“Angry isn’t the right word,” saysMarciaClark, after a brief pause. “What I feel now, still, is profound disappointment and pain. Because whatever you think about O.J. Simpson’s guilt, two innocent people were brutally murdered and the killer never brought to justice.”
Today – as she was every day of the American football player’s 1995 murder trial – Clark remains haunted by the words of his beaten wife, Nicole Brown Simpson: “He’s going to kill me, and he’ll get away with it because he’s O.J. Simpson.” As the lead prosecutor in the most publicised criminal trial in American history – a trial that was televised for 134 days, turning the prosecutors, defence attorneys and judge into soap stars and celebrities – Clark can move on but will never forget. She’s not allowed to.
Twenty-one years on, there is still a morbid and microscopic interest in the case, enflamed by every suggestion of new evidence. Earlier this month, a knife “discovered” on Simpson’s former Brentwood estate was handed to police. “But it has been excluded, I believe,” says Clark. “It was actually discovered years ago by a construction worker who gave it to a detective who took it in to police but was told ‘the case is closed’. So he just turned it back in.”
The critically acclaimed 10-part TV series, American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, now airing on BBC Two and starring Cuba Gooding Jr, John Travolta, David Schwimmer and Sarah Paulson, has undoubtedly given the case yet another lease of life.
“My heart really sank when I heard the series was going to happen,” admits Berkeley-born Clark, a warm and well turned-out 62-year-old now living just outside LA. “I didn’t want to relive this nightmare that was traumatising on every level. Because really I believed I was just seeing the justice system thwarted every single day. Two people were dead, and nobody seemed to care. The whole thing had just become a circus.” A circus that continued long after Simpson was acquitted of murder - but found liable for the wrongful death of the second victim, Ron Goldman, in a civil suit two years later – and only ended with the former NFL star’s 2008 conviction and imprisonment for a subsequent armed robbery and kidnap in Las Vegas.
When Clark was told that the series was to be produced by Ryan Murphy, however, her fears subsided. Overall, the characterisation has been pretty accurate, she feels. A good defence lawyer will always push the envelope, Clark maintains of Johnnie Cochran, “and it’s up to the judge to ensure the trial isn’t hijacked by inflammatory subjects that have no real relevance to the issues. Our judge did not do that, and so we had a trial awash with claims of racism and crackpot conspiracy theories. There was no reason to allow Cochran’s use of racial epithets into the trial, for example. By doing so, the judge turned the trial into a referendum on race instead of a search for the truth.” Equally, Bob Kardashian (father of the now infamous Kim), “really was the unswervingly loyal friend [to Simpson] depicted in the series – and also a very nice man. It is a little bit surreal to see how famous his young daughters became.”
Clark has been enjoying impressive sales figures for her reissued 1997 bestseller, Without A Doubt, since the series began. And there has been another silver lining: having once felt like “the media’s piñata”, beaten down by sexist attitudes and tabloid scandals that included the publication of topless photographs in the National Enquirer and a ludicrous fascination with her hair, the divorced single mother has finally emerged a heroine.
The focus groups recreated in the series - in which we see strangers calling Clark a “bitch” and criticising her perm – really did take place, she assures me. “Even now, the hair’s got its own hashtag,” she quips.
Clark feels “there is still an unfair emphasis on women’s looks now, in all professional arenas. Actresses and models, I kind of understand, because their appearance is a part of what they do. But when it comes to lawyers, doctors and politicians, come on! Can we not focus on what a woman is saying?”
The publication of topless photos – taken on a beach in St Tropez and sold by her ex-husband’s mother five months into the trial – was “hideous and extremely hurtful, because it’s one thing having people you don’t know knock you about, but another to have someone you know wilfully reveal your private life for money.”
But it was the way Clark was treated inside the courtroom, she says, “not by the lawyers but by Judge Ito, that was the worst thing. He treated me like a second-class citizen, and a jury takes their cue from the judge.”
So disgusted by the unanimous ‘not guilty’ verdict of October 1995 that she gave up the law there and then, and became a virtual recluse for two years as she wrote her book, Clark now handles court-appointed criminal appeals, with a lucrative side-line as a crime fiction writer. She has changed her mind on several issues pertaining to the case, notably cameras in courtrooms. “If there hadn’t been cameras in the trial, no-one would know what a travesty of justice it was, at least in my eyes.”
So does she believe Simpson would have been convicted if he had been white? “Yes. He would have. If it had been a famous football player, it’s very likely he would have. But ultimately juries will believe what they want to believe.” This jury wanted to believe that Simpson had been framed by racist cop Mark Furhman, and that the glove famously found at the crime scene was planted. “Because of course the trial took place three years after [the beating of] Rodney King, in the wake of the LA riots, so the impact was enormous,” Clark says. “But actually today things might be just as bad in some respects because you’re seeing things on your phone and computer, on body-cams and dash-cams and surveillance footage, which are telling us that this happens a lot more horribly and obviously than we thought. So in today’s climate we might wind up with a very similar verdict.”
One thing it’s hard to remain sanguine about is the conspiracy theorists. “We went to such great lengths to prove them all wrong,” Clark sighs, eyes to heaven. “I’ve never before or since seen such damning physical evidence.”
Over two decades on, with Simpson coming up for parole next year, Clark remains as incensed as she was in that courtroom. “I’m sure he hasn’t been a problem prisoner,” she says wearily. “He’s older and disinclined to be problematic. Oh and I’ve heard that he gets really soft treatment in there and that he throws Super Bowl parties in his cell. Have you seen the musical, Chicago?” she laughs mirthlessly. “Like that.
“But look: it’ll be up to the parole officers. All I know is that we went in and we fought hard every single day to the point where I ate and breathed and slept the case. I gave it every fibre of my being and although in the past I have said I felt guilty that the killer was never brought to justice, that implied that I didn’t fight hard enough. No, what I really felt was horribly badly for the families I couldn’t deliver justice to. And I always will.”
Without A Doubt, with a new foreword byMarciaClark, is available as an e-book on Amazon.com. Blood Defense byMarciaClark will be published by Thomas & Mercer on May 1 (£8.99). To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visitbooks.telegraph.co.uk
