OJ Simpson is dead, and Nicole Brown should still be alive. Simpson, the longtime batterer and stalker of Nicole Brown Simpson, and the man who all but confessed to her gruesome stabbing murder in June of 1994, died on Wednesday of cancer. He passed at his home in Las Vegas, “surrounded by his children and grandchildren”, according to a statement issued by his family. He was 76.
Simpson died in bed, receiving medical care to make him comfortable, at the end of his natural life. He had reached old age; we can infer that when he took his last breaths, he was surrounded by well wishes and love. His was a very different death from the one he allegedly inflicted on his former wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman. They did not die in bed; they probably died screaming. And for Nicole, at least, her death was the culmination of a years-long campaign of terrorism that OJ had waged against her since they met; it was the moment their whole relationship had been leading to.
Five days before she was murdered, Nicole called a domestic violence shelter to ask what it would take for her to disappear to someplace where OJ couldn’t find her. By then, she had long been keeping evidence of his abuse, including photographs of her injuries and letters from him confessing to beating her, in a safe-deposit box at a bank.
The marriage had been violent from the start, including regular beatings by OJ, screaming scenes, at least one incident in which he locked Nicole in their wine cellar for hours, and another in which he took a sledgehammer to her car. It was the kind of abusive marriage that makes people ask: “Why didn’t she leave?” In fact, she did. At the time she was killed, Nicole was living on her own at her home in Los Angeles; she had divorced OJ more than two years prior.
But leaving the marriage had not ended OJ’s abuse. He continued to stalk her, extending the control and violence he had inflicted during their marriage and making it clear that she would never be able to live beyond them. “I’m scared,” Nicole told her mother months before she was killed. “I go to the gas station, he’s there. I go to the Payless shoe store, and he’s there. I’m driving, and he’s behind me.”
Domestic violence situations often get euphemized as “relationship conflicts”, or “tempestuous”, “intense” love affairs. What they really are are horror movies, arrangements in which one person, usually a woman, finds her life narrowed, her actions surveilled, her freedoms constrained and her body abused, violated and hurt. But perhaps the greatest terror of domestic abuse is how the world conspires to look away.
Cops were called to the Simpson’s house no fewer than nine times; it is likely that Nicole endured many more beatings than that without ever calling the police. But the officers were deferential to OJ, accepting his version of events. They were more impressed by his status as a celebrity former athlete than interested in what he was doing to his wife. Nicole’s friends reportedly often encouraged her to get back together with OJ. Her parents liked him, too, and apparently regretted the divorce, even though they were aware that Simpson was beating their daughter. (He had set Nicole’s father up with a Hertz dealership.)
In the weeks before her death, she told many people that she was afraid that OJ would kill her and get away with it. But these words of Nicole’s were not admitted as evidence at OJ’s subsequent criminal trial. The judge, Lance Ito, deemed them “hearsay”, noting that Nicole could not be cross-examined by OJ’s lawyers, because she was dead. OJ was acquitted of the murders in 1995.
In the years that followed his acquittal, OJ did little to counter the dramatic evidence that was presented against him at trial. At times, in his subsequent public appearances, he seemed to be winkingly alluding to having gotten away with murder. In 2006, he announced a book, If I Did It, that purported to tell the truth of the murders, flimsily framed as a hypothetical. Fox agreed to a televised interview with Simpson about the murders. But the project was scrapped after Ron Goldman’s surviving family filed a lawsuit.
Soon after, in 2007, Simpson was caught robbing a Las Vegas hotel room in a heist to steal sports memorabilia. He never served a day in prison for the murder of Nicole. But for that property crime, he served almost nine years.
Nicole Brown had just turned 18, and was working as a waitress in Los Angeles, when she met the man whose violence would define the rest of her short life. She reportedly did not know at the time that the man who was courting her was a famous NFL star. She stopped working and moved into an apartment that OJ paid for almost immediately; the violence started almost immediately, too. One of the first times OJ hit her, he apologized by buying her a Porsche. After another time, he asked her to marry him. She said yes.
Abuse is like this: its contradictions and reversals, the batterer’s promises that he will change matched only by the victim’s desperate, delusional wish to believe him. But domestic violence is like cancer: without intervention, it will march inevitably towards death. Nicole begged for help: from police, from her friends, from family and ultimately from a domestic violence shelter. No one was able to help her, because no one was willing to stand between her and OJ. No one was willing to act like her life was more important than his celebrity.
Nicole died just a few weeks past her 35th birthday. When her body was found, she had been stabbed seven times in the neck and head, and had sustained a six-inch gash across her neck that nearly decapitated her. A coroner found that she also had defensive wounds on her hands. No one had been willing to defend her while she was alive; she died trying to defend herself.
About half of her life was lived under OJ’s control. If we had had more compassion and courage – if we had been willing to see domestic violence for the threat to women’s lives that it is – how much longer might her life have been?
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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