Without a Doubt

by Marcia Clark

At last, the door opened. The courtroom went silent. O. J. Simpson strode in, impeccably dressed, looking surprisingly fit. What an impressive transformation from the bedraggled, confused defendant who had appeared for his arraignment. His new role was the O.J. You Know and Love, Falsely Accused. And no Shakespearean actor would play this one better.

We were well into the criminal trial by the time we were allowed to learn that the envelope did indeed contain a stiletto. The report said that it had been discovered by Jason Simpson in the medicine cabinet of Simpson’s bathroom. Then it had been turned over by Shapiro to a special court master, who gave it to Judge Kennedy-Powell. (Shapiro was unhappy that she introduced it at the prelim—apparently he’d been hoping to blindside us with this evidence during the trial.) The knife’s discovery was supposedly made after our second search of June 28.

never believed the medicine cabinet story. I’d been at Rockingham all through the second search, and the rooms had been taken to pieces by officers looking specifically for that knife. But the question was largely academic. The knife didn’t matter. It is too easy to boil a knife to destroy traces of blood and tissue. It is not difficult to go out and buy a duplicate. No coroner could say with certainty that it was the murder weapon. Knives, unlike guns, do not smoke: they do not leave proof-positive evidentiary calling cards. If I’d really pressed to get it into evidence, however, I’m sure that all I would have gotten was a spanking-clean knife, property of a known collector of weapons. In the end, we let the stiletto rest in its eight-by-eleven manila envelope—where, I believe, it remains today.

Eventually, I imagine, O. J. Simpson will reclaim it and auction it o...

After the knife interlude, we were finally able to begin proving that there was sufficient cause to charge our defendant. We clicked through the civilian witnesses briskly. Shapiro’s cross-examination was uniformly ineffective, so there was little or no clea...

One key witness was Steven Schwab, the dog walker who had first encountered Nicole’s Akita running loose in the neighborhood. We hadn’t been able to get him up before the grand jury, but his testimony was crucial to our time line. If the murders were committed after eleven o’clock, Simpson would be home free: he couldn’t possibly have done the killing and hooked up with the limo driver in time. The problem was that the first time Schwab talked to police, he said that he believed he’d first seen the Akita around 11:15 P.M. This statement was made to the cops at about five on the morning after the murders; Schwab had been aw...

Usually a prior inconsistent statement by a witness is a credibility killer. At best, you’re left doubting the witness’s memory; at worst, his honesty. But Schwab was so sturdily forthright you just knew he’d made an honest mistake. He endeared himself to the spectators in court by recounting the process by which he had verified in his own mind the Akita encounter. He had an unvarying nightly routine, centered on old reruns. A cable network showed his favorites and he always watched the Dick Van Dyke Show, which ended at 10:30. Then...

We’d gathered in the lane at the rear of the condo, when Lieutenant John Rogers noticed blood—drops of blood, on the back gate. What the hell? We stopped dead in our tracks and looked at one another. Could Dennis Fung have overlooked this crucial evidence on the morning of the thirteenth? We stopped everything and called for a criminalist. The realization that we’d probably just stumbled upon another incredible fuckup cast a pall over the party.

Tom led us down the walkway toward the front of the condo. I could still see some of the blood droplets and the faint outlines of the bloody shoe prints, mere ghosts of the images I’d seen countless times in photographs. What had it been like, I wondered, for the officers that night to see all this evidence lying before them? I’d never seen so much left at a crime scene. This murder was obviously the work of an amateur.

At the front of the condo I stood on the upper landing and looked down on the area enclosed by the front gate. It was cramped and dark, even smaller than photos could convey. I turned to Bill and said, “The jury has to see this. When they realize how small it is, they’ll understand how impossible it would be for two men to have fit in here to commit the murders.” “Yeah, no kidding,” h...

