The FX series The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Run Of His Life, has come to the surprisingly compassionate conclusion, over and over, that a significant part of the problem was not malice but excess made worse by public attention.
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Kate Berry was 13 years old when the O.J. Simpson trial became a national craze in 1995.
“You know a lot of times when you prosecute, you have a senior prosecutor and a junior prosecutor”. Marcia vetoes the play, saying you don’t follow roads without knowing where they end.
What makes her an interesting author? The two are close, and though the show doesn’t go so far as to present them as romantically involved, it presents them as having considerable chemistry of which they’re both aware, to the point where it’s transparently a loaded question when he asks her if she wants to head out of town with him for an overnight trip for a friend’s birthday. Fitting into these gloves would have been a key prove of Simpson’s involvement in the murders, but not being able to put them on arguably changed the entire course of the trial. Although Clark still “works on appellate court-appointed cases” according to Vulture, these days, it seems that she is primarily a writer. Given her roller-coaster time in the spotlight, that might be for the best.
Whether or not Clark watches the series objectively, she has said that she can watch it because she sees a disconnect between herself and the version that Paulson is portraying. “It didn’t seem that way to me”, she said. I’m eagerly awaiting the rest, and grateful for the opportunity to continue challenging the memories and assumptions of my childhood through the lens of the urgent and continuing struggle for racial justice.
The defense was beginning to unravel, as Robert Shapiro (John Travolta) was stressed about starting more riots and upsetting the LAPD – urging Robert Kardashian (David Schwimmer) to join him in wearing a police solidarity pin. But the real Marcia Clark has taken issue with one major aspect of her portrayal. Clark started the prosecution’s closing arguments which are expected to last at least two days.
A common refrain I’ve been hearing since American Crime Story premiered (and since we’ve all been obsessively revisiting the trial and re-examining the evidence through a pop culture lens) is “How the hell did O.J. Simpson get off?”
As evident from the Tuesday night episode, the professor strode to his fax machine, wrote something on a piece of paper, sent it to Johnnie and gave a chance to his class to watch as the lawyer got the fax, read its message and proposed the professor’s perspective to the judge, right there on live TV. The reality is that it’s very much a crime, and a very serious one.
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But in real life, it turns out, the answer’s even trickier-and anyone shipping Clark and Darden can certainly keep hope alive. And that makes it much more hard for people of color to get anything resembling fair treatment.
