June 21, 2024: Simpson Trial Figures: Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman

[On June 17^th, 1994, O.J. Simpson was arrested by the LAPD. The subsequent trial featured a number of individuals whose stories have a great deal to tell us about America, then, now, and overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Simpson trial figures. Leading up to a special weekend post from one of my favorite young AmericanStudiers!]

On two of the many reasons to better remember the victims.

First things first: we don’t and shouldn’t need any reason to better remember the two people murdered in June 1994 beyond that simple and horrible fact. They and their families and loved ones were by far the most profoundly and tragically affected by this case, and there’s nothing more important to say than that. I’m going to leave this first paragraph short in order to make those points as clearly and concisely as I can.

Beyond those individual and most important reasons to include Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in a series like this one, it’s also the case that better remembering them helps add significant issues into the conversation. With Nicole, the most prominent such issue is an absolutely crucial and (due to many of the factors I’ve written about this week) at times frustratingly minimized one: domestic violence. While they were overshadowed by the Mark Fuhrman recordings (which certainly were horrific in their own ways, as I discussed in Tuesday’s post), the multiple recordings of Nicole calling 911 to report OJ’s incidents of domestic violence comprised one of the most blatant representations of these issues in our collective history, and were (or at least damn well should be) impossible to ignore. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the fact that the vast majority of mass shooters have histories of domestic or intimate violence that predate and seem clearly related to the explosions of mass violence, and in its own way the OJ trial overall and Nicole’s story specifically foreshadowed and can add to this 21^st century conversation.

While Nicole’s murder was thus frustratingly and tragically predictable given that prior and escalating history of domestic violence, Ron Goldman’s murder could not have been more random, an incredibly horrific instance of “wrong place at the wrong time.” There are plenty of details of Goldman’s life and identity that would be worth highlighting to better remember him, from the overtly inspiring (such as his volunteer work with children suffering from cerebral palsy) to the tragically unfulfilled (such as his ambitions to open his own restaurant). But I would say the very fact of the randomness of Goldman’s murder, especially when linked to those details of his individual identity and life, makes an important point in its own right: that every victim of violence, such as all those killed in mass shootings, represents a fully, complicatedly, vitally three-dimensional human, with all the different layers, small and big, mundane and inspiring, that comprise us all. I’m not sure there’s a better reason to do everything we can to limit violence of all kinds, nor a better individual representation of those tragic realities than Ron Goldman.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Simpson trial figures or stories you’d highlight?