We’d been told by Nicole’s friend Ron Hardy that the intercom controlling the lock on the front gate was broken. If Nicole had wanted to let a visitor in, she’d had to go down and open the gate manually. If this was true, it was easy to conceive how Nicole and Ron were both at the front gate when Simpson moved in for the kill. He could have attacked Nicole from behind, hitting her on the head, making a quick cut to her neck, and slamming her into the staircase wall. She would ...

Frankly, I favored a slightly different scenario: Nicole Simpson hears something outside—the sounds made by her ex-husband lurking in the shrubs around her condo. Nicole steps outside to investigate. She ventures down to the front gate, looks down the walkway and into the shrubbery to the north. Nothing. And then, when she turns to mount the steps, to reenter the house where her children are sleeping, she walks right into him, smack into the man who she had vowed would no longer be the center of her life. He is dressed for silent combat—dark sweats, knit cap, gloves. He has come to take her life. Somewhere during this time, Ron Goldman, on his innocuous errand, appears. Perhaps Ron has come up the walk while Simpson is in the midst of his stiletto mêlée. Why doesn’t he flee? Perhaps he has come too close and can’t escape. Or perhaps—and this seemed a stronger likelihood—Ron feels compelled to come to Nicole’s aid. He is about to engage in an a...

This was not some irrational, free-floating anxiety. During the Rebecca Schaeffer case, I’d learned about the pathology of obsession from Gavin de Becker, a security consultant and perhaps the world’s wisest authority on the psychology of stalking. Gavin helped me develop a psychological profile of Rebecca’s killer. When the Simpson case broke, I didn’t even have to call him. He phoned me to see if I was okay.

“Marcia”—Gavin’s mellifluous voice is unmistakable—“have you been receiving mail?” I had, in fact—by the box load. I hadn’t read it. I didn’t have the time. Gavin offered to sort through it for me to see if there was anyone to watch out for. He also told me how to mitigate the risk factor in signing autographs: “Never sign more than your name,” he warned. Even a meaningless expression like “sincerely” could give encouragement to an unbalanced fan. If a situation seemed the least bit weird—a guy looking twitchy, avoiding eye contact—I should get the hell outta there. “Kind of ironic, huh, Gavin,” I told him. “Whoever thought I’d be on the receiving end of this bullshit?”

It did not seem logical to me that Fuhrman would try to frame O. J. Simpson with as little information as he’d had at the time he’d found the glove. How, for instance, could he have known that Simpson didn’t have an airtight alibi for the time the murders occurred? How could he know whether an eyewitness, or even an ear witness, might come forward to identify someone else? What if someone stepped forward to confess? How could he know whether Kato had already gone far enough down the south pathway to see the area where the glove was found? Did Fuhrman even have the opportunity to move evidence? I’d asked the LAPD for a list of all of the officers who’d arrived at Bundy before Mark. There were sixteen of them. Only four had gotten beyond the perimeter to see the evidence near the bodies: Officer Robert Riske, first officer on the scene.

From where I was sitting, Fuhrman was in the clear. I did my best to reassure him of that. But he was very anxious. Very paranoid. He complained about being treated like a “goddamned suspect.” He complained that the defense was targeting him, trying to destroy him. Things took a turn for the worse when the FBI found a single Caucasian hair on the glove from Rockingham. It most likely belonged to Ron Goldman, but no one could establish this conclusively. The defense asked for hair samples not only from Fuhrman, but from Phil, Tom, and Ron as well. When I passed this request along to the cops, they went absolutely ballistic. “We’re not going to be treated like goddamned suspects. Next they’ll want to take our blood,” they huffed. I warned them that their refusal would look bad, but I said, “Fine. I’ll fight it.” I got myself charged up to oppose a court order for the hair samples. But before I could strap on my armor, the cops had a change of heart. Their attorneys had told them that in refusing, they’d appear to be hiding something. So they agreed to give the hair samples.

I got on the horn to Shapiro. “You won’t need a court order for the hair, Bob,” I told him. Fine, fine. Everything’s cool. I had barely gotten off the line when the cops did another flip-flop. “We’re not giving samples,” they insisted. “We’re not goddamned suspects.” Finally, they complied. And, thank God, when the results came back a few weeks down the line, nobody matched the mystery hair. The thing that annoyed me was that I’d really gone to bat for those guys, and still they went around grousing that I was disloyal. I could already see the police distancing themselves from this case. By late September, Tom and Phil were “too busy” to do anything I asked. Finally, I just quit calling them and used our D.A. investigators instead.

Simpson arrived at court that morning sporting an expensive dark suit and an irritating swagger. This was new. I remember thinking that his handlers must have adjusted his medication because he was clear-eyed and alert. He appeared confident, which gave me odd comfort. My guess was that Simpson’s confidence often led him to do stupid things. He seemed in the mood to bluster. I wondered if he was being coached to display that swagger in hopes that press and public would remember that the guy in the dock here was the ostentatiously confident O. J. Simpson. “Do you understand the charges against you, sir?” asked the supervising criminal court judge, Cecil Mills. Simpson stood up straight and answered as if breaking from a huddle. “Yes, Your Honor.” “How do you plead?” Simpson snapped to full attention and boomed, “Absolutely, one hundred percent not guilty.” You asshole, I thought. You unregenerate, scum-sucking creep.

watched Simpson as the deputies led him out of the courtroom. He gave the crowd a thumbs-up. Beneath that three-thousand-dollar suit he’s just one more sadistic punk, I told myself. You’ve put a lot of those away. He’s no different. But, of course, he was. By my estimate, O. J. Simpson had already sunk more than a million dollars into his defense, and the case was barely six weeks old. Shapiro alone must be pulling down a retainer well into six figures. Possibly seven. With each passing week, the defense team seemed to be doubling in size. There were at least three private investigators we knew of working for the team, with scores more P.I.s on the freelance pad. Their names kept turning up in the press—as did those of defense attorneys around town looking to get some ink. One of those was Johnnie Cochran.

doubted that Cochran would risk his reputation as a pillar of the community for the likes of O. J. Simpson. The defendant was not some brother who’d been shaken down by cops for driving in a white neighborhood. O. J. Simpson could have jogged nude through Bel Air without being arrested. He hobnobbed with white golfing buddies, married a white woman, lived in a mansion, and had effectively turned his back on the black community. He had, moreover, committed two murders of horrific savagery.

What I proposed was to give Dr. Blake the entire sample. Let him do all the testing—provided the defense would share his results with us. If the Dream Team was sincere about getting an honest result, they’d go for my compromise. The only possible reason for turning me down was if they knew the results would hang their client. My counter-motion, in essence, would call their bluff. Get it, judge? They don’t want the truth; they want to hide evidence. Sure enough, the defense flatly rejected my proposal. That figured. What surprised the hell out of me was the subsequent ruling from Ito. He granted the defense’s ridiculous request: 10 percent, he decreed, would be “available to the defense for their own testing.”

I leaned over to Lisa Kahn, the deputy who was handling DNA for our side, and whispered, “Did he say what I think he said?” Lisa just shook her head in disbelief. “Your Honor.” I jumped up, interrupting Ito in midsentence. “May I ask the court to take some further evidence?” Ito fixed me with an icy glare. “I think that perhaps defense counsel has misled the court as to the nature of the testing that is going to be performed. You’re depriving us of ever conducting the poly-marker test completely by giving that ten percent to the defense… . You are taking evidence out of our hands forever.” Ito seemed embarrassed and angry. I’d put him on the spot. On national TV no less. He must have realized that he could not safely ignore my objection. What if I was right? What if this screwy order wound up trashing all the blood evidence? So he ordered a hearing during which experts from both sides would testify as to how much evidence we had and what we could afford to give up.

I’ve wondered over and over again if I should have taken him on so boldly so early in the game. But every time I replay this scene in my mind, I come to the same conclusion. No good attorney would sit by and watch a judge throw away evidence. Meanwhile, the message was clear—Lance Ito lacked good judgment. If he’d strayed afield on such an obvious no-brainer, what could we expect on the complicated rulings? We’d soon find out. The defense had commit...

