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Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
*O.J. Simpson was described as semi-literate and can barely write a sentence. Toobin says O.J.'s main job at USC was to play football, and he didn't get an education while he was there. This was in the 1960s, before the NCAA cracked down on college athletes and their schooling.
*O.J.'s "dream team" of defense attorneys all seemed to despise each other and often bickered. After the trial, some attorneys vowed never to speak to each other again.
*Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran had a longtime mistress and basically kept up two households for about a decade, until his real wife got tired of his antics and left him.
*Nicole Brown was financially dependent on O.J. and seemed to have no real skills other than modeling. (Toobin reported that all of the Brown sisters had breast implants, but no college degrees.) Nicole had only worked a few weeks -- as a waitress and as a shop girl -- when O.J. met her. I also didn't know how much domestic violence Nicole had suffered in her relationship with O.J. And when Nicole tried to get help, she found that she couldn't rely on Los Angeles police, because they would always defer to O.J.'s celebrity. It's telling that just a few days before Nicole was murdered, when she was concerned O.J. was stalking her and was going to harm her, she called a women's shelter for help, rather than the police. Even though O.J. and Nicole had separated at that point, O.J. was still trying to control her life and her finances.
*Look, there's no doubt that police detective Mark Furhman said some horrible racist shit years ago, but there's no way he planted evidence at O.J.'s house. It's absurd.
*Oy vey, the race issue. The O.J. case fed into the whole history of racial injustice in America, and specifically it became a referendum on the LAPD. What a mess.
*I listened to Toobin's original book on audio, but I also checked out an updated edition of the paperback, which had an afterword on the civil trial that Goldman's family filed against O.J. It was interesting to learn how arrogant he was during the civil trial, even when more evidence was found against him. This time, the jury found him guilty and he was ordered to pay millions in damages. By then his celebrity status had been lowered to one of social pariah, and O.J. couldn't afford (or refused) to pay. In a bizarre twist to this tragic tale, O.J. is currently in prison for an unrelated burglary incident in 2007.