‘I Always Loved Her’ O.J. Simpson Testifies He Never Struck His Former Wife

The accusations came in a sudden rapid-fire barrage at day’s end: You had gloves, you had a hat, you had sweats, you had a knife. You confronted Nicole Brown Simpson and you killed her. And you killed Ronald Goldman.

Uncowed and unprovoked, O.J. Simpson turned to look directly at the stone-faced jury as he denied, under oath, every dark act attributed to him.

“That is absolutely not true,” Simpson said, emphatically denying again and again every new line in the sinister portrait of him as a murderer.

Testifying in open court for the first time about the double killing that made him the most famous murder defendant of the decade, Simpson said he had never done anything worse than “rassle” with his ex-wife and denounced any evidence to the contrary, including entries in the dead woman’s diary, as lies.

“This was a woman I love today,” he told predominantly white jury of seven women and five men. “I always loved her.”

Sighing frequently into the witness stand microphone and looking tense but poised in a quiet gray suit, Simpson delivered more than four hours of baritone testimony in a performance considered the dramatic high point of his civil trial. It will likely be the deciding factor in whether he is found liable of wrongful death and fined some unspecified amount of money that could ruin him financially.

Simpson was acquitted last fall of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. It is their relatives who have now brought suit.

Because he chose not to testify at his criminal trial, Simpson’s testimony Friday gave his accusers their first chance to grill him publicly about allegations that he had abused his ex-wife and about inconsistencies in his statements to police after the murders and in his 11 days of depositions before the civil trial.

Throughout much of his morning testimony, an enlarged photograph of Nicole Brown Simpson’s battered face was projected on a screen at the front of the Santa Monica courtroom.

Daniel M. Petrocelli, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, began by focusing on the allegations of spousal abuse rather than on the night of the murders, subjecting Simpson to a barrage of tightly worded questions designed to yield little more than yes or no answers in exchanges like this:

“How many times did you strike Nicole?”

“Never,” Simpson said.

“How many times did you slap her?’

“Never.”

“How many times did you kick her?”

“Never.”

“How many times did you beat her?”

“Never.”

“And if Nicole said you hit her she’d be lying, is that true?”

At that point Simpson’s lead defense lawyer, Robert Baker, objected, but Simpson had said “Yes.”

Simpson’s denials contradicted what police, friends of Nicole Brown Simpson and others have said on the subject; at Simpson’s criminal trial, prosecutors listed 59 incidents of domestic abuse.

Simpson pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of spousal abuse in 1989, receiving a suspended sentence, after police found his wife bruised, bloodied and cowering in the bushes on New Year’s Day.

In 1993, Nicole Brown Simpson called 911 during an incident in which Simpson broke down her door. Soon before she died, she called a battered women’s shelter to express fears that he was stalking her.

Simpson, who will return to the stand Monday, asserted later in the day that his ex-wife had lied in her diary when she wrote that he made threats larded with obscenities to inform on her to the IRS.

She also wrote that he warned she would “pay for” hanging up on him once; that, too, Simpson said, was a lie.