The O.J. Simpson Trial: Paula Barbieri Part 1

Sarah: I think that on the Simpson trial zodiac, you are a Barry Scheck with a Marcia Clark rising.

Mike: I had a Marcia Clark tagline. 

Sarah: Yeah. Because I told you we were doing Marcia Clark and then I sprung Paula Barbieri on you. Yeah. You're going to roll with it like a low rent, nineties, daytime talk show host.

Mike:  I'm trying to say something that isn't misogynistic. 

Sarah: Maybe that's the tagline, “Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we try to say something that isn't misogynistic.” What are the misogynistic things that are like flicking through your head?

Mike: No, just like I was going to say like the, where like the mistresses of history get to be the wives of the next or something, but that's fucking terrible.

Sarah: I think you’re off to  a good start. I think you're getting there. How about where the mistresses of history speak? Because there's nothing pejorative  about being a mistress.

Mike: That's true. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where women who co-star in men's lives get to finally star in their own. 

Sarah: There it is. 

Mike: I have had this episode sprung upon me and I have not had time to prepare a tagline.

Sarah: You don't have to do anything. You just have to lay back and let me tell you about the nineties. That's your whole job. How hard is that?

Mike:  I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post. 

Sarah: My name is Sarah Marshall, and I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. Although honestly, at this moment, I'm really putting most of my time into this podcast. So how do I say just like a second thing about myself? My name's Sarah Marshall and I'm sitting on a sheepskin in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Mike: So today we are talking about Paula Barbieri. 

Sarah: We're going to do 14 episodes on the OJ Simpson…

Mike: Thing. 

Sarah: I don’t know. More and more I see this as a Greek tragedy. I think we're going to talk about the OJ Simpson tragedy. And it's a tragedy, not only was there a senseless murder of two people, but everyone who became involved in this event, as a trial, as a media frenzy, emerged diminished in some way. And Elizabeth Wurtzel, who I gave a hard time in the last episode for being so weirdly unsympathetic to Nicole's candles, also has a great line talking about the trial, which is, ‘never before have so many people looked so bad for so little’. That's the OJ Simpson trial. 

Mike: So this episode is like the period between the murder and the trial-ish. 

Sarah: Yeah, there's basically a six month period, after OJ is taken into custody, before trial begins, when an incredible amount of media coverage takes place. There's an incredible amount of speculation, an incredible amount of anticipation, unless I'm really missing something, no one is orchestrating these things from the top down, but you can kind of see how past scandals are being improved upon as the nineties progress. Partly because the sophistication of the media covering them and the invasiveness of the media and America has seen the first gavel to gavel coverage of a criminal trial in the United States, which is the Pam Smart case, in New Hampshire. Which was broadcast locally, and people with switchover from soap operas to watch it. Like it bumped actual programming. Like this is one of the very early instances of people noticing the viability of reality tv.

Mike: Well, let's dig in. Where should we start?

Sarah:  Mike, tell me, what do we know so far about Paula Barbieri based on what I've told you on this podcast? 

Mike: Literally, all I know is what you told me last episode, which is that Paula Barbieri is a lady who looks like Julia Roberts, and who briefly dated OJ Simpson when he was separated -  or I guess divorced - from Nicole Brown Simpson. That's all.

Sarah: Was your assumption that if she was around pre-murder, she would not be around post?

Mike: It kind of was.

Sarah: It's like you don't know straight women. And yet you talk to one, like all the time. The reason that I want to start off talking about how all this looked to Paula Barbieri is that, of all the people in the story, she was one of the only people who had unguarded access to OJ Simpson immediately following the murder. 

Here's what Dominick Dunne writes after the criminal trial about Paula Barbieri in one of his later Vanity Fair columns. “Paula Barbieri, Simpson's erstwhile girlfriend, has reportedly signed a $3 million book deal with Little Brown. Since Barbieri never achieved the star status of Cindy Crawford or Naomi Campbell and the modeling profession, it seems highly unlikely that any publisher would pay such a sum for her life story unless there was a clear understanding that she had something very saleable to write, or have written for her, about her former lover. Their sexual union was said to be extraordinary. The sounds of their lovemaking in Robert Kardashian's house on the night before Nicole's funeral, according to an inside source, woke up the household. Barbieri’s real value to the overall story, however, is that she knows what Simpson thought and said about Nicole in the weeks and days before he killed her. Just the night before, they went to a black tie party in Bel-Air together. She broke up with him the next morning, the day of the murders, and went to Las Vegas. But after the news of the murders, she returned immediately and stayed in Kardashian’s house with OJ. She was present during the crucial four days between the murders and the freeway chase.” 

