THIS Valentine’s Day, I went on a date. I made sure I got gussied up, even went to the salon to get a pedicure, in the hopes that I was at least half-presentable for the big night.
As soon as I got home, I ran to the bathroom for a warm shower, chose my clothing carefully—I wanted to be cute but still comfy—then settled in for a hearty dinner with Mr. Bigshot. We had an amazing ’shroom burger from 8 Cuts, with an order of those incredibly sweet and salty onion rings with garlic aioli sauce for dipping. Yum! (I’m a cheap date, what can I say?)
OK, I must ’fess up, dear readers. My Mr. Bigshot Date was none other than “The Juice”, OJ Simpson. With my iPad hooked up to my TV set, I was streaming the award-winning series The People v. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. (Thank you, Netflix! Yay!) The series was a runaway winner at the recent Primetime Emmy Awards (nine trophies) and the Golden Globes (two).
With an amazing cast, led by Sarah Paulson, who played the stressed-out but tenacious prosecutor Marcia Clark, Cuba Gooding Jr. (Simpson), John Travolta (defense lawyer Robert Shapiro), Courtney B. Vance (who was also brilliant as lead defense eagle Johnnie Cochran), Nathan Lane (F. Lee Bailey, defense) and David Schwimmer (Robert Kardashian, defense), plus a great number of competent and credible actors in various recurring roles, the series takes the viewers through the twists and turns (legal and otherwise) of the former beloved football player’s trial for the deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in 1994.
And like many journalists glued to CNN then, I had watched Simpson and his friend (AC Cowlings) on the white Ford Bronco being chased by cops through the Los Angeles highways. That was how huge the case was already turning out to be—imagine televising a live car chase?!
No spoilers for this TV series, though. The details of the case against Simpson are readily available on the Web and widely documented in several books, one of which became the basis for this series. What’s intriguing and quite interesting are the depictions of the legal maneuverings employed by the prosecution and defense to, say, get some jurors tossed out; or how Clark and her coprosecutor Chris Darden (Sterling K. Brown) shared moments of intimacy; the difficulties of Judge Lance Ito (Kenneth Choi) with some jurors and why the group went on strike, among others.
But the real star in this series was not the triumphant Simpson. Nor was it Cochran and Shapiro, despite the way they had managed to win the case. It was really Marcia Clark.
No wonder Paulson has collected awards for her turn in the series. She plays Clark with such competence, conveying all the complexities of her character and the personal trials the prosecutor was undergoing. Clark is portrayed with so much grit, and heart, too, that the viewer can’t help but feel empathy for her. In one courtroom scene, the prosecutor is shown as stern and commanding, directing the line of questioning at a witness. In another scene, still in the same courtroom, Clark calmly walks in after finding out her husband is trying to get temporary custody of their kids, and as she sits, her eyes tear up and she bites her lip, just trying to keep it together.
At the time, Clark was in the thick of divorce proceedings against her husband Gordon Clark, and hard-pressed to run a household and oversee the lives of her two growing sons.
This was where some of the complications in her life came from. Even more infuriating for the feisty prosecutor was that she had to battle the sexist and misogynist attitudes of the time.
Clark was pilloried in the media for her curly hair, the way she dressed (business suits, what else? no expensive tailoring for this government employee!), and even for a nude photo that appeared in a tabloid, apparently released by her first husband.
This was one of the reasons the case also resonated with me back then. I felt so much empathy for Clark because she didn’t deserve all that BS thrown at her. Why should it matter so much to people that her hair was curly or in waves? What bearing did it have on the case when there was hard evidence against Simpson? If social media had been around then, Clark could only have been in worse shape—black and blue all over from the cyber-bullying.
(In the end, what did the prosecution team in was not Clark’s hairstyle or outfit, but mistakes she and her coprosecutor made in the way they proffered up their evidence and their witnesses versus Simpson. It could also be said the jurors just wanted to get home; that’s why their deliberation on the merits of the case only took an unprecedented four hours!)
What bites, though, as Clark summed it up in the press conference shortly after the verdict was handed down, was that many battered women and (ex-)wives like Nicole Brown Simpson would have to continue to live in fear, instead of speaking out against their attackers.
It’s now 2017, and yet nothing much has changed from 1994. It’s a sad truth that domestic abuse still happens in this day and age, and wives are still afraid of walking away from the torture inflicted by their husbands, and suing them. A depressing thought for Valentine’s Week, but there you go. Neither a box of luxe chocolates, a dozen roses, nor a thousand decadent dinners can heal the scared, scarred and broken hearts of women in abusive relationships.