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OJ Simpson, the trial that stopped AmericaThe news broke mid-morning and for a few hours America went back to 1995, with the websites of all the major newspapers once again posting front pages from thirty years ago. Under those headlines stood photographs of OJ, sitting in the Los Angeles courthouse where from an American sports superstar he would become a global celebrity. Yesterday Orenthal James Simpson, who died of cancer at the age of 76, returned to the honors of the fame that had come to him not so much from his exploits as a football champion but from a murky legal affair. It was June 17, 1994, the day of the inauguration of the World Cup that opened in Chicago, but an America that was already paying little attention to the unknown tournament was about to be distracted by another event with sporting implications. That afternoon the televisions, one by one, turned on live coverage of a singular event in Los Angeles. OJ Simpson, American football hero, instead of turning himself in at the police station where he was expected on charges of double murder, had gotten into his white Ford Bronco and for an hour had been leading an army of LAPD police cars in a surreal chase on the freeways of LA .
SOON FROM THERE we foreign correspondents, together with seemingly every living journalist in America, would find ourselves following and trying to explain an inexplicable story. Not so much the crime novel at the center of the sordid news episode, but the psycho-media corollary that developed all around until it enveloped the nation in an unprecedented whirlwind. At the center of the vortex, what had seemed a fairly clear case of guilty feminicide took on political-sexual implications and inevitably a racial dimension in the city still traumatized by the African-American riots of two years earlier.
A media village was formed outside the court, made up of caravans, satellite vehicles, semi-permanent stations for correspondents and forests of cameras. There were also cameras inside the courtroom where, for the first time, a trial was broadcast live, changing the working habits of a country tuned in day and night and creating new professional figures such as legal commentators for all channels. -news.
Ten years before Michael Jackson and Amanda Knox – the case inaugurated judicial postmodernity with a vanity fair that uncovered the ocean of emptiness and narcissism underlying the worldly and political-judicial elites that are inextricably superimposed in Hollywood. “Trial of the century” is an inflated label, but the melodrama OJ, accused of the bloody murder of his wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, eclipsed all precedents, becoming the subject of journalism, gossip, documentaries and fiction – especially memorable The People vs. OJ SimpsonRyan Murphy’s retelling for HBO in 2016.
IT WOULD HAVE declared Cuba Gooding Jr. who played him in that drama: «After all, we have the OJ case to thank if we know the Kardashian clan today. (daughters of one of Simpson’s lawyers, ed.) It was the moment in which celebrity definitively fell from his pedestal and fell among us all.”
The irresistible charm of the story was linked to the dizzying fall of the protagonist from the heroic pedestal on which he had been elevated by sport and the commercial system that surrounds it. He had made the singular young athlete, legendary NFL champion, an unattainable symbol of success and integration. The phrase “I’m not black, I’m OJ” is still attributed to OJ as if, rather than from racial discrimination, he had been emancipated from his own race.Among the testimonies of the trial that most contributed to the acquittal verdict was that of officer Mark Fuhrman, who revealed himself to be a supremacist and racist.
AN EMANCIPATION hairpiece which included the beautiful (and white) soap opera wife, the career as a testimonial and minor film star (the Naked Gun series), the Brentwood villa, a neighborhood of stars and celebrities. When the trial tears away the illusion, with Simpson’s reputation, the self-absolution device linked to his sanctification will also decay. And with the public judgment of an almost universally accepted guilt, all the uncomfortable truths kept silent by the heroic representation will come back to light.
Among the testimonies of the trial that most contributed to the acquittal verdict was that of officer Mark Fuhrman, who revealed himself to be a supremacist and racist. The decision was therefore inevitably acclaimed by an African-American community that in LA had just experienced the ignominious humiliation of yet another exoneration of Rodney King’s tormentor policemen and a revolt suffocated in blood. “When we learned of your acquittal,” Al Sharpton would say years later, at the funeral of Johnnie Cochran, OJ’s main lawyer. «With all due respect brother Simpson, we didn’t clap for you, but Johnnie. Because for decades our brothers, fathers and cousins had had to face white justice alone but now we finally had someone capable of facing any jury with us. And win.” In the neighborhoods of the continuous harassment of the LAPD against the Afro-American community, the verdict could therefore only be welcomed as partial compensation for the historical and congenital racism of the infamous city police, even if no one was able to completely get rid of a bitter aftertaste: of all the heroes, militants or simple innocent citizens persecuted, beaten and killed – the only one who had beaten the system was OJ, who more than anyone was part of it.
Less sensational was the second trial, a civil one, in which he was found liable for millions of dollars in compensatory damages to the victims’ family. In 2007, however, he was arrested in Las Vegas for an affair involving sports “memorabilia” which he claimed had been stolen from him and which he recovered from a souvenir merchant with the help of a gun. That affair resulted in a conviction and almost ten years served in prison. Demonstration of continued persecution by supporters – and partial redemption for the largest group – of those who have always considered his case a striking example of judicial error.