And then Larry Schiller, who wrote one of the 700 books about the OJ Simpson trial is quoted by Dominick Dunne saying, “I can understand Paula getting that kind of money. She's got all the sex to talk about, which sells, and she was there when the lawyers talked to OJ, both at the house and in jail. She was always reading the Bible or writing her Christmas cards, and listening. She knows a lot, and she's not bound by the attorney client privilege.” What do you think about the Dominick Dunne description of Paula?

Mike:  I mean, like he was going for a little like, oh, she's just a model and now she's cashing in, kind of thing. Which like, whatever people can cash in on things. I don't give a shit.

Sarah:  Well, and let's talk about this because I've been thinking about the cashing in accusation and that's been a theme in our show, too. So, this book comes out in 1997. Let me read a snarky review of it to you. 

Mike: This is from Amazon?

Sarah: Uh, no, Michael, this is from Entertainment Weekly. 

Mike: Oh, like a published, like a real review. 

Sarah: Yeah, a real review. Like I'm talking this was before the way to understand consensus about something wasn't to look at Twitter. The before time, the long, long ago. “Ignore the fact that OJ Simpson is now a quaint anachronism in the post princess Diana age.” What a weird thing to say, “Who cares if nearly every OJ friend, foe, lawyer, prosecutor, Heiberg journalist and tabloid hack has already cashed in with their contributions to the remainder bins. That's no reason to ignore this book, the one that finally tells us” drumroll, please, “what OJ was like in bed. Of course, were it not for the $3 million advance Paula Barbieri received for The Other Woman, My Years With OJ Simpson, she could have saved herself the travel of writing 312 pages and issued a simple statement about Simpson's sexual prowess. I want to tell you, she might've said he's not really that great. A simple thumbs down? No chance, especially when Barbieri saw the opportunity to turn her pedestrian life story and doom stint as one of Simpson's numerous non-Heisman trophies and to the stuff of romance novels. Oddly, Barbieri glosses over her disappointment with Simpson's quote, humdrum and ritualized lovemaking. The thought had exhilarated me more so than the act itself, I'm afraid, she writes. Yet I wasn't disappointed. It's hard to explain. This sets the killing tone for the rest of the book. Barbieri broods about Simpson’s possible guilt, accuses him of infidelity and describes his rages, including one time he grabbed a cell phone from her, knocking it out of her hand and quote hurting her yet. She never seems truly troubled by any of it. His quote, ‘sheer animal magnetism and their mutual affinity for John Gray’s Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus were apparently enough to offset double murder charges, Simpson's violent temper, and his other women. Barbieri’s own father had once broken her mother's ribs, she says, and that may be why she returned to Simpson after their many breakups and stuck by him when he was on trial. For the first time she had mixed doubts about his innocence. But even her family can't excuse her extraordinary, Nicole-like inability to truly write this guy off.” 

I want to stay in that final sentence. Like let's, I'm going to say it again. We're going to like diagram this thing. “But even her family history can't excuse her extraordinary Nicole-like inability to truly write this guy off.”

Mike: It just seems very illiterate about how domestic abuse works.

Sarah:  Right. I mean, that's how I would characterize it. It's like, first there's the idea that Paula - and implicitly Nicole - need to be excused for their inability to break things off with OJ Simpson, right? Like they need to be forgiven by the public, by somebody, like they're guilty of something. And like, it is an inability to end things with a controlling man. Like, why are they the villains that we have to beneficently forgive? What’s that about? 

Mike: Right. It's also fucked up because like, what appears to be the case is that when Nicole left him, he killed her. So being like, “why didn't she leave him?” is like, maybe she had information that turned out to be fucking true. That like leaving him was a threat to her life, which I think it's pretty safe to say that it was so it's weird to be like, oh, she should have left him. Like she did. She took your advice and then she got fucking murdered. So like, maybe now is not the time to be like, oh, what took her so long. Like what the fuck? 

