Simpson Defends Self on Questions About Character

On a day simmering with questions about sex, violence and betrayal, O.J. Simpson forcefully defended himself Monday, telling jurors in his civil trial that he is innocent and has nothing to hide.

Yet, though he told his story with calm confidence, Simpson found himself on the defensive toward the end of his testimony, when an opposing attorney confronted him with 30 recently discovered photos purporting to show him wearing Bruno Magli shoes--the same rare, expensive brand that tracked size-12 bloody footprints near his ex-wife’s body. After flipping through the snapshots, Simpson insisted they were not accurate.

“I did not wear those shoes,” he said firmly.

Asked if he has any idea why they appear on his feet in the photos, he said simply: “No.”

That testimony came at the end of a day that unfolded like a soap opera and ultimately boiled down to a referendum on Simpson’s credibility.

His lead defense lawyer sought, through gentle questioning, to portray Simpson as a decent man who offered to hire top-notch investigators and do anything else in his power to help police find the killer who butchered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman on June 12, 1994. The plaintiffs, however, served up a different picture, of Simpson as a brazen liar who cheated on his wife, beat her fiercely and ultimately slashed her throat in a frenzy of jealous rage.

The jurors who will decide which version rings more true could begin deliberating as early as next week. The defense plans to rest its case this morning, after calling Simpson’s oldest daughter, Arnelle. The plaintiffs will then put on a two- or three-day rebuttal case. First up for them: the freelance photographer who said he took 30 photos of Simpson in Bruno Magli shoes at a football game in Buffalo, N.Y., about nine months before the murders.

Simpson was acquitted of criminal charges in 1995, but the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson and the relatives of Ronald Goldman are now suing him in civil court in Santa Monica. Jurors will be called upon to decide whether he was responsible for the murders--and if so, how much he should pay the victims’ relatives in damages.

As he has before, Simpson turned to the jurors on Monday and swore under oath that he had nothing to do with the slayings.

“On June 12, 1994, did you, with your children in the house up in their beds sleeping, murder your wife, your ex-wife, and leave her body where your kids could find it?” defense attorney Robert C. Baker asked.

“No,” Simpson said. “Absolutely not.”

That was the last question Simpson faced on the witness stand Monday, concluding four hours of testimony. He is unlikely to return to the stand in the civil trial. Analysts who watched his testimony Friday and Monday praised him for a formidable performance: emotional but not overwrought, forceful but not intimidating.

“Simpson has been in control,” Loyola Law School Professor Victor Gold said. “He’s the one getting his story out.”

An Emotional Witness

His story, at least as the defense shaped it, had nothing to do with the physical evidence implicating him in the murders. He was not asked to explain his blood at the crime scene, the victims’ blood in his Ford Bronco, or the bloody glove at his estate. Nor did he review his alibi in any detail.

Instead, he described how eager he was to help the police track down the culprit, telling jurors that he willingly talked to detectives without his lawyer present, then let them search his luggage and take his blood to assist their investigation. “I was innocent,” he explained. “I’d do whatever I could to help them. . . . I wanted whoever did this to get caught.”

Simpson choked up, swallowing back tears, when he described his concern that his children might have glimpsed the gory crime scene. He grew emotional as well when he talked about his thoughts the week after the murders: his shock, his pain, his suicidal urge. Those feelings crested as police were about to arrest him on June 17, he testified.

“I just turned to [best friend Al Cowlings] and asked him to take me to Nicole’s grave,” Simpson said. “I was feeling a lot of pain and I just wanted it to end. I guess I was feeling suicidal.”

On the verge of shooting himself, Simpson said, he pulled back and directed Cowlings to take him to his mother, in what became the infamous Bronco chase. “My mother told me years ago that you couldn’t go to heaven if you committed suicide,” Simpson said, explaining his change of heart.

Sighing repeatedly, Simpson sounded weary and pained as Baker gently took him through the week before and the week after the slayings. But he adopted a more feisty tone when lead plaintiffs attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli stepped up to cross-examine him and started hurling accusations his way.

Petrocelli began with an assault on Simpson’s testimony last Friday that he had never attempted to lie about any important matter in his life.

“When you were married to Nicole, you were repeatedly unfaithful to her, were you not?” Petrocelli demanded.

“From time to time, yes,” Simpson answered.

“That was dishonest on your part, was it not?” Petrocelli continued.

“I think morally it was dishonest of me, yes,” Simpson responded. “But I don’t know if I could characterize it as a lie.”

“You don’t think it’s a lie to cheat on your wife, the mother of your two children?” Petrocelli asked, his voice indignant.

“That’s not the word I would use for it, no,” Simpson responded.

From there, Petrocelli’s cross-examination danced across several topics, but always came back to probing the volatile relationship between O.J. and Nicole Simpson.

Like the prosecution in the criminal trial, the plaintiffs argue that Simpson was obsessed with Nicole, that he needed to control her and possess her. He beat her several times during their relationship, they contend, and killed her when she made clear she would have nothing more to do with him.

Under questioning from his own attorney, however, Simpson has rebutted every witness who accused him of beating Nicole.

He did not knock her headband off with a slap outside a veterinarian’s office in the early 1980s, he testified--in fact, he couldn’t have, he said, because she only wore headbands when she was playing tennis. He didn’t strike her in early July 1985 on Victoria Beach in Laguna, because he was at home in Brentwood preparing to host an annual softball game.

Simpson also undermined the controversial testimony by Nancy Ney, a hotline counselor who said a woman identifying herself as Nicole called the Sojourn House battered women’s shelter in a panic a few days before the slayings, saying her celebrity ex-husband was stalking and threatening her.

Ney testified that the woman caller was not sure whether her ex-husband had any guns. But Simpson told jurors that Nicole Simpson was well aware he kept a gun in his car and had others at home. In fact, in the weeks before her death, she had started badgering him to lock the gun in the trunk whenever their children rode in the car with him, he testified.

Not in a Bad Mood

Simpson also scoffed at the witnesses who described him as morose, withdrawn and brooding the day of the slayings.

Yes, he got in a tiff with a golf buddy that morning, he said, but by the next hole, they had hugged and made up. Yes, his girlfriend was annoyed that he got up so early for golf, but she had been angry at him before without ever breaking up for good. In fact, he was so convinced that they were still an item, he scheduled a double date with a friend for later in the week.

As for his daughter’s dance recital that evening, he said he sat just two seats away from Nicole and joked around with her father, Lou Brown, outside the auditorium.

“Were you in a dark mood?” Baker asked.

“No,” Simpson replied.

After showing a home video of Simpson kissing the Browns and hoisting his son in the air, Baker continued: “Was there any animosity between you and Nicole Brown Simpson?”

Simpson’s answer: “Absolutely none.”

Petrocelli sought to tear down Simpson’s denials on cross-examination, but the Football Hall of Fame running back refused to budge. Instead, he talked back to Petrocelli, telling him at one point: “You’re wrong. You’re totally misstating what I told you.”

Said Gold: “The anger he’s showing fits in with his whole portrayal of the case, that he’s the one who’s been victimized, he’s the one who’s been wrongly accused.”

Petrocelli, in contrast to his first bout with Simpson in November, when he called him as a hostile witness during the plaintiffs case, kept his tone mild and his questions low-key.

“I’m surprised he didn’t go after [Simpson] harder,” Loyola Law Professor Stan Goldman said after watching the brief cross-examination. “Given the pyrotechnics of their first confrontation, I expected something more.”

Petrocelli did not use all the weapons at his disposal in grilling Simpson.

In a hard-fought legal battle outside the jurors’ presence, the plaintiffs won the right to confront Simpson with an explosive letter that Nicole apparently wrote sometime between 1989 and 1992. Yet Petrocelli read only one sentence of it to jurors: Nicole’s assertion that in a major fight on New Year’s Day 1989, “I called the cops to save my life, whether you believe it or not.”

The eight-page letter, which is undated, starts out: “I’d like you to keep this letter if we split so you will always know why we split. I’d also like you to keep it if we stay together, as a reminder.”

From there, Nicole Simpson launches into bitter accusations. She reminds Simpson about an incident when “you beat the holy hell out of me and you lied about it at the X-ray lab and said I fell off a bike.” She also blasts him for “infidelity, wife beating and verbal abuse.”

Simpson contends that Nicole wrote the document at her lawyers’ prompting, fabricating incidents to get the best possible financial deal in their divorce. Professor Goldman speculated that Petrocelli may not have used the most inflammatory portions of the letter because it would give the defense a potent issue on appeal.

Analyzing a Photo

Petrocelli seemed to reserve his sharpest questions for when he dealt with the 30 photos allegedly showing Simpson in Bruno Magli shoes.

“You don’t recall ever wearing any of the shoes in any of these photos?” Petrocelli asked incredulously.

“Correct,” Simpson answered.

Simpson acknowledged that the jacket, shirt and tie he is wearing in the picture look like his. And he said he knew at least three of the five people he is posing with in the photos, which were allegedly taken at a ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of his record-breaking rushing season with the Buffalo Bills.

But he said the baggy gray pants in the photo, which billow around his legs, do not seem to be his.

“I’m normally a very sharp dresser and this is very not like me,” he said. “They don’t look like they fit.”

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Simpson’s Testimony

Here are excerpts from O.J. Simpson’s testimony Monday during questioning by defense attorney Robert C. Baker and cross-examination by plaintiff attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli.

On his flight in Al Cowlings’ Bronco:

“At one point I just turned to him and asked him to take me to Nicole’s grave . . . . I was feeling a lot of pain and I just wanted it to end. . . . I guess I was feeling suicidal. . . . I was missing Nicole. My kids didn’t cry. They had attacked me somewhat, and that hurt me.”

*

On his concerns after hearing of the murders:

“I wanted to know if my kids had been exposed to anything. [The police] said no. They said whatever had happened had taken place in front, and they took the kids out the back so they weren’t exposed to anything.”

*

On offering to hire criminalist Henry Lee and forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who both ended up testifying for the defense, to help the LAPD investigate:

“I wanted whoever did this to get caught. I offered to pay their costs and expenses for them to come out and work with the LAPD. . . . because I understood them to be the best people in the world at this kind of stuff.”

*

On a 1993 argument he had with Nicole about her friends:

“I was talking about Heidi Fleiss and hookers and drug people. ... Some people who were on drugs--are still on drugs--and who were hookers were hanging around the house at that time.”

*

On his attitude toward Nicole the day of the murders:

“On June 12, I didn’t think there was any animosity between me and Nicole. None at all. ... [But] I can’t say everything was hunky dory. My attitude was still some concern about her, and I was trying to avoid her.”

*

On 30 photographs of him wearing shoes that the plaintiffs contend are Bruno Maglis:

“They don’t look like any shoes I’ve ever owned. . . . The pants [in the photo] don’t look right to me [either]. . . . I’m normally a very sharp dresser and this is very not like me--they don’t look like they fit.”