Simpson trial heightened awareness of domestic violence

In December 1994, investigators from the Los Angeles County prosecutor’s office drilled open a safe-deposit box that had belonged to Nicole Brown Simpson. In it, they found Polaroids of her with a battered face and letters from O.J. Simpson apologizing for abusing her.

“The message in the box was clear,” wrote Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the bombshell trial of Simpson for Brown Simpson’s killing, in a book about the case. “’In the event of my death, look for this guy.’ ”

These pieces of evidence were presented in a trial that captivated the nation, showing the public a pattern of abuse and control in horrifying detail.

“It was kind of like America was learning about domestic violence all at once,” said Stephanie Love-Patterson, a consultant for Connections for Abused Women and Their Children, an organization in Chicago that provides support for victims of domestic violence.

Almost 30 years later, the case has received renewed attention after Simpson’s death this past week. After a monthslong trial in 1995, Simpson was acquitted of killing Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. A civil trial later found him liable for their deaths.

His dramatic trial, which prompted national conversations about race, celebrity, policing and discrimination, also served as a landmark moment in America’s evolving understanding of domestic violence. Media coverage of domestic abuse surged afterward, and the fervent attention encouraged many abuse survivors to reach out for help, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Donations to women’s shelters poured in.

“The murder of Nicole Brown Simpson brought private violence into public view,” said Amanda Pyron, the executive director of the Network, an advocacy organization in Chicago. “It forced people to really reckon with their feelings on relationship violence and the role of law enforcement in keeping women safe.”

Federal data suggests that rates of intimate partner violence against women had been falling around the time of the Simpson trial and continued to fall, slowly but steadily, through most of the 1990s.

According to a 2023 report from the nonprofit Violence Policy Center, the rate of murders committed by men against women in the United States fell between 1996 and 2014, when around 1.1 out of every 100,000 women were killed. But it began increasing in 2015, with a sharper uptick during the pandemic, when lockdowns kept many women at home with their abusers, reaching a rate of 1.3 per 100,000 women in 2020. The vast majority of those women knew the men who killed them, the report said, and most of them had been in intimate partnerships.