Under California law, with rare exception, you are entitled to challenge a search or warrant only once. Shapiro and Gerald Uelmen had taken their shot before Judge Kennedy-Powell during the prelim, and she’d denied their motion. But now the defense wanted to mount a new assault upon that search in Superior Court. Their grounds? “New evidence” had come to light involving police misconduct. They petitioned Ito to reopen debate on the warrantless search. He wasn’t, apparently, im...

When Ito took the bench I asked permission to address the court. He granted it curtly. This is not the time to stand on your dignity, I told myself. Fall on your damned sword. So, on behalf of the People, I apologized profusely for any slight His Honor might have suffered during Tuesday’s hearings, and I implored him to consider the letter we’d submitted. I begged him not to cripple the People’s case by keeping out evidence when the testing delays were really no one’s fault.

Reluctantly, they agreed to try again. Within two minutes they were off and gossiping on another subject not mentioned on the tape—the Bronco chase. Black jurors believed Simpson had only wanted to visit Nicole’s grave. When one of the more neutral jurors suggested that it might—just might—have been the escape attempt of a guilty man, one of the female blacks shot back with a defense of Simpson, referring to him as “my man O.J.” “My man?” I thought to myself. The only way he’d be your man is if you were white, twenty-five, and built like a centerfold.

The racial divide did not come as any great shock to us. As early as the second week of the investigation our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had come to us warning that a couple of black female jurors seemed protective of Simpson. They’d gone so far as to say that Nicole “got what she’d deserved.” What was disturbing to me was how the popular media had permeated the thinking of the mock jury. Not a soul among them seemed capable of critical thinking. If it was on TV, it must be true. Of course, many of the reports they’d seen were based upon nothing more substantial than a loose comment dropped in the hallway outside of court, but they had entered the canon as God’s own truth. The jury hung, five to five.

I remember so many nights I’d come home from a study session or the library and peek into the bedroom to see if he was there. If he wasn’t, I’d hop into bed as fast as I could in hopes that I’d be asleep before he got home. As I look back on it all now, I realize that I was suffering from a true depression. I was unhappy with Gaby, but my perspective was so distorted that I couldn’t imagine being happy with anyone else. I repeated to myself all those bromides that I’m sure a lot of couples repeat to convince themselves that they should stay together rather than get out and look for something better. Like: “There’s no such thing as the perfect mate.” “You can’t find it all in one person.” “You always have to compromise.” What I didn’t understand at the time was that in order for compromise to work, both parties have to be essentially compatible. They shouldn’t be spending 90 percent of their time together brawling. There should be something in each that enhances the other. Still, whatever it was that Gaby and I had, I thought it was the best I deserved, the best I could hope to get from life.

Even now, I’m hard put to explain why I married him. I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of what I’ve done in my personal life has been impulsive, has seemed to run counter to the dictates of common sense. But in its own weird way, getting married made sense at the time. If we were having trouble, the thing to do was to bind ourselves closer to each other so we’d have to get along. Right? Well, no, actually.

After those two months of sensory deprivation studying for the bar, I was exhausted and ready for a blowout. The sights and smells of southern Europe were intoxicating. I couldn’t do or see enough. Gaby had a way of going up and talking to people. He could speak a little Italian, a little French. He regaled strangers with his backgammon exploits until they were eating out of his hand. Anyway, he struck up a conversation with the conductor of the sleeping car we took from France to Italy. He was a young guy with a sweet face and large warm brown eyes. When we arrived in Rome, the conductor took us home to have dinner with his mother. And he offered to act as our unofficial tour guide. On one outing he took us to a topless beach. I thought it was an absolute riot. I’ve never been the inhibited type. In fact, shortly after we got there, I shed my own bikini top. Gaby put his arm around my waist, and our Italian friend snapped the picture. I was happy and smiling in that shot.

