OJ
The title of OJ's book is "If I Did It", in big bold letters, the "If" in white typeface while "I Did It" is in, what else, a nice blood red, so of course the latter is emphasized. IOW, "I Did It". OJ gets to have his cake and eat it, finally exploiting what everyone already always knew, w/o actually having to admit responsibility or express remorse. And Judith Regan and the Fox network, along w/the Dream Team and the most corrupt jury one can imagine, have just become accomplices after-the-fact to the murder of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. Not legally of course, but on another level, in a moral, ethical sense.
Yes, I know that Johnny Cochran and his team did their job, and did it brilliantly, and every defendant deserves representation, but as far as I'm concerned that does not release them from a moral responsibility. They put on a great show, and there were lots of screw-ups from the prosecution, but the evidence was clear to anyone w/o a biased pov, the blood literally led right to OJ's door. Of course, since it turns out that they had a jury who were apparently not only willing to ignore the evidence, but did not even take the time to genuinely consider it, stacked the odds strongly in their favor. I know little about the law, but as I understand it a jury is not supposed to come to conclusions during a trial, rather they should wait until all the evidence is in and then consider it all during deliberation. How could 12 people examine 6 months of testimony and arrive at any fair verdict in 4 hours? Of course it's impossible, it's absurd. Apparently, for these jurors, the trial was just an annoying formality to be endured before they came to a conclusion they'd reached early on, possibly before the trial even began, based not on the specific evidence of the case, but rather something else entirely, their opinions about racial inequality in an imperfect justice system. When the jury filed into the courtroom for the verdict, one of them gave OJ the classic raised fist,"black-power". What else needs to be said about the mind-set of these 12? Valid cause, wrong venue, reprehensible action.
After the trial I thought OJ would slink into a kind of shameful obscurity, a shadow, but he proved himself to be a true sociopath, an egomaniac w/o a trace of integrity or taste. He sought publicity wherever he could find it. In one of his most bizarre and creepy exploits, on some foreign talk-show (back when he still had trouble getting face-time in the U.S.) he actually jumped out from behind a curtain and pretended to stab the hostess w/a banana. Ha-ha! What a kidder!
How frustating the last 10 yrs or so must have been. He knows the truth about one of the most famous and horrible crimes ever (The Trial of the Century!) since he did it, but he couldn't exploit this knowledge and use it to his financial advantage. But now, in the age of reality tv, where watching people humiliate and degrade themselves and others has become popular entertainment, he can finally step out into the limelight again. It's just another reality show, but w/death.
In the one clip that the Fox network has shown to tease the interview, OJ is saying something about the murder along the lines of: "I don't see how all of them would not be covered in blood." Good for Fox, they got "blood" into their promotion, the promise of an actual description of how this man almost cut off his ex-wife's head and then brutally stabbed the man who tried to stop him. (And make no mistake, Ron Goldman, usually considered only as an afterthought in the whole picture - the guy in the wrong place at the worst time - was a true hero. We can't know the exact details and circumstances of course, but the evidence suggests that the way the crime scene was setup, he had to have initially been some distance from them when he entered the premises and could have turned around and ran, instead he went to Nicole and may have tried to defend her. It's more than wrong place/wrong time, the timing is so precise as to be chilling. How long does it take to cut someone's head off? A few moments? The evidence of Goldman's wounds suggests that he fought like hell.)
So many years later OJ finally gets to have his day out of court and in the spotlight and be damned the families of the victims (including his own). Watching that one short clip on Fox (the only one I will watch) is to truly experience the nadir of reality tv. To see this monster get off on the attention he so pitifully and desperately needs by recounting the specifics of how he murdered two people in cold blood and got away w/it is to truly experience the surreal. "You have just entered the Twilight Zone..." The ratings should be thru the roof.
Ron Goldman's family has setup a website w/a petition to protest the OJ book and Fox interview:
http://dontpayoj.com/index.php
Harold
