O is for OJ Simpson.
O is for OJ Simpson. Well… so after last week, I decided to put this in. Simpson was my first case. I started following in February 1995, and continued following cases to this day, with quite a long break in between. I did follow the civil trial, but without cameras, that was harder to do back then. I only got to watch about 30-35% of the case back in 1995, because well… I’m a blind person. OK OK, I know that’s a strange way of putting it. I had to stay after school to do mobility lessons. I won’t talk about that here because it isn’t relevant, but I have a lot to say on why that whole thing mostly didn’t work for me. I also had to go on a family trip to Hawaii during the trial, and stay at a resort with no TVS in the rooms. Before I found out that slight fact, about the TVS, I wanted to go, after that, not so much. Not at all, actually. I got to go back in 2003, when I wasn’t following a case, and it was much more fun for me! During the innitial pendency of the case, I was 11, turning 12. Given that fact, and the fact that I only saw around 30-35% of it, or it was a fairly small portion, I decided to go back and revit Simpson. I knew the trial was long, and that it would be quite an undertaking. I did this in 2022, while following Depp V Heard. That took place in Virginia, which was in the Eastern timezone. After that was over each day, I wasn’t following anything else, so I didn’t have much anything going on after that. It took me 5 months to complete the entire Simpson trial. Breaks were taken out in Court TV’s archive, and in the recorded version I was watching on Youtube, which is surprisingly good quality, but has major gaps. I did not do this straight through. I put the trial on pause to follow a couple 2022 cases. Had I not done that, I probably would’ve gotten through it in 3-4 months. I won’t talk much about what I found, but the thing was a mess, and it was made that way by both sides. No, the media was not complicit in that one. both sides definitely made it worse by talking to the press, but that’s their choice. I continue to research to this day. We’re very close to the 30th anniversary of June 12th, which is the date the murders happened. After I found out Simpson died a week ago today, I went to the trial subreddit, and noticed that it was having an influx of users join. Since 2022, I’ve thought about doing something with the case. It’s my belief that all original court documents need to be released, in both cases. In order to more effectively advocate for this, I’m thinking about blogging through the entire archive next year. This will likely take more than 5 months. In order to more effectively do so, I would set up a domain that I’m not using right now, but when I registered it, I intended to use it for purposes like these..