The tears shed on the witness stand by battling Denise Brown won her a shock reprieve from former brother-in-law O.J. Simpson's hard-hitting defense team.
Denise was so visibly upset that the Juice's lawyers took a kid-gloves approach to cross examining tragic Nicole Brown Simpson's older sister.
With millions of TV viewers glued to their sets, O.J. attorney Robert Shapiro gently quizzed Denise without trying to 'assassinate' her character as the Brown family had feared.
"It was a lucky break for Denise," says one of Nicole's closest friends. "But we're still afraid that O.J. and his dream team haven't finished with her yet. They can always recall Denise to the witness stand..."
But to legal experts, the biggest omission was Shapiro's failure to ask Denise about the astonishing statement she made less than two weeks after her sister's gruesome death.
"She was not a battered woman," Denise said then. "My definition of a battered woman is somebody who gets beat up all the time. I don't want people to think it was like that.
"I know Nicole. She was a very strong-willed person. If she was beaten up, she wouldn't have stayed with O.J. That wasn't her.
Everybody knows about 1989 (O.J.'s New Year's Day battering of Nicole). Does anybody know about any other time?"
This remark is even more puzzling when it is compared with what Denise disclosed several months later - that on the morning of June 13 1994, when she was awakened by her mother's scream, she yanked the phone out of her distraught mom's hand and yelled to the detective at the other end: "Oh my God, HE killed her, he murdered her."
He, she later confirmed, meant O.J.
Star Magazine
February 21 1995