From ACE Weekly

Getting Juiced

Because it's not everybody who had either the leisure, the stamina, or the stomach for it, and because there were moments sublime as well as ridiculous (although the latter far outnumbered the former), I feel as if I have a civic duty--no, a mandate, as the Repulicans are so fond of declaiming--to bear witness, to tell you what I saw on TV in those final 15 grinding hours, from when I first heard that the jury--finally, the actual goddamn jury--had reached a verdict, until it was read aloud in Judge Lance Ito's courtroom.

         We'll shitcan the build-up, though, because by now everybody knows by rote how it all ended: "We the jury, in the above entitled action, find the defendant, Orange-thal--O-ren-thal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code section 187(a), a felony, upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being."

———

It was 11:00 Monday evening, and it was from our very own John Lindgren, WTVQ's unflappable anchor, that I first heard the news that the OJ jury had reached a verdict. But because Lindgren's reporting always seems to be delivered from somewhere deep inside a Prozac reverie, I flipped over to CNN. I needed heat and light. And Art Harris, CNN's man on the scene, provided it--the heat, at any rate.

         Although it's impossible to say why, Harris appeared badly shaken by the abruptness of the jury's deliberations. He sputtered and spat, his eyes pulsed in their sockets, and he never did contrive to put together any cogent observations. "It was really telling, you don't know what it means, though, but [the jury] did not look at OJ Simpson, they averted their gaze. OJ rolled back and forth on his feet, projecting this good guy image." Then, breathlessly, "It was so dramatic." But before Harris collapsed in a swoon, he did manage to introduce one of the evening's most interesting--and least pursued--subjects: awaiting the jury's verdict, on what should have been his long dark night of the soul, OJ was evidently working out a viable commercial strategy for his next incarnation, whatever that turned out to be--a repentant convicted murderer or an embattled Nixonian hero, but some kind of victim in any event.

         Greg Lefevre, who was next up at CNN, confirmed this. Lefevre reported that the attorney with whom OJ had spent the most time that evening was not Johnnie Cochran or even lame duck counsel Robert Shapiro, but Skip Taft, OJ's "good friend and business lawyer." He also reported that Taft and OJ had discussed a pay-per-view special of some kind, although Taft, who had turned dreamily wan and monosyllabic, told reporters outside the LA County lock-up that he and the Juice had talked "mostly, mm . . . just about the whole case . . . and all . . . that."

         Over on ABC's Nightline, meanwhile, Ted Koppel had his hands full, trying, for starters, to deflate the breathtakingly supercilious jury consultant Sonya Hamlin. Hamlin asserted that she, and she alone, never believed the predominantly African-American jury would exonerate Simpson, that the pundits "forgot about the fact that there were ten women on the jury . . . and from that point of view I think we were imagining that they were using the information differently than they were." Ted reminded Miss Thing that we didn't yet know what the verdict was, and Hamlin turned a gentle smile reserved for children on Ted--very Peggy Noone-ish--and cooed, "No, we don't know how they did. But if you've worked in the field a very long time, you begin to extrapolate from what you think jurors usually do, or from what folk usually do."

         Folk? From what folk usually do? Just exactly who are these folk? That marked the first time, but not the last, that I heard "folk" used this way during the pre-verdict broadcasts. And as far as I can tell, we've witnessed the birth of a new euphymism. A subtly unflattering one, I think. Or, to put it another way, a subtly racist one. But enough of that.
The silver lining in OJ's acquittal, though, if there is one, is that Sonya Hamlin was dead wrong. And here's hoping she never finds work again.

———

Six hours later I was watching the morning shows, Today, Good Morning America and CBS This Morning, and evidently the pool of remotely qualified talking heads had dried up overnight. Which led to exchanges like this one between GMA's Paula Zahn and Sheila Scott Scotti, an admitted "addict" of the OJ Simpson trial, her only claim to fame: Scotti: "Many of [the jurors] are inept and unqualified to make such life-threatening decisions. And I'll tell you something else--" Zahn: "Are you making the same generalization about this jury?" Scotti: "If they acquit him, absolutely, then I certainly, uh, that'll support, uh, exactly what I said. And if this jury acquits, this verdict will send a message to celebrities all over the world that they can get away with anything. That it's OK to murder, it's OK to be above the law. And I really fear, I mean, it's happened in the past, but I have a feeling that it may, that it may happen again." Sheesh.

         Over on the Today Show Bryant Gumbel was having a big guy thing with New Yorker reporter Jeffery Toobin and attorneys Roy Black and Gerry Spence. They were mostly cracking jokes and guffawing and just generally whooping it up--and it really was entaining to behold. All that was missing were the big tumblers of scotch, but it was still well before noon. Nevertheless, Bryant had a job to do, so he asked Gerry Spence if he was "as amazed as the rest of us at how swiftly this verdict came in." And as is his wont, Spence reared back and let 'er fly. "I am amazed. I thought I had plenty of time, and I was off fiddlin' around someplace, trying to rest up a bit, and suddenly the verdict comes in, and I was amazed. Now whether I was amazed as you were amazed, I don't know. We haven't got one of those kind of amazement calculators or measurers around here, but yes, Brian, I was amazed. I am confounded. I am. I am confounded."

         The next hour was just a lot of phoney-baloney on all the networks. Meaningless chatter that had somehow congealed into "conventional wisdom" in less than 12 hours. We were all concentrating on race, had missed the gender issue, etc. Because at this point everbody's still working on the assumption that since the jury refused to look at OJ, they had convicted him. It was insulting. But there was one bright spot, and that was Barbara Walter's interview of Kato Kaelin, only minutes before the verdict was read.

         "Kato, the first time I talked with you, you told me that you had a strong opinion as to OJ's guilt or innocence. Do you still have a strong opinion?" Kato, one must understand, is not an artful man, and you could watch every possible future scenario flicker across his inner eye before he finally answered, "I, uh, what I know is that I did five days of testifying, and that's the only part of the trial I've seen, and, uh, I know what the system is, it's, I'm not the judge or the jury, so I just think, regardless, regardless of any of the outcome, I know Ron and Nicole are gone forever." With friends like that--well, with friends like that OJ walked on a double-murder rap. And if you think about it too hard, it might make your head explode.

———

It was repeated many times, but the usage of most over-heated sound bite of the Most Over-Heated Trial of the Century tripled, quadrupled, quintupled, as the hour of the verdict neared: "Every day of the year, across this country, black jurors convict black defendants."

         As if that had anything at all to do with what we were witnessing.

———

Only 20 or 30 seconds before the verdict was read, John Mack, President of the Los Angeles Urban League, was holding forth on ABC, callin' 'em like he he sees 'em: "There's not the same emotional connect between OJ Simpson and the African-American community as there was with Rodney King. I mean, there's no question about it, OJ had crossed over. He'd become a white hero."

         Say it again, brother Mack.

———

After the verdict was finally pronounced, and after Lance Ito had unburdened himself of what seemed to be a warm-up for an acceptance speech at the Academy Awards (he thanked the bailiffs, the court reporters, his research attorney and law clerks, the court's media liason and the LA jury commissioner, among others--without whom none of this would have been possible), came the moment of closure we'd all been waiting for. It was a sham, of course, like so much else in this trial, and it was almost certainly a set piece cooked up by one or another west coast "production team," but it was all we had: an aerial shot of the white van that carried OJ from the LA County jail toward his Rockingham estate--only this time he had no need of $9000, a fake beard, a passport. And once again passersby slowed down to wave frantically from their cars, and crowds gathered on overpasses to pump their fists in the air and cheer the Juice on.

         Exhausted in every way, I poured myself several glasses from a box of wine and took to my bed, where I lay awake wondering how it all might have been different, if only Sheila Scott Scotti, the OJ trial addict, had shared her murderous-celebs-on-the-loose theory with Marcia Clark before Clark's closing arguments.