The People v OJ Simpson: to win the argument, tell a story

20 years ago, I was gripped by the OJ Simpson trial. At school I was studying Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the story of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. In 1995, Simpson, a black American football star, was on trial for killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. Both trials—one fictional but based on real cases; one factual but played out like fiction—were about race, sex and justice, but they could not have been more different. The clean moral lines of Lee’s tale contrasted with the blurry post-modern Simpson trial, where accusations of racism convinced the jury to acquit, and where the lawyers were about as far from Atticus Finch as you could imagine.

Watching the TV dramatisation The People vs OJ Simpson, the last episode of which has just aired on BBC2, drew me back into the story. At the start, the series seemed more like shlock entertainment than a serious investigation, but it has grown better over time, intelligently humanising its protagonists.

As it has improved as drama, though, it has strayed further from its source material, a non-fiction account of the trial published in 1997 by the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin. Toobin is merciless to nearly everyone: Simpson is an “uneducated, semiliterate ex-athlete,” not to mention a “narcissist.” He declares Simpson guilty (the show hedges its bets) and that Simpson’s lawyers knew this also. (They deny this.) The presiding judge Lance Ito was, according to Toobin, as celebrity obsessed as the preening lawyers, offering private briefings with CNN’s Larry King and boasting of a letter he had received from talk show host Arsenio Hall.

Toobin is no less harsh on the prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, cataloguing their errors and missteps. The worst of these was the infamous moment when Darden asked Simpson to try on the black gloves found both at the murder scene and Simpson’s house without knowing whether they would fit. (They didn’t—possibly because they had been shrunk by all the blood that had soaked into them.)

Toobin, a former prosecutor, has the controlled anger of someone who feels justice has not been done. He sums up: “The prosecutor’s arrogance led it to disaster. The defence’s obsession with race led it to victory.” According to Toobin, there was ample DNA evidence to convict Simpson—from the blood stains that led from the murder scene to his house via his white Bronco, to his history of domestic violence and stalking of his ex-wife. “The case emerged from a set of facts, and those facts matter,” he writes. (Simpson, now in jail on a separate charge, still asserts his innocence.)

The show’s writers choose to present certain figures in a more sympathetic light than Toobin does. The interplay between book and series could be summed up by a conversation in the TV series between Clark and Darden. Clark says: “The defence has been obsessed with telling stories. Lawyers resort to stories to distract from the facts.” That’s the Toobin view, roughly. But Darden hits back: “You know Marcia, people like stories. It helps them make sense of things.” That’s the show’s view, roughly.

One of the odder transformations involves one of Simpson’s lawyers, Robert Kardashian. In the series, played by David Schwimmer, he is a tortured soul who suspects Simpson’s guilt but doesn’t have the courage to confront him. Kardashian, who died in 2003, is the father of the infamous reality TV show clan—and Kim, Kourtney et al, make appearances as self-obsessed brats. It’s true that when Simpson was acquitted Kardashian looked ashen-faced. Clark, in recent interview with Vulture, confirmed her view: “Robert Kardashian looked devastated when he heard the verdict. He knew.” Toobin, on the other hand, had little time for Kardashian. He was Simpson’s “closest friend and advisor,” and at least in the early days, his “devotion to Simpson had a desperate, frantic quality.” (Kardashian took out a full-page advert in a magazine calling for “Justice for the Juice.” OJ’s nickname was “The Juice.”) You suspect that the programme-makers needed someone from the defence the audience could side with, and Kardashian was the best of a bad bunch.

At points they do try their best with the trial’s most infamous figure after the defendant. Simpson’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran turned the trial into a verdict on the LAPD’s racism, a tactic as brilliantly effective as it was devious. (Cochran died in 2005) Its effectiveness derived from its grounding in truth. The People vs OJ Simpson begins with footage of Rodney King being beaten by white LAPD policemen in 1992. When they were acquitted, LA went up in flames. Cochran himself was also the victim of racism from the LAPD. But, like Toobin, the programme-makers cannot ultimately excuse his breathtaking cynicism. Such was the racial animus whipped up that if Simpson had been found guilty, it might have sparked another race riot. All this for a double murder case that did not, in essence, have anything to do with race.

Perhaps the most interesting softening from book to TV is the presentation of Clark and Darden. Clark was raked over by the media for her appearance and supposedly harsh manner. In Toobin’s account, she comes across as stubborn and unlikable, making errors at the start of the trial that boxed her in later. In the show a superb Sarah Paulson plays her as a flawed but determined prosector, passionate about domestic violence cases. Darden’s errors came not from stupidity—the impression you get in Toobin’s account—but from the goading by Cochran. Clark and Darden have never confirmed whether the near romance that the show depicts had any truth to it. Dramatically, though, it works superbly. Their closeness and cooperation symbolise the racial unity that might have been.

Their partnership is a salutary reminder that not everyone got caught up in racially-directed thinking—something Toobin sometimes forgets. After Simpson was acquitted, the African-American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr wrote a piece in the New Yorker asking prominent black figures their opinion on the trial. The academic Cornel West and opera singer Jessye Norman exonerated Simpson and blamed the media. On the other hand, the filmmaker Spike Lee said he “wasn’t happy” with the verdict while poet Amiri Baraka was more forthright: “I know the son of a bitch did it.” Gates himself thought Simpson was guilty.

Which is another reason why, 20 years on, the programme-makers are to be applauded for trying to bring layers of subtlety to the issue of race. It is possible for the LAPD to have many racist cops, and also for OJ Simpson to be guilty. Believing these two things was not, as Cochran claimed, any kind of contradiction. To believe that is to succumb to a binary view of the world that ignores the victims. The makers of The People vs OJ Simpson convey this greater truth, even as, at points, they take considerable dramatic license. But at least they admit they have massaged the truth into a compelling narrative.