. And that was the moment when I personally was like, oh, these kids who I thought of as having an easy time because they weren't me, we're having a hard time. And I just didn't notice that because I was very busy with my own hard time. And I just like, yeah,

it does something to you. Yeah, I've reconnected with some people from my high school who were way more popular than me and were like totally had their shit together. And then of course, they start telling me all the shit they were actually going through in high school. And it always takes a second for it to sink in. You had problems? You had challenges in your life? I've been projecting this perfection onto you for years for really no reason. That's all my own shit. I love how we just have these Pala episodes and we just clearly both are Pala and it's just like us just loving on Pala this whole time. So we talked in a previous episode about how Pala found Jesus when she was a kid. And she goes back to her pastor from her youth in Florida,

Jack Reese, and goes in to talk to him about spirituality and talk about the Bible. And she says, typically, I began that first meeting by asking for help for OJ rather than for myself. Was there anything in the Bible about persecution, some scripture to help a man unjustly accused? I had to believe that OJ was being persecuted, that the DA's office was out to get him for their own malicious reasons. I saw OJ as a martyr because a martyr was innocent by definition. I was going to say, like, shouldn't he be reading her some Bible passages about the pitfalls of abusive relationships? But the Bible is actually not great on that stuff. Right, I was going to say, is there stuff in the Bible about that?

I know. Can he read to her from like the feminine mystique instead? Are they allowed to do that? Well, this is good. She says, Jack was wonderful. While giving me the verses I asked for, he steered clear of any talk of OJ. As Jack pointed out, the only person you have control over is yourself. And lots of times you don't even have that. We focused that day on respecting God's boundaries, or what Jack called staying inside the fence. He referred me to Deuteronomy, our Heavenly Father wasn't oppressive or abusive, Jack explained. He set boundaries, not to inhibit or restrict us, but to protect us. I love this idea that, like, you just totally

circumvent, you don't even bother being like, what do you like to have boundaries, Paula? It's just like, you know, God has boundaries. Is this chapter called Deuteronomy? Where's my car? Sorry. So, okay, she's in Florida with her mom. You know, she's still talking to OJ. She's having these moments of clarity, it seems at times, but like, it just all comes back to OJ. Eventually, OJ is like, when are you going to come back to LA? And he's going to put her on the list of material witnesses, which is going to mean that she can visit him much more frequently. And, you know, she delays and delays and feels guiltier and guiltier. And in mid-August, she tells him that she's going to come soon. And she says,

I was excited too. It wasn't just guilt and responsibility that were driving me to LA. I missed that man. I'd grown accustomed to his face. When I finally reserved my flight to Los Angeles, I booked my ticket under an assumed name, D.H. Lawrence, the author of Sons and Lovers, an old favorite of mine. Everything went smoothly out of Panama City. But when I watched my connecting flight in Atlanta, I felt creepily on display as if I were in a glass jar for public inspection. As I handed my ticket and driver's license to the Delta counterperson, I said softly, you understand? The woman smiled and said, oh yeah, I understand. I didn't realize it at the time, but I wasn't just losing frequent flyer miles with my fake name. The instant I boarded that plane

to Los Angeles, I lost my identity. Yes, I mean, it seems like she should have used the distance as an excuse to sort of let this fade away. It's like kids that study abroad. Right. How often does your ex get put in jail? I know. A place where they literally can't bother you? I know. Paula, don't get on the plane. She got on that plane, man. And yeah, this is where I want to end for now, is with Paula on the plane heading back to LA, going back to standby her man. And after a summer's worth of legal maneuvering and investigation and a growing mountain of damning evidence against the defendant, and we're going to jump into other people's perspectives in the new year and keep going

with the story. But yeah, for now, I just want to be sitting on this plane with Paula, looking out the window, watching LA get closer and closer, and trying to figure out like, what am I feeling? Like, what is this love that I'm feeling for this person? Like, do they value me? They have to, right? Did he kill anyone? Yeah. He can't have, right? And do they have chunky monkey in LA that I can go get at the store? And can I at least get ice cream without people staring at my butt? you