A Fact that Just Isn’t

People are emerging from the woodwork all over the place getting their “memories” of the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial published in all manner of places.

Such is the case with The Hollywood Reporter “guest columnist” Craig Tomashoff. In a piece with the headline ‘People v. O.J. Simpson’: My Date With Juror No. 7 (Guest Column), Tomashoff, who says he was working as a correspondent in People magazine’s Los Angeles bureau in the mid-1990s,  writes:

“A dozen of us were given a special bit of information we had to keep to ourselves: the name and address of one of the jurors.

“The fact that we had these details, courtesy of the Los Angeles County Superior Court, was proof of how the media had taken more control of the case than the attorneys; it didn’t fill me with a lot of faith in our judicial system that such private information was so readily available.”

I can’t attest to the veracity of Mr. Tomashoff’s claim of chasing Simpson juror Brenda Moran, or conversations with Moran’s relatives, but one of his assertions I know that is absolutely false is that he or any other member of the media got the name and/or address of any of the jurors “Courtesy of the Los Angeles Superior Court” — at least not in any straightforward means.

The jurors’ names were never made public by the Court. Nor were they given to members of the media. Neither were their addresses, employers or other personal information.

It is true that the news media did obtain the names, addresses and who their employers were, but that was from private investigators one or more news organizations hired to ferret out that information.

To their credit, even though most, if not all of the media covering the trial had that information well into the trial, none identified them in any of their reports until after the trial.

It is not surprising that People magazine and other print and broadcast/cable outlets knew the jurors’ names and home addresses had staffers staking out the jurors’ homes. That was well known by Court officials as jurors were dismissed for various reasons during the trial. (In fact, all 12 jurors ended up being dismissed as the trial progressed and were replaced by the 12 alternate jurors who sat in the jury box and were sequestered with the primary jurors throughout the trial. One of the trial judge’s concerns is that juror misconduct or illness might cause an alternate who had become a regular juror to be excused, which could have resulted in a mistrial.)

It could have been that once People and other media organizations learned the jurors’ names and who their employers were, they contacted the employers, in Moran’s case that could have been Human Resources or the department where she worked, to confirm that she, indeed, was a court employee, but at no time did the Court itself officially release the names and/or other information about the jurors on that case.

Prior to the Simpson trial, court policy was to provide names, only, of the jurors, that was changed, however, following a string of high profile cases in which jurors were hounded by the media who wanted to interview them post verdict. Because of juror complaints claiming media harassment, the Court changed its policy, allowing jurors to indicate that they did not want their names to be made public. The Court also began to make juries on some criminal cases, such as the Simpson trial, anonymous, keeping their names confidential post-trial.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/people-v-oj-interview-juror-877435

Kardashian-Jenner Ex a One-Time Show

I’m trying to square this as reported in People magazine:

“Kris Jenner still recalls sitting in the courtroom during the trial of O.J. Simpson, hanging on every word, still grieving the loss of her best friend, Nicole Brown Simpson.”

According to my records and memory, Kris Jenner made it into the courtroom a grand total of once, and that was Sept. 27, 1995, a full 15 months after Nicole Brown was murdered and more than nine months after the trial’s opening statements.

That’s right, more than nine months after the trial’s opening statements. That means, while she was indeed pregnant–very pregnant according to my memory of her that day–as the People piece points out, she became so after the trial began. That should be neither here nor there, except that almost every mention of her in connection with the trial includes a reference to her being pregnant.

What merits noting is that she was not a frequent courtroom attendee. Here’s my account in Anatomy of a Trial of the only day in my records that Kris and her husband at that time, Bruce Jenner, came to the Simpson trial:

“Another day of a strange star alignment occurred less than a week before the trial ended. On September 27, Ito had given the two courtroom seats he held in reserve for his use, generally for visiting judges, his parents or other relatives, to a songwriter, David Foster, he knew and Foster’s wife. The wife had previously been married to former Olympian Jenner. And there in court that same day was Jenner with his current wife, who was the ex-wife of Simpson attorney Robert Kardashian.^[i] The Jenners sat with former baseball star Garvey and his wife, who, months earlier, had been a prosecution witness.

            “While the media didn’t miss a chance to report on celebrity comings and goings, their accounts were silent on the non-stars he met with, often sacrificing lunch or a couple minutes of down time to do so.”

[i].  Author’s notes, Author’s journal, September 27, 1995.

Nick Covered Simpson and Many Other Hi-Profile Trials

I have known Nick Ut for more than two decades, but learned much about him from this People magazine story that I didn’t know.

I had thought that U.S. aircraft dropped the napalm, not South Vietnamese planes, and I didn’t know Nicky’s role in going to the girl’s aid — to the point of not only getting her and other children who were running to escape the hell that had been dropped from the sky to an American hospital, then used his media credentials to “convince the hospital staff to admit the children.” He, no doubt, saved her life.

As I look at Nicky’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, and read this story, it struck me that the military troops walking along the road with them didn’t seem to be the slightest bit interested in the screaming, running, terrified children’s plight — not even the child without any clothes. It took a news photographer to step up to that humanitarian plate. Nick deserves all the recognition and accolades he gets, and more!