You Know At Least One Nicole Brown…

OJ Simpson is dead but domestic violence is alive and well.

OJ Simpson, an abusive man who killed two innocent people and got away with it, is dead.

That's all that needs to be said about this monster. I don't care how he made a living.

But I want to talk about domestic violence, and I hope you'll read an essay I've linked to in this piece.

In 1994, the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin wrote a series of essays about Nicole Brown and domestic violence. Dworkin passed away in 2005.

The essays have been compiled and linked to them later in this piece, but I wanted to share a few quotes from the piece first.

“You won’t ever know the worst that happened to Nicole Brown Simpson in her marriage, because she is dead and cannot tell you. And if she were alive, remember, you wouldn’t believe her.”

“Nicole Simpson, like every battered woman, knew she would not be believed. She may have been shrewd enough to anticipate the crowds along the Orange County freeways cheering on O.J. Every battered woman has to be careful, even with strangers. His friends won’t stop him. Neither will yours.”

“Nicole Simpson went to many experts on domestic violence for help but none of them stopped him. That’s what it takes: the batterer has to be stopped. He will not stop himself. He has to be imprisoned, or killed, or she has to escape and hide, sometimes for the rest of her life, sometimes until he finds another woman to ‘love.’”

“There is no proof that counseling the batterer stops him. It was Nicole who asked the police to arrest Simpson in 1989, the ninth time the police had been called. Arrest needs to be mandatory. The 1989 assault on Nicole Simpson should have resulted in O.J. Simpson’s ninth arrest. We don’t know by what factor to multiply the number nine: how many episodes of being beaten women endure, on average, per phone call to the police. In 1993 alone, there were 300,000 domestic violence calls to the police in New York City.”

“Accounts of wife-beating have typically been met with incredulity and disdain, best expressed in the persistent question, “Why doesn’t she leave?” But after two decades of learning about battery, we now know that more battered women are killed after they leave than before.”

“Nicole Simpson was living in her own home when she was murdered. Her divorce had been finalized in 1992. Having ended the marriage, Nicole Simpson still had to negotiate her safety with the man who was hurting her.”

“Every battered woman learns early on not to expect help. A battered woman confides in someone, when she does, to leave a trail. She overcomes her fear of triggering violence in the batterer if he finds out that she has spoken in order to leave a verbal marker somewhere, with someone. She thinks the other person’s word will be believed later.”

“Every battered woman faces death more than once, and each time the chance is real: the batterer decides. Eventually, she’s fractured inside by the continuing degradation and her emotional world is a landscape of desperation. Of course, she smiles in public and is a good wife. He insists—and so do we.”

“Those of us who are not jurors have a moral obligation to listen to Nicole Simpson’s words: to how O.J. Simpson locked her in a wine closet after beating her and watched TV while she begged him to let her out; to how, in a different hotel room, “O.J. threw me against the walls. . . and on the floor. Put bruises on my arm and back. The window scared me. Thought he’d throw me out.” We need to hear how he “threw a fit, chased me, grabbed me, threw me into walls. Threw all my clothes out of the window into the street three floors below. Bruised me.” We need to hear how he stalked her after their divorce. “Everywhere I go,” she told a friend, “he shows up. I really think he is going to kill me.””

“Five days before Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered on June 12, 1994, she called a battered women’s shelter in terror that her ex-husband was going to kill her. The jury was not told this, because she couldn’t be cross-examined. Guess not. Most of the rest of the evidence of beating and stalking, from 1977 to May 1994, was also excluded.”

“Nicole Simpson knew she couldn’t prevail, and she didn’t try. Instead of running, she did what the therapists said: be firm, draw a line. So she drew the sort of line they meant: he could come to the recital but not sit with her or go to dinner with her family—a line that was no defense against death. Believing he would kill her, she did what most battered women do: kept up the appearance of normality. There was no equal justice for her, no self-defense she felt entitled to. Society had already left her to die.”

“Surrounded by family, friends, and a community of affluent acquaintances, Nicole Simpson was alone. Having turned to police, prosecutors, victims aid, therapists, and a women’s shelter, she was still alone. Ronald L. Goldman may have been the only person in seventeen years with the courage to try to intervene physically in an attack on her; and he’s dead, killed by the same hand that killed her, an expensively gloved, extra-large hand.”

Nicole Brown knew the monster was going to kill her. She told people in her life, she told authorities, she told mental health professionals. She pleaded for help; she recorded what the monster did to her in her diary, so there was a contemporaneous record. She called 911 over and over again.

She was terrorized by her ex-husband and the father of her children.

There are many Nicole Browns today; you know at least one, if not many more.

You can click here to read Andrea Dworkin’s essays but before you do that, please keep reading.

I also ask that you support my friend, Kim Goldman; the monster murdered her beloved brother, Ron Goldman.

Kim has spent the last three decades fighting for her brother while also doing vital work to help victims of crime and children stuck in the welfare and criminal justice system in Los Angeles.

Kim has also been remarkably kind to me in ways I will keep private for now but deeply touched me.

Please follow Kim on Twitter and Instagram.

Kim is the development director of CASA LA, a wonderful organization that helps children in the overburdened child welfare and justice system in Los Angeles.

They have a gala in May and are looking for unique and special auction items (tickets for events, luxury stays, etc) that can be auctioned off to major donors.

With the news of the monster's death this morning, Kim has been inundated with press requests and messages, and I'd like to help ease the burden on her as she navigates a world where the monster who upended her family’s life is no longer on earth.

If you can contribute an item(s), click the link below to submit your information.

Click here to donate a major auction item or support CASA LA.

If you want to support CASA LA in general and want to make a donation or support the gala in some other way, please click here

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