Interesting Offer, Interesting Reaction

First came this story:

Bunny Ranch brothel offers O.J. a post-prison job

Then came this one:

O.J. SIMPSON GETS JOB OFFER FROM NEVADA BROTHEL …Prostitutes Threaten To Quit

Then all the jokes flooded my head.

Then came the thought, Neh, why bother. Everyone else will do that.

Reality TV, anyone?

 

WAOW Doesn’t Deliver, Milwaukee Independent Does

Neither the Wausau TV station news director nor the interviewing reporter sent me the link, as they said they would, to the Simpson-parole piece they aired yesterday, so I went to their website and found:

http://www.waow.com/category/135525/video-landing-page?clipId=13511186&autostart=true

http://www.waow.com/story/35935004/milwaukee-author-reacts-to-oj-simpson-parole

Anyone who missed it didn’t miss much. What got me most, though, was that instead of using the photo I sent them, which they requested, they used a picture of me that I didn’t recognize.  It took a bit of poking around online, but I finally found it. It was taken by Milwaukee journalist Lee Matz and posted on his news and information site www.milwaukeeindependent.com. The same picture was included in a profile Matz published today. Here are links to the video and the text versions of the profile.

http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/video/video-from-iranian-revolution-to-24-hour-news-cycle/

http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/jerrianne-hayslett-the-news-industrys-role-in-justice/

A huge thank you to Lee Matz and Milwaukee Independent.

And the Verdict is…

As everyone who watches TV probably knows by now, the Nevada parole board who heard O.J. Simpson’s plea today to be released on parole.

So I supposed I should blog about that.

Okay.

Oh, snap, I missed Fox coverage with Mark Fuhrman’s analysis.

Is anyone surprised the Nevada board granted Simpson’s parole request?

A number of people with the news media who were involved with coverage of Simpsons’ trial expressed disgust and ill wishes for Simpson at the parole board’s decision.

A Wisconsin television news reporter did interview me today about the board’s decision. I had hoped to have a link to the interview to post on this blug, but the station has not yet sent me the link as it said it would do.

Perhaps I can post it tomorrow.

 

Simpson might not be the only one on TV on Thursday

Someone I met recently at a neighborhood party asked me if I was going to be on any media programs in connection with Simpson’s parole hearing on Thursday.

Not only had no one contacted me about such a possibility, I hadn’t thought about reaching out to anyone in the media. I hadn’t even arranged my schedule so I could watch it (ESPN is reportedly going to televise it, and other networks might follow suit).

That changed this evening. The news director of a TV station in a city nearly 200 miles away called and invited me to participate in a segment on Thursday to discuss the trial (the 1995 murder trial in which he was acquitted, not the 2008 robbery/kidnap trial that resulted in conviction and Simpson’s imprisonment) and my book.

The caller was gracious and offered to pay travel expenses. I appreciated that, but declined. It’s a matter of time, not the gas to get there. As an alternative, we’re going to talk tomorrow to arrange a FaceTime session during the day on Thursday.

It should be interesting — or at least I sure hope it will be.

 

OJS pops up in unexpected places

John Kerry Compares Trump To OJ Simpson For Ditching Paris Climate Accord

Kerry: ”…Trump saying he’d renegotiate the Paris accord is ‘like OJ Simpson saying he’s gonna go out’ and ‘find the real killer.'”

http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/04/john-kerry-compares-trump-to-oj-simpson-for-ditching-paris-climate-accord/

Comparing Tiger Woods to OJ Simpson is offensive

“The only thing in my view that links Woods and Simpson, apart from being high-profile athletes, is the colour of their skin. I don’t think we would, for example, compare Lance Armstrong to a killer.”

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editors/2017/05/31/comparing-tiger-woods-to-oj-simpson-is-offensive.html

No Cameras, No Phones: You Can’t Watch Bill Cosby’s High-Profile Trial

My friend Linda Deutsch, on today’s NPR Weekend Edition, talked about  media coverage of Bill Cosby’s trial in Philly — no cameras, cell phones, recording devices, internet access — and the Simpson trial 22 years ago.

http://www.npr.org/2017/06/04/531444438/no-cameras-no-phones-you-cant-watch-bill-cosbys-high-profile-trial

Everyone should read “Anatomy of a Trial: Public Loss, Lessons Learned from The People vs. O.J. Simpson” for a clear picture of the impact media coverage had on the judiciary and the public. It makes the best case for courtroom camera coverage.

A great summer sale of $7.99 just went into effect on Amazon —   www.amazon.com/dp/0826218229?m=A1UT13HVUXZL25&ref_=v_sp_widget_detail_page — Or order directly from me for a signed copy.

“Made in America” Edelman Examines Simpson, Trump, Celebrity, Country

The insights documentarian Ezra Edelman reveals in these two articles are so thought provoking, nothing I say can do them justice. Fascinating reading.

