As recently as last week and up until yesterday, I had the good fortune of watching the Netflix series, “The People vs O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”. For some reason I had waited until this point in time to watch it, when I knew that it had been on Netflix for a good many months. Being right up my sports interest alley, I decided to give it a try.
Man, I wasn’t disappointed.
I hate to exaggerate, especially when I finished the series yesterday, but I have to say it was absolutely one of the most enthralling, detail-driven, informational, and enlightening things I have ever had the experience of consuming.
Being that it is only 10 fifty minute episodes, it’s not hard to binge it rather quickly. This is one of the things that makes it so deserving of my attention.
It starts out with O.J. leaving his house, being driven away by a limo driver. Later that night, three policeman happen upon the scene after calls of loud noises and disturbance. What they found there were the dead bodies of Nicole Simpson Brown (O.J.’s ex-wife), and Ron Goldman (presumably her “lover” at the time).
The rest is history.
The highlights of the year long trial, lasting from January 1995 to October 1995, include the famous glove fitting scene.
If you’re not familiar with the trial, these gloves were found at the scene of the crime, and were thought to have belonged to O.J. The People prosecuting O.J. went back and forth deciding on whether to make him try on the gloves, almost balking because at the time of trial, it had been a year since the crime occurred, and things can happen in a year to leather gloves.
If it wasn’t already obvious, the gloves didn’t fit. Or at least O.J. made them not fit.
Regardless, the jury saw what they wanted to see, and this was just the first step in a monumental acquittal against overwhelming evidence.
Watching this series made me think. It made me think about the justice system and the sequestering of jurors and the power of the media on impartiality. It made me think about O.J. and this fascinating look into his psyche.
Lastly, it made me think about money.
Money is what brought O.J.’s absolutely stacked defense team together. A New York Times article states that it cost O.J. approximately $5 million in legal fees to win this case.
Five. Million. Dollars.
That’s how much it costs to let a pretty obviously guilty man go free. This made me think about other cases, like the Ray Lewis case, and the Tonya Harding case, and the Oscar Pistorious case. Some of these cases went differently than others, but maybe that isn’t because of the truth, or because they did or didn’t do it.
Everyone has a price, and that includes hot shot lawyers who are very good at what they do, spinning narratives and creating alternatives to stories that are pretty much already solved.
Maybe, just maybe, it all came down to how much money they had in their pockets.
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