Even if you didn't think that O.J. was the killer, it is clear that he certainly beat Nicole at least a few times - in fact, in her diaries, which were not admitted as evidence, she recorded sixty-one separate incidents of abuse - and yet somehow that element of their relationship was strangely sacrosanct, it was something no one seemed ready to assess honestly and shamelessly.
The legal aspects of domestic violence - which was referred to in court as "domestic discord," since the word "violence" was deemed prejudicial - created a rallying point for outraged feminists and social workers and women's advocates to gather around and make some noise. It gave Denise Brown a good reason to avoid going to court. But none of the spousal abuse experts making their points on CNN or Geraldo Live had anything enlightening to say.
Even though we all knew that there must have been some kind of strange dynamic going on between O.J. and Nicole, some insulated universe that they invented and they alone understood, some kind of closet system that they had entered long ago, none of the pundits wanted to touch it, to speculate on it. The fact that the crime of domestic wife-beating had so long been overlooked - meant that nuanced thinking about these relationships had to be suppressed.
Meanwhile, as fired up as many people were getting about battered woman's syndrome out here in the real world, inside the courtroom none of this was getting through. One juror, interviewed after the verdict, even declared all the spousal abuse evidence "a waste of time", and left it at that. While this reaction was disingenuous and indicative of the jury's overall stupidity, it was also an understandably impatient response to a monolithic, simplistic view of what it means when a man throws his fist at a woman.
Because it means many things, just as both the words "yes" and "no" mean many things, and the human condition has always been and will forever be made more complicated, exciting, fun and difficult by the misunderstandings that dog us day after day, if not hour after hour or minute by minute. And this will always be the problem when the law gets mixed up with human affairs, particularly crimes of passion or mistakes of the heart: the legal system imposes a straightforward, Manichaean set of absolutes on crooked, twisted, multimotivated human behavior.
In criminal court, one can never be sort-of guilty or kind-of innocent.
While the O.J. trial brought domestic violence into the open, it may well have pushed the subtleties of personality - the simple idea that you can act as a person and not as a "syndrome" - dangerously out of view. Any curiosity about what made Nicole stay seventeen years in a relationship that was apparently violent from the start, what strange deal she'd made with the devil long ago - all that was discounted.
There was never any suggestion that by documenting the abuse and leaving pictures of her injured self in her safe-deposit box - which the prosecution had to drill open as it searched for evidence - and telling her friends "O.J. is going to kill me and get away with it," Nicole might have indicated not mere resignation to her fate but a strange acceptance of it...
It was never okay to conjecture that she have believed that it was somehow the proper denouement of her star-crossed romantic life to end up stabbed outside her home, throat slit so completely that she was almost decapitated...
There was never any thought that this bloody crime scene was as inevitable to her as William Holden floating in the pool at the beginning and the end of Sunset Boulevard, a great movie about characters who always knew it would come to this, who knew that Oedipus was a fool to fight his destined disgrace: instead of resisting fate, they get drunk with doom. Any suggestion of this kind of complicity on Nicole's part was absolutely verboten.
Somehow it was only okay to say that Nicole suffered and was murdered - never that she may have courted death or at the very least been a passive partner in her own end. That is just a far too sickening thought after years of feminism have tried to show us otherwise.
It does not matter that O.J. killed Nicole after she left, or that when a violent marriage ends in femicide, 75 percent of these murders occur after she has really severed ties: WHAT MATTERS IS THAT SHE STAYED.
Blame it on battered wife syndrome, on her friends, her family, Southern California in general or Brentwood in particular: it doesn't matter. There are women who walk out on a man who punches them, and there are women who stay: that's the main difference between people who get killed and people who don't. Seventeen years later it's too late....
I bet she left a safe-deposit box with pictures of her bruised face in it and the diary with its record of sixty-one instances of abuse, and I bet she told her friends over and over again, "O.J.'s going to kill me," not because she was afraid it was so or that she was even trying to prevent it - I think she said it because she knew it were so. She was forecasting the weather, knowing full well that there's nothing you can do to stop a hurricane...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Bitch In Praise of Difficult Women
(London: Quartet Books 1998)
Blame it on battered wife syndrome, on her friends, her family, Southern California in general or Brentwood in particular: it doesn't matter. There are women who walk out on a man who punches them, and there are women who stay: that's the main difference between people who get killed and people who don't. Seventeen years later it's too late....
I bet she left a safe-deposit box with pictures of her bruised face in it and the diary with its record of sixty-one instances of abuse, and I bet she told her friends over and over again, "O.J.'s going to kill me," not because she was afraid it was so or that she was even trying to prevent it - I think she said it because she knew it were so. She was forecasting the weather, knowing full well that there's nothing you can do to stop a hurricane...
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Bitch In Praise of Difficult Women
(London: Quartet Books 1998)