OJ: Made In America’s Ezra Edelman interview: ‘It’s a deeper portrait of a country’

‘The director of the Oscar-winning documentary talks about the the scourge of celebrity and the similarities between the rise of O.J. Simpson and Donald Trump” 

 

Oscar-winning director of OJ: Made in America says Donald Trump is a lot like OJ Simpson

 

 

 

 

Nicole Brown, Ron Goldman at the Oscars

Here’s an early — and nice — story about documentarian Ezra Edelman accepting and dedicating the Oscar he won for his ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America at tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony to murder victims Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.

Toobin’s Simpson Account No Exemplar of Accuracy

Terry Gross is interviewing Jeffrey Toobin on her “Fresh Air” program today about his new book American Heiress, which is about Hearst empire heiress Patty Hearst. Toobin says he was 13 when Patty Hearst was kidnapped at age 19 and a UC Berkeley sophomore by a violent rogue group self-named the Symbionese Liberation Army.

It is supremely irritating to hear Gross identify Toobin as author of the “definitive book about the O.J. Simpson trial.” That book is so filled with errors and character assassination, some based on hearsay which I point out in Anatomy of a Trial, I can only hope that Toobin did a more accurate job with his new tome.

Beyond Larry King’s Freudian Slip

The anecdote in the opening paragraph of The Atlantic’s June 16, 2016, O.J.: Made in America Is Vital Storytelling review…

Buried in the fourth part of O.J.: Made in America, ESPN Films’s masterful eight-hour documentary about the O.J. Simpson murder case, is a telling little Freudian slip from the then-CNN host Larry King, whose network had turned news coverage of the trial into an unprecedented 24/7 marathon. He had just met with Lance Ito, the presiding judge in the trial, and King was asked by a news crew if he wanted Ito to appear on Larry King Live. “Sure, we’d love to have him after the show is over. After the trial is over,” he said, catching himself. “It is like a show.”

…might have happened.  I don’t know. But I do know it doesn’t tell the whole story. Whoever the news crew was apparently didn’t know that King had asked for Ito to be on his show before King met him during the trial. The saga of how that meeting came about is documented on pages 65-67 of my book Anatomy of a Trial, for which I’m pretty much to blame.

Learning that King planned to be in L.A. and wanted to attend the trial, I suggested to Ito that he might meet with him to thank him. King’s was the only news broadcast or talk show that granted Ito’s request to delay by one day interviewing Faye Resnick about her rush-to-print tell-all “diary”. King also read the entire statement from Ito on a show he had asked the judge to appear on with members of the media who were unhappy about his courtroom rules and restrictions.

The rest of The Atlantic review about the ESPN documentary seemed OK to me, but then I’ve only gotten through Part 3, so far. So this blog post is based on second-hand information, since I haven’t watched Part 4, which contains the scene described in The Atlantic review’s opening ‘graph.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Woman Loser

Former Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark, with guns blazing, is rising from the ashes of her humiliating defeat with the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson in the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Clark’s resurgence is due, in part, to a wave of sympathetic publicity with a recent airing of an FX multi-part melodrama.

She has narrowed the focus of her shotgun spray of blame that riddled her 20-year-old multi-million-dollar co-written post-trial memoir and taken aim on just the trial judge.

Although never camera or reporter-notebook shy in the years since penning that memoir, Clark is capitalizing on her newfound fame by targeting Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lance Ito, who retired last year, with a revisionist trial  history extraordinaire.

The first fabrication that hit my radar was an interview a few weeks ago in which Clark claimed that Ito was the one who came up with the idea for Simpson to try on the so-called bloody gloves that led to defense attorney Johnnie Cochran’s now-infamous line, “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Despite being in the courtroom and behind the scenes every day, meeting with Ito daily–sometime several times a day, keeping up with the media coverage and reading, hearing and writing a lot about the case in the years since, I had never heard anything about Ito coming up with the idea to have Simpson try on the gloves.

Rather than rely solely on my memory, although I would have  had to be deep in the clutches of dementia to have forgotten something that significant, I checked with a reporter who attended every day of the trial and probably had the best access to all of the lawyers in that case, and, eventually to Simpson himself.

“I never heard any such thing and think it’s an effort to rewrite history,” the reporter said.

I also checked with one of Ito’s law interns who worked in his chambers and was privy to every aspect of the case. Like the reporter, the law intern knew about or had heard anything like Clark’s assertion.

“Uughh,” the law intern, who is now a practicing attorney with her own firm, wrote in reply to my question. “I was there that day and I have no memory of the gloves idea coming from Judge Ito. As usual he had the job of ruling on their asinine ideas. She [Clark] continues to disappoint as a female attorney role model. She really has no moral compass.”

I’m pretty sure I know about the ethics of a judge presiding over a criminal case suggesting to lawyers on either side how they should present evidence. For confirmation, I contacted a judge who sat on the LA court bench during years I worked there, and who has since retired and is currently a private judge.

Such a comment would be very inappropriate for a judge to make, the retired judge said. “Even if it takes the form of ‘why don’t you’ do this or that, it would look like the judge was trying to assist that side. That is clearly unethical.”

To have done so without defense attorneys present would constitute ex parte communication, which is, without a doubt, judicial misconduct.