When we returned from Europe, I withdrew into myself again. Gaby and I lived more or less separate lives. I got a job as an associate lawyer with the firm I’d been clerking for. And there I discovered the healing powers of work.

like to think that having a real career awakened some semblance of self-esteem and an independent identity that gave me the strength to confront the truth. Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it was just the growing-up process, which would have happened regardless of whether I’d found a profession. Whatever the reason, I grew stronger. More confident....

agonized about leaving him. I knew I should just pick up and go, but I was hamstrung by guilt. Just as my career was taking off, his fortunes were taking a downturn. The backgammon mania was subsiding. It became clear that gambling would not provide him with an identity—or even a living—very much longer. All he’d ever been was a backgammon pro. A teacher at best; a hustler at worst. His entire image of himself was built around being pretty and having a fast, flashy lifestyle. His looks were going. His money was going. He was depressed. We spent long nights discussing his childhood, his past, and his uncertain future. I knew that if I was ever going to find it in my heart to leave him, I was going to h...

At first Gaby was gung-ho. We’d go a few nights a week, although we ended up taking different classes. For me the experience was interesting, though not earthshaking. Scientology, as I saw it, was really kind of a ragbag of truisms from the world’s great religions. But Gaby’s spirits seemed to be improving. After only three or four weeks, however, I heard that he was close to getting thrown out. Apparently, he’d been hitting on the women in his classes and they didn’t appreciate it. They complained to the supervisors, and Gaby was put on notice that he’d have to clean up his act or get out.

That did it for me. I realized right then and there that I couldn’t waste my life if he wasn’t going to get serious about his. It was around that time that I met the man who would become my second husband. I’d gone down to the church’s administrative offices to sign up for a new set of courses. A pleasant young man was assigned to help me. His name was Gordon Clark. “What’s your job?” he asked me. I told him I was a lawyer. I wanted courses that would stress interpersonal relations. I was looking for something that would help me to size people up and evaluate them from an attorney’s point of view.

I knew that I was attracted to Gordon Clark. And I could tell he was attracted to me. I suppose anyone looking at us from the sidelines could tell what a mismatch this was. For one thing, I was a twenty-six-year-old attorney. He was a twenty-two-year-old without a college degree. But he seemed to hold out the promise of happiness. I looked at him and I saw, or thought I saw, stability. I knew what I had to do and I steeled myself to do it. One evening, I waited for Gaby to come home. I wasn’t nervous or frightened. I was sitting on the stairs and he was in the living room below me. He started to discuss a trip we’d been planning to take to Monte Carlo, where he was to play in a backgammon tournament.

There was one small problem. I had no place to go. I had no money. I could have gone after community property, but all I wanted was out. The sentiment was noble—but hardly practical, given my current circumstances. I was in between jobs and on unemployment. And the nine-month grace period on my student loan repayment had expired several months before. I’d thought Gaby was making those payments, but shortly after I moved out, I learned that he hadn’t paid a dime; I was several months in arrears. That nonpayment had been reported to all the credit agencies, so I had no credit cards and no way to get one. I couldn’t have passed a credit check even if I’d been able to afford an apartment. How could a woman with a law degree be so helpless? Luckily, friends of mine knew a man who was converting some apartments into condominiums. He agreed to let me stay in one rent-free for a month or two until I could get on my feet. I packed up my clothes. Gaby gave me an old TV and I moved out. I wrote the bank a letter explaining that I was going through a rough period and that I had no intention of defaulting on my student loan. I assured some faceless bank official that as soon as I was employed I would catch up on the delinquent payments and make all future ones on time. I made good on that promise. After a year of timely payments, I wrote another letter to the bank asking them to clear my credit rating. And to my surprise, they did. (If whoever was responsible for that act of kindness i...

When I left Gaby, however, I was destitute. In spite of that, I was happy. I felt I might actually be able to make it out on my own. Not long after moving out I landed a job with the law firm of Brody and Price doing defense work. I loved my colleagues. They were wonderful, ethical people. I was well on my way to making it on my own. And yet within three months, I was married to Gordon Clark. How did that happen? Why didn’t I take some time to enjoy my newfound freedom and experience life as a single, independent adult for a while? What the hell was the rush? The relationship with Gordon had taken off like lightning, but marriage was definitely not on the agenda as far as I was concerned.

