With every case that we cover at Court TV, everyone acts differently when our cameras are in a courtroom. It’s just human nature to know that you’re being watched and so you act differently. I don’t think the arguments would have lasted as long as they would have if the cameras weren’t there. Judge Ito had this mentality of “I’m going to let the world watch me be fair,” and I think that opened up some problems for the prosecution. It gave Johnnie Cochran and the rest of Simpson’s team a huge leash that they wouldn’t have had in a courtroom with no cameras.
Was there a general theme you discovered in your interviews when you asked the participants to reflect on the case 30 years later?
It’s interesting, we talked to most of the defense team and they were very eager to talk about specifics—how this happened and that happened. But when you start to ask them, “Do you think O.J. did it?” or “Do you think Fuhrman planted the glove?” they don’t seem as convicted. You get the feeling that—while they won’t admit it—they obviously believe that O.J. did it. But when you talk to Tom Lange or [prosecutor] Bill Hodgman they feel the same as they did 30 years ago. They feel like they had the goods and are still frustrated that they were let down by circumstances.
You covered O.J.’s latter-day legal cases and got to know him at that point. How did you find him at that point in his life?
He was very gregarious and would talk about football or anything else. But there was this unspoken feeling that you don’t bring up the murders. I don’t know if, mentally, he had convinced himself that he didn’t do it. I don’t think so—I think he just lived with it. The average person would shrink away if they got away with a double murder; you would never hear from 99% of them again. But O.J. just kept going in this strange tone-deaf manner, putting himself into these strange scenarios post-verdict. He was a very strange, very interesting man, that’s for sure.
The trial launched your news reporting career and launched Court TV as a major courtroom outlet. How has it impacted the way the network covers trials since?
It put Court TV on the map and always comes up whenever you’re at a big trial. Everyone who was at O.J. will say, “It’s almost as big as O.J.” or “This isn’t O.J.” It remains the trial of the century and got viewers invested in the courtroom coverage that Court TV is able to provide. We have our core watchers, but when a big trial comes up, we can feel it—and not just in our ratings. You can sense the core ingredients that make people universally interested in a trial.
That begs the question: 30 years later, are we overdue for another trial on the level of O.J. Simpson?
I’ve covered some big trials—Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, Phil Spector. About every year-and-a-half we’ll get one. There was a lot of interest in Alec Baldwin, although that trial ended early. So we get big ones, but nothing that’s eclipsed O.J. We might be waiting another 50 or 60 years.
