Getting Civil with O.J.

Why some veteran reporters won’t schmooze with the Juice

BUZZ Magazine

By Jessica Seigel | Contributing Editor

DATELINE DÉJÀ VU--For old-timers on their second tour of O.J. trial duty, covering the Rehash of the Century is like attending a dysfunctional family reunion. You dread going, but once there you sorta have fun, even if you’re forced to listen to the same old stories.

"Boys, behave yourselves!" someone’s auntie should scold, marching over to separate CBS-TV reporter Harvey Levin from Fox legal analyst Luke McKissack, who are scrapping happily on the Santa Monica courthouse lawn over a fine point of O.J. Simpson family trial history. Something about how the new, later murder time-line just doesn’t add up. Does too. Does not.

Just hours earlier, Levin had insisted he was exhausted, wrung out, kaput from covering the same exasperating, riveting, annoying subject for so long. Yet in spite of himself, he got so excited arguing that he clenched his fist, then mock-stabbed McKissack to illustrate his point.

Sudden mood swings always characterized the media’s love-hate relationship with the story that made the two and a half years since the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman feel like a hundred. “My feelings about covering this case are not logical,” Levin says.

Few of us in the press corps were ever rational about it. The case devoured our waking hours and invaded our dreams. After the not-guilty verdict, many trial reporters were physically sick for weeks—earaches, flu, back pain. Was it just exhaustion—or something else? Many left the newspaper business altogether. (I am one of them.) Even the bosses had overdosed, so this time news organizations have pulled back resources and coverage to the bare minimum. The Los Angeles Daily News reporter, for example, writes her stories in her car in the courthouse parking lot because her editors refused to pony up the $1,380 fee for space in the print pressroom.

But their bosses' faded ardor is not the only change. The veterans of O.J. One, about half of the current press corps by eyeball estimates, find themselves faced with a perturbing difference between the criminal proceedings and the current civil trial: O.J. himself.

From the moment he was taken into custody on June 17, 1994, after the freeway chase, O.J. had been the prisoner, surrounded by guards shadowing his every move. At the criminal trial, his pasty jailhouse skin and faraway look matched his degraded state. In Judge Lance Ito's courtroom, he did not look imposing.

Now, when court is in recess, Simpson just stands up and walks out. He saunters confidently into the hallway where journalists gossip and cultivate sources during breaks in testimony. His polished skin glows. He is relaxed. Tall. Smiling. When he stands, his muscular body and ingratiating charisma dominate a surprisingly large amount of space.

"I find it very strange, extremely strange," says author and Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne, who dropped by to gather details for his novel about the murder case. "Now he's all dressed up and laughing and smiling like we're at a cocktail party."

It's an eerie feeling, and journalists, searching their souls, are split into two ambivalent camps: those who will talk to O.J. and those who won't. The reporters who refuse say that he "gives you the willies." Neither fainthearted nor green, these journalists take pride in their wised-up ways. They have all interviewed convicted killers. But as one Rosalind Russell-ish newspaper dame explains it, chatting with O.J. revolts her because you're supposed to act as if you believe he didn't do it. "His personality is lording it over you," she says.

One earnest young veteran voiced what many think but few will admit: "When I first saw him, I had this feeling that we should wrestle him to the ground and haul him off in chains."

Many members of the media bonded with the Goldman family during the long criminal proceedings and still sympathize. While seeking monetary damages, the Goldmans really want a measure of justice, and their pain is still raw.

But without the all-seeing television cameras, the courtroom's emotional temperature has subsided to a near-normal tone, very unlike the self-important, melodramatic tension of the first time around. This time, O.J. is eager to schmooze—mostly about golf and football (he rightly pegged the World Series for the Yankees in six games), and some in the press corps don't have a problem with that. These journalists, criticized by their colleagues for "sucking up to O.J.," angrily retort that they're just doing their job getting both sides of the story, especially since the press corps is so friendly with the Goldmans. "There is a line to be drawn between sucking up and talking," says Court TV reporter Dan Abrams. "Any journalist who won't talk to Simpson is a wimp."

The divisions have not dampened the pressroom camaraderie, which is the only thing that keeps people going. That and the fact that the new print-media digs in the DoubleTree Guest Suites hotel near the courthouse are pretty swank. While the bleak, cramped quarters at the first go-round on the eleventh floor of the downtown criminal courthouse made you feel like a rat in a box, now fresh air and music from the lobby's player piano wafts into the second-floor press suite overlooking a sunny central atrium.

Just twenty paces from the print-room door, the hotel lounge bar opens daily at 4 P.M. Happy hour used to mean day-old coffee with Cremora. Now journalists nibble on free shrimp and sip two-dollar beers. They need it.

After just the third day of civil trial testimony, words like DNA, time line, and bloody glove left two reporters dozing in court. "I'm getting tired of this already," one veteran radio man harrumphed, slamming his notebook down in the pressroom at day's end.

"Hey, Slim," the Rosalind Russell type called to a skinny colleague. "It's 3 P.M. Do you think that's too early for a drink?"

December 1997

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