Church of Scientology, however, didn’t allow romantic liaisons between its officers and members of the public. If Gordon wanted to stay on the staff and keep seeing me, we’d have to get married. The problem was that I was still legally married to Gaby. One of Gordon’s fellow Scientologists told us how to get a quickie divorce in Tijuana. It was supposed to be perfectly legal, but I wasn’t so sure. On the other hand, so what if my marriage to Gordon wasn’t strictly kosher? We were only going through this charade to appease the church hierarchy. And so I made the trip to Tijuana. My brother came along to keep me company. Two weeks later Gordon and I got married in a friend’s apartment. The Scientology minister who married us was Bruce ...

Thinking back on it all, I can see both the pattern and the reasons for the facade weddings, the race from one marriage to the next. The truth was, I didn’t know how to be alone. I didn’t have a self to be alone with. As long as there was a man in my life, there was someone to cater to and mold myself around. As long as I had a man to define me, I didn’t have to confront the uncomfortable issue of discovering my own identity. It’s funny. People used to tell me how they never really felt they knew me; that I was mysterious to them. If I’d been a little more in t...

I look back on those days of obscure identity with great sadness. If only I’d found the strength to stand on my own for a while, to endure the loneliness, to handle the challenges of daily living as a single adult! I might have learned, among other things, to enjoy my own company. I might have discovered a real person who didn’t need another to find definition. That must be what happiness is all about. It’s not a life without pr...

Four or five months after I’d left Gaby I was driving through Beverly Hills when I saw him walking somewhere. His expression was so sad. I’d heard that he’d gotten into a fight with someone who accused him of cheating at backgammon. Gaby had been punched in the face. It was the only time I’d ever heard of a backgammon row ending in real violence. Gaby was apparently sinking deeper. I didn’t hear anything about him for another seven years or so. One morning I saw a small article in the L.A. Times. A man named Gabriel Horowitz had suffered a gunshot wound to the head. I sat stunned, reading and rereading the lines of print, not quite comprehending. Gabriel Horowitz? My Gaby? It had to be. I knew that for my own peace of mind I had to get the whole story, so I asked a detective I was friendly with to check it out for me. A few days later he reported back. Gaby’d been visiting Bruce Roman and the two of them were looking at gun...

Such a bizarre twist of fate. For weeks, I walked around in a daze, barely able to concentrate. The guy had put me through a lot of pain, but when I thought of him confined to a wheelchair for life all I could think was “Poor Gaby.” I never thought I’d say that. My sadness was so deep, it was inexpressible. Admittedly, my private life has taken some unusual turns. And whenever I can manage to climb onto a plane of semidetachment, I see why the tabloid press ended up pursuing me with such cruel enthusiasm. I had no defenses. All I could do was steel myself for the worst-case scenario. In late July 1994, just as we were gearing up for the harrowing business of jury selection in the Simpson case, I got word from Suzanne Childs that the tabs were rooting around my marriage certificates and divorce papers. A couple of weeks later, the Enquirer published an opus entitled “O.J. Prosecutor’s Trag...

The stories presented me in absurd caricature, but anyone could see that they contained nuggets of truth. I was so humiliated. I’d never confided the details of my first marriage to anyone at the D.A.‘s office except my friend Lynn. My “past,” as I saw it, was not an opportunist’s upward scramble, but a painful, private struggle. As far as I was concerned, I was a survivor. I had surmounted my personal difficulties through acts that took considerable initiative and will. In the summer of 1994, I was not Marcia Kleks, the gambler’s girlfriend. I was a lawyer—an intelligent and accomplishe...