Sarah: Yeah. The thing about cashing in, it's like, of course it's always media that is accusing people who are friends of some participant in a trial, or family members, or lawyers writing books, or witnesses selling their stories. It's always media that accused them of cashing in. And it's like, your whole industry is based on harvesting the trauma of random citizens. And every day you go to the story mines and turn human lives into a commodity called narrative. And this is like, this is the last $3 million she's going to make. Like, it's not like this book came out when she was a 30 year old model who had essentially sacrificed a couple of the last reliably profitable years of her life to a guy who was going through a trial.

Mike: Is she his girlfriend during the trial? Did they continue dating? 

Sarah: That’s a very good question. And it's one that she and Christopher Darden, who's one of the prosecutors, come to blows about. Because Paula Barbieri and OJ Simpson get together in May 1992. So like at the moment, basically that OJ and Nicole separation is getting serious. And so from the beginning, he's super serious about her. 

So Dominick Dunne is covering OJ Simpson’s trial for Vanity Fair. He's essentially a member of the Greek chorus in this long tragedy. And he does this wonderful thing in his Vanity Fair coverage where he literally will put in, for the most part, unattributed quotes into his OJ coverage that do feel like you're hearing from the whispers of a Greek chorus, or just the whispering gossip of Los Angeles. And for the most part fancy, rich, white Los Angeles people, like people in society who regard Faye Resnick as new money, although Dominick Dunne thinks rather highly of Faye Resnick. And so one piece of early Paula Barbieri coverage is just Dominick Dunne's coverage of the whispers about Paula Barbieri, which is “Bob Evans knows Paula Barbieri. I heard that Paula Barbieri was with Michael Bolton at the Mirage in Vegas on the night of the murder. If Paula had been there, I bet Nicole could never have been killed that night. He didn't have any place to go.”

Mike: What?

Sarah:  Unpack that for me.

Mike: What the fuck is that?  

Sarah: I don't know. What is it?

Mike: Like, how do we blame women for this? Like how do we reach so far around a corner to blame a woman for this somehow?

Sarah:  There's a lot of weird logical twists here where even in, and who knows what this person is trying to say. But throughout this, when people are trying to defend OJ’s innocence, they will often inadvertently say something that suggests his guilt. 

Mike: What the fuck? Where are we in time now when she gets introduced?

Sarah:  Well, Paula is part of the OJ Simpson coverage from the beginning. 

Mike: Oh really? Okay. So she's like kind of known as his girlfriend from day one.

Sarah: Yeah, because she had been publicly linked to him before. He was photographed with her in a black tie event on the night before the murders. And I’m going to show you a photo. This is on the back cover of Paula's book, The Other Woman: My Years With OJ Simpson, A Story of Love, Trust, and Betrayal. And here's the picture of them that night. 

Mike: Wow. Okay. 

Sarah: What do you think? 

Mike: He looks very handsome. 

Sarah: He does have an enormous head. People mention this a lot and it's like, it really is a big head.

Mike: Yes. And she's wearing a beautiful gold dress. She's gorgeous, beaming. She has brown curly hair. You're now accidentally scanning down to her boobs. And now I'm looking at her boobs.

Sarah:  I'm trying to smoothly pan down. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, she's super attractive. She's beautiful. I don't know if I think she looks like Julia Roberts, particularly, but she's super pretty.

Sarah: She doesn't look uncannily like Julia Roberts. Yeah. I think it's because it's a way at the time of being like, oh, she highly resembled someone who's very highly prized by Hollywood right now. Like she's a grade A, top shelf woman. 

Mike: But so, uh, should we walk through her relationship with OJ, or should we start with the murder? Where should we start?

Sarah:  Let’s actually, let's start Paula Barbieri’s story the way Paula starts it in her book, which came out in 1997. Which starts with Paula on June 12th, feeling that after two tumultuous years with OJ Simpson in an on again off again relationship, she's finally ready to move on. And she's finally met a man who makes her feel excited and happy and like she could really fall in love again. And his name is Michael Bolton. 

Mike: Really? Wow. 

Sarah: I just want to warn you, the celebrity cameