When the news broke in the early hours of June 13, 1995, that Nicole had been murdered, the media ultimately sprang to life with recollections of O.J.’s abusive behavior—which was strangely common knowledge and yet…
According to Jeffrey Toobin‘s 1996 account of the Simpson case, The Run of His Life (the source material for The People v. O.J. Simpson), on 3:58 a.m. on New Year’s Day, 1989, Nicole called 911. When police arrived, her face was battered, she had a handprint on her neck and she had been hiding in the bushes outside in a bra and sweatpants. O.J. denied beating her and, when police asked O.J. to come down to the station, he drove off in his Bentley. Ultimately, Nicole was reluctant to press charges, but she signed the police report and O.J.—who would later suggest that Nicole had often been violent with him but he continued to love her “too much”—was prosecuted for misdemeanor battery.
It wasn’t that any of it was swept under the rug—rather, it was more or less ignored by the media, let alone barely prosecuted. When deciding whether to bring charges, LAPD Officer Mike Farrell asked around to see if any cops remembered other incidents at the Simpson house. Only one, Mark Fuhrman (whose career as a detective would pretty much end after the O.J. trial), would offer an account about being called out there in 1985, but the cops actually went out there eight times before New Year’s 1989.
The Simpsons divorced in 1992. When police notified Nicole’s parents of her death via telephone two years later, her older sister Denise Brown was on the line and screamed, “He killed her! He finally killed her!”