knew that the only chance I had of coming off with any dignity was to stay calm and keep silent. I thought, If I just concentrate on my job, I can get through this. They’ll get tired of me. I can ride this out. But the tabs didn’t get tired of me. In September I picked up new rumblings: the National Enquirer was working on a story that I had been a battered wife. They’d apparently turned up a pair of backgammon promoters who were claiming that once, during a tournament-organizing event, Gaby got angry and threw a chair at me. They’d also found some dingbat who’d once been a neighbor of Gaby’s and mine. She was claiming that I walked around in long-sleeved dresses all the time so that no one would see the bruises from Gaby’s beatings. The news threw me into a state of near panic. Of course, I knew what the truth was. Gaby never threw anything at me in public. His pride would never have allowed him to let people see that we fought. We did all that in private. But even during those arguments behind closed doors he never beat me. Never. He pushed, I shoved,...

My approach to domestic violence cases over the years was one of extreme caution. I’ve never gotten up on a pulpit to spout a feminist line. I never rushed in and charged spousal battery without a full set of facts in hand. The Simpson case was no exception. From the beginning I’d hung back on the DV. I felt there was too much we didn’t know. As of July 1994, the personal history of the Simpsons was still too murky. From a strictly legal standpoint, we would never have needed to address their history of marital violence. True, the fact that a man has beaten his wife over the years may go to motive if he is accused of murdering her. But the state isn’t required to establish why one person killed another, only that he intended to do it. It is perfectly possible to get a conviction strictly on the physical evidence. And in the Simpson case, the physical evidence was so amazingly strong, I felt that we could probably put him away relying on that alone.

The domestic violence aspect of the case, by contrast, left me deeply conflicted. The photos of Nicole, her voice on the 911 tape—these produced in me sensations of dread. When the police and city attorney’s reports arrived in my in box, I scanned them hurriedly, professionally, then pushed them to one side. Later, when Scott Gordon would collar me in the hall, as he did at least seven times a day, with, “Marcia, we’ve got to get to work on DV,” I’d say “Yeah, yeah, Scott. Why don’t you write me up a memo on that?” Every time a reminder of Nicole’s physical suffering came up, I felt headachy. Sometimes a little sweaty. I’d knock the feelings away and keep pushing on. There were so many brushfires burning around me that it was easy to postpone dealing with the issue indefinitely. I’m sure I knew that, when the time came, I’d have to confront my personal history as well. Which gave me added incentive for not facing the demon down.

Homework. Exactly what I did not need at this moment. The Simpson case was already threatening to bury me under an avalanche of paperwork. Every night I’d carry home a couple of satchels of documents. Then, after the usual bedtime routine, I’d spread my papers out on my bed and work into the early hours of the morning.

“I want you to get one of those little pocket recorders and document each article and how it affected you,” Mark continued. “It would be best if you could manage to do that every day. The more detail the better. Spare yourself nothing. This will describe the emotional distress and the damages we ask for.” He told me to keep the tapes in a secure place. And if I didn’t have one, I should give them to him to put in his office safe. “When am I going to do all that?” I asked him. “You spend a lot of time in your car, don’t you?” I did as Mark asked. I bought myself a microcassette recorder. It sat for a few days on the dashboard of my Maxima. Finally I picked it up and made my first faltering attempts. “Well, Mark,” I began, “here goes. It is… what is today? September thirtieth, and I’m leaving the courthouse. It’s about ten after nine and I’m exhausted… .

“There’s so much to organize. I just wish I could stop the clock for about three weeks and put everything together in a nice, neat, tidy order. Do all the things that I usually do to prepare for a trial. I am beginning to [be] very pessimistic about my ability to put it together the way I ordinarily would. And in this, of all cases, where I need to do more than I usually would—it’s frightening… . Ah, God. I don’t know how I’m gonna survive this… .” When I replayed the tape, the distress in my own voice took me aback. I was also surprised by the relief it gave me to vent my frustrations. I continued to record, not every day, but every few days. I found that getting into my car was like entering a confessional. I talked, and talked, and kept on talking to that mute, whirring confidant. I reflected and I flamed. A tape recorder is a patient listener. It passes no judgments.