America renews sick infatuation with OJ as freedom looms
wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman – to believe he was the victim of circumstance. Watching the spectacle on TV, it was as if we were swearing in a new president, not gawking at a convicted felon.
Dressed in his prison blues, Simpson presented himself as a family man who has missed dozens of his children’s birthdays. He painted a picture of a devout Christian who had lived his life as a model citizen...
His unrepentance and pathological self-righteousness before the board evoked memories of his smug smile as his acquittal for the 1994 murders was read out all those years ago.
“I’ve basically spent a conflictfree life. I’m not a guy that ever got into fights on the street with the public and everybody,” he told the parole panel. “I’m at a point in my life where all I want to do is spend as much time as I can with my children and my friends.
“I’ve done my time, and I’ve done it was well and respectfully as I can.
I’ve honoured their verdict and not complained for nine years.” Our hearts bleed for you, Juice. During the hearing he gave a lengthy explanation of his 2007 crime in which he held up two memorabilia dealers, deflecting blame and saying his associates should have served time in prison for bringing a weapon.
After he had been granted parole, which will see him released on October 1, in echoes of the famous courtroom scene after he was found not guilty of murdering his wife and Goldman, he mouthed “thank you, thank you” to the board.
Simpson’s arrest for the killing of his wife and the subsequent “trial of the century” exposed a deep racial divide in views of the police and criminal justice. Many white people found his acquittal unthinkable, while many blacks rejoiced and hailed him as a hero.
Today, in the era of Black Lives Matter and videos of police officers using force against black people, that chasm is even more apparent.
However, justice will remain elusive when Simpson walks free, while the Brown-Simpson and Goldman families will endure their loss and grief for the rest of their lives. The jury of public opinion seems the only court in which Simpson has been found guilty of all the charges that have been brought against him.
And those who bizarrely still see Simpson as an all-American hero would do well to remember he is a liar, a wife-beater, and in many people’s eyes a murderer (though
Those who still see Simpson as an all-American hero would do well to remember he is a liar, a wife-beater, and in many people’s eyes a murderer
not convicted in a criminal court, a civil judgment found him liable for the deaths of Nicole and Goodman in 1997).
America has a warped obsession with Simpson. My only hope is that the Juice crawls under a rock when he walks free and the country stops putting him in the spotlight.
There could be no candidate less deserving of the sympathy he so desperately craves.