Given the scrutiny that trial, the judge and the parties got, it’s a sure bet that any such suggestion would have been found out and the judge would have been subject to reprimand, at the very least. Plus, Ito was absolutely assiduous to make sure he did everything completely by the books to prevent a mistrial or be overturned on appeal, should Simpson be convicted.

In other words, Clark pulled that little gem of finger pointing from some orifice other than her mouth.

In another interview, this time on Late Night with Seth Meyers, she said she had never had a judge be so openly sexist as Judge Ito was.  Judge Ito is many things, but sexist isn’t one of them, to which, I dare say, females in his personal and professional life, will attest.

Clark is quoted in Monday’s New York Daily News describing Ito as “unprofessional” and criticized him for allowing the trial to be “turned into a circus” because he allowed it to be televised and for “his infatuation with the media.”

Ho boy.

First, at one point in a hearing on whether to allow cameras, Clark advocated for televising the trial.

“Allowing cameras to remain in the courtroom would give the public the opportunity to see what the evidence actually is and to hear the truth,” she told Ito during a November 7, 1994, hearing on whether or not to televise the trial. “The best way to refute unfounded rumors and wild speculative theories is to permit everyone to see and hear the evidence that is presented in court. … No matter how thorough and fair reporters are, their coverage cannot equal the evidence of witnessing a trial first hand.”

Second, although plenty of antics went on nonstop outside the courtroom and around the courthouse, there was no circus in the courtroom — plenty of video footage exists and the trial transcript proves that. However, Clark herself was one of the clowns Ito struggled to keep reined in.

Attorneys’ conduct so egregious, including that of Clark — in spades — that Ito, after repeatedly fining them, finally resorted to issuing a court order spelling out what they could and could not do — down to “no eye rolling.” I included the entire text of that order on pages 136-137 in my book, Anatomy of a Trial. Even then, he continued to have to fine them and threaten to hold them in contempt because they refused to behave. The amount in fines Ito levied against the Simpson trial attorneys — on both sides — exceeded that of any criminal trial in the state’s history at that time.

So far as being “infatuated with the media” is concerned, disappointment or even contempt for many of them would be more accurate as he witnessed their excesses and making him the brunt of their exaggerations and misrepresentations.

In that Daily News interview, Clark said, “He sits down for a six-part interview in the middle of the trial about his life. Who does this?”

What Clark is misremembering is (1)  Ito didn’t sit down for a six-part interview and (2) an interview he did do wasn’t in the middle of the trial.

Months before the Jan. 23, 1995, opening statements, a TV reporter asked to interview Ito in connection with the opening of an L.A. museum exhibit of the World War II Heart Mountain Japanese internment camp in Wyoming, which is where a man and woman who married and became Ito’s parents met. After long consideration and conferring with a number of people, he finally decided to do it, but only with the assurance that the subject would not be the Simpson case but would focus only on the exhibit and the issue of Japanese internment. He also insisted on several other conditions, including that the station not promote the interview in advance and would air it only once and that would be during an 11 p.m. newscast.

As described on page 25 of Anatomy of a Trial the station violated every condition, including buying full-page newspaper ads and splitting the interview into six parts, which aired in six consecutive broadcasts.

Then there was this in a June 14, 2016,   Chicago Tribune article:

“Clark said that while she was generally pleased with the FX series, it failed to capture how Ito was ‘entranced by his media moment’ and ‘the steady stream of celebrities coming in and out of chambers’ during the trial. Sometimes the celebs Ito had invited backstage demanded to meet her, too, she said.

“‘I’m actually trying a lawsuit … I don’t need to meet Jimmy Dean,” she said of one encounter with the crooner-turned-sausage king. “I mean, I love your sausage, sir!'”

Did celebrities show up at the trial? Yes, as more and more it became the place to be seen. Many were, themselves, members of the media. And yes, some did meet Ito in his chambers, although I would hardly describe it as a “steady stream.” And one, which became a disastrous fiasco, was entirely my doing,  which I have rued every since.

But Jesus, Jimmy Dean? I saw neither of them. Neither did I hear or know of any who even asked, much less demanded to meet Clark. I don’t know of any who thought she was worth their while. So maybe her bruised ego is prompting her to make such a claim now.

“This is disgusting,” the reporter I talked to about Clark’s glove claim said. “She is trying to sell her books and somehow find absolution for her inept performance 22 years ago. To attack Ito is beyond the pale.”

What does Ito have to say about all of this?

Nothing. Which is what he said during, and has continued to say since, the trial. At least not publicly, which is why Clark thinks she can say whatever she wants without consequence. Given that Ito has consistently refrained from speaking out against his critics, Clark can be pretty sure he won’t now.

While Clark and her ilk have capitalized on their fame from the trial over and over and in many forms and formats, Ito hasn’t. He hasn’t written a book or gone on the rubber-chicken circuit or hauled in huge speaking fees like Clark has and is continuing to do.

I’m pretty sure he won’t speak up this time either. Clark probably isn’t worth his while.