Lee Heidhues 8.14.2022
There is nothing funny about the O.J. Simpson saga.
The native San Franciscan turned Professional Football star, who murdered his ex-wife and her boyfriend on June 17, 1994.
The tawdry violent saga riveted the world. I felt O.J. was Guilty of murder when I read the first hard news story in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Thereafter I paid scant attention to the arrest and subsequent Trial in which O.J.’s “Dream Team” secured an innocent verdict on October 3, 1995. A verdict which shocked the World with it’s most memorable line by O.J.’s attorney Johnny Cochran, “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.”
Which is exactly what the star struck Jury did.
Now we fast forward 27 years to New York Magazine which draws some apt comparisons between O.J. and Donald Trump
Excerpted from New York Magazine – Margaret Hartman – 8.13.2022
This is what it was like to live through the O.J. Simpson story.
Americans talked about little else from June 17, 1994, when O.J.’s Bronco chase riveted us to our grainy 4:3 television sets, to October 3, 1995, when the nation was so stunned by Simpson’s acquittal that not a single Domino’s pizza was ordered for five minutes.
There are actually a lot of similarities between the Trump-raid story and the Simpson “Trial of the Century.” If you’re looking for a hit of nostalgia, this is your big chance to obsessively follow and mock a serious crime story, then feel weird about it decades later. There’s really nothing more ’90s than that.
On the night of the murders, Simpson flew from L.A. to Chicago for a promotional golf tournament, and later a young Kim Kardashian searched his golf bag for a murder weapon. Trump likes to golf when he visits Mar-a-Lago (though the resort itself is not a golf club), and he once met with Kim Kardashian in the Oval Office.
Attorney Alan Dershowitz was part of Simpson’s “Dream Team,” and he defended Trump in his first impeachment trial. Simpson was known as a Heisman Trophy winner and record-setting pro-football player prior to the murders. The FBI was reportedly looking for documents on nuclear weapons in Trump’s home, and … the bag containing the codes to launch a nuclear strike is known as a football?
Okay, I’ll admit those are all just red herrings. But the overlapping terms do give the two sagas similar vibes, and I hear we’re now all about vibes
Are you so sick of hearing about Trump that you’re having a hard time forcing yourself to care about this absolutely wild moment in American history? Is everyone you know divided into two camps: one that believes a certain celebrity is getting away with brazen crimes and another that thinks he’s being unfairly persecuted?
It is impossible to truly replicate the Simpson trial’s media dominance since we had only a limited number of live-TV-viewing options rather than an endless supply of fresh streaming content. Although I was only in elementary school at the time, I consumed an appalling amount of information about the double-murder trial; I even had an O.J. Simpson Pog slammer.
We can all draw our own conclusions about the two stars’ relationship with the truth. But regardless of whether we believe them, both men insist they’ve been unjustly targeted by law enforcement — and at times they’ve backed each other up on this point.
Simpson and Trump were once close enough friends that the football star attended the mogul’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. This was about six months before Simpson was charged with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman. Simpson was acquitted in 1995 but found liable for their deaths in a 1997 civil suit.
Similarly, just this week, Simpson urged people not to jump to conclusions about his former pal. In this Mar-a-Lago-raid commentary nobody asked for, he recalled that the FBI raided his Florida home, too, saying, “My point is the FBI can be wrong, even though it’s hard to believe that Merrick Garland and some federal judge signed off on this.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-raid-o-j-simpson-scandal.html
Lee's Perspective 