“Be Yourself”
That simple philosophy appears next to a yearbook picture of a fun-loving senior with blonde hair feathered and parted in the middle, very much the “in” style in 1976.
Her friends called her Nick.
The world would later know her as Nicole Brown Simpson…
Linda Deutsch
Her face is one of the most familiar in the country, her marriage the stuff of tabloids.
But despite the intense glare of public fascination, Nicole Simpson remains out of focus..
Celebrity wife, devoted mother, pampered party girl, battered woman….
Even in death she remains an appendage to her famous husband.
CNN Report 1994
In the tabloids, she’s been portrayed as a man-baiter, a pill popper, an air-headed party girl who flitted around L.A. in a white Ferrari.
Her friends remember a mom in a Jeep Cherokee sticky from slurping children.
Though she liked to work up a sweat on the dance floor and drink tequila. “Her kids were the most important thing in her life,” said her friend Ron Hardy.
“She looked like a Barbie doll, drop-dead gorgeous, but could wait on him hand and foot and have his children,” said Patricia Rose…
Newsweek Magazine
Shortly before sundown on the October day O.J. Simpson was acquitted, David Perel, senior editor of the National Enquirer, walked out of the tabloid’s headquarters in Florida and went home for Yom Kippur.
He stayed home the next day for the traditional period of reflection and atonement–his first quiet day since the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman: He spent hours lying face down on his bed thinking about a woman who would not see her children grow up.
He thought about racial division in the country.
By evening, he had lapsed into a state of sadness and mental and physical exhaustion. The Enquirer’s special collector’s trial issue was on its way to the printer.
The story was over, or so it seemed.
When Perel staggered back to work that Thursday, reporter Alan Butterfield, who had been trying for months to procure Nicole Brown Simpson’s diaries, told him he might be able to get them after all…
‘The National Enquirer and the Publication of Nicole’s Diaries’
Nicole’s ordinary words of fear, despair and terror told to friends, and concrete descriptions of physical attacks recorded in her diary, are being kept from the jury.
Insignificant when she was alive–because they didn’t save her–the victim’s words remain insignificant in death: excluded from the trial of her accused murderer, called “hearsay” and not admissible in a legal system that has consistently protected or ignored the beating and sexual abuse of women by men, especially by husbands…
Andrea Dworkin
Since we’re on the subject, here’s what I believe: In the light of the evidence presented to date, O.J. Simpson is profoundly disturbed.
I believe he killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
I also believe he will not be convicted of murder, primarily because of racial tensions in Los Angeles and because the legal system has no rational, modern system for selecting a jury able to cope with the social pressures and legal complexities of the trial…
Jon Katz
May I say, without incurring wrath, that I didn’t like her face?
May I also say: So what? Whether she had a “good” face is neither here nor there. I don’t care.
I don’t care what she did or didn’t do to incur his deranged anger. Fuck him. He’s a man, isn’t he?
So why didn’t he exercise control over his bad self? Don’t tell me he couldn’t…
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
Nicole Brown Simpson Remembered. 