We’re all living in the age of O.J. Simpson

Where were you when you heard the verdict? The murder case of O.J. Simpson, who died last week, was a defining moment for America that is seared in the memory of everyone over 40, says Peggy Noonan. It marked “the beginning of the modern media age” and the strange cult of hypercelebrity. Crowds ran to California motorway bridges on 17 June 1994, to see the fleeing Simpson being driven past in a Ford Bronco, followed by police cars. They cheered and pumped their arms, as if it was an exciting drama, not a real-life double murder. “And people watching thought: Whoa, what are we seeing, what is this? Some new kind of fame was being presaged.” One of Simpson’s close friends, an obscure Los Angeles lawyer by the name of Robert Kardashian, went on TV to read a public letter from O.J. about how much he loved his ex-wife. Kardashian, like other O.J. attorneys, would become famous, as, in time, would his former wife and their children – one of the first reality-TV families. The judge, Lance Ito, “also became a celebrity, and apparently liked it”. Before the trial, black Americans lacked confidence in the US legal system; after it, people of all colours felt similarly. “The O.J. Simpson case was the beginning of knowing we were crazy, and admitting it.”