Real Meaning Of Simpson Case Lost

Perhaps now we can remember what the O.J. Simpson story was all about.

Because, God knows, we had forgotten.

It became a referendum on black and white, a litmus test of race relations in this country.

It became an exorcism of police prejudice and corruption inflicted on African-Americans.

It became a dialogue about defense and prosecution tactics, about the quality of justice for rich and poor, about the special privileges as well as the profound disadvantages of fame.

It became a chance for craven self-promotion for endless hustlers and hangers-on, a national orgy of celebrity as we ordained new stars: Marcia Clark, Kato Kaelin, Johnnie Cochran.

The point of the O.J. Simpson story was so distorted that I’d been wondering for days how to cover the civil trial verdict when it came in.

Where could I go to get a fresh perspective - if there were such a thing?

The possibilities seemed obvious - a campus, a bar, anywhere there’d be black and white people together to see if they’d react differently this time.

And then I realized with a jolt that I’d forgotten what the story really was about.

It was supposed to be a national teach-in, a chance for enlightenment, a serious look at something long misunderstood.

Domestic violence, not race.

Remember that?

Remember the hundreds of people who flooded hotlines right after the murders, battered women and their families who realized, perhaps for the first time, that batterers often become killers?

Remember the women who jammed shelters in record numbers the summer after the murders, fleeing for their lives?

Remember the revelations that had the potential to end all the misconceptions about domestic violence?

But the criminal trial ended it all, silencing the discussion and turning it to issues of race.

The buzz on the talk shows was about rifts between lawyers, about judicial demeanor, about payback for years of police brutality. It rarely was about domestic violence.

“There was a time I really believed the one positive about this case was that it was an educational tool about domestic violence,” Joan Mintz Ulmer of Women Against Abuse said this week.

But “it seemed to have focused on everything else.”

The civil trial did, indeed, remind us that this case was about a man who had beaten his wife and then killed her - but it seemed to generate more interest in Bruno Magli shoes than anything else.

Because by then, the damage had been done. The Simpson case already had left its imprint on our national psyche.

We have new household names: Robert Shapiro, Christopher Darden, Lance Ito. The slimy parasites who have made a living off of O.J. Simpson, we know those names, too - Faye Resnick, Geraldo Rivera, all the rest of them.

But do we know the name of Eunice Stevens?

Her husband was arrested for killing her on Sept. 9, 1995, in their home in Philadelphia. She was found with her neck almost severed, with defensive wounds on her hands and arms.

And do we know the name of Stefan Stromberg?

Her husband was arrested after she and her mother were slaughtered in a Germantown, Pa., apartment last April.

Advocacy groups argue that a woman is battered in the United States every 15 seconds - by her husband, boyfriend or live-in partner.

I don’t trust the statistics. But if the numbers are wrong, the heartbreak isn’t.

The hotlines at battered women’s shelters are quiet again. The shelters no longer are overcrowded. The phones at advocacy organizations no longer ring off the hook with media inquiries.

In the criminal trial, the jury convicted Mark Fuhrman of racism and the Los Angeles Police Department of corruption. Nicole Brown Simpson was merely an afterthought.

But thanks to the civil jury, she and all the women she symbolizes finally were vindicated. Some sanity and common sense finally were brought to bear on this ugly and sickening case.

Perhaps now we can remember the lesson Nicole Brown Simpson was meant to teach us. Perhaps now we can remember what the O.J. Simpson story was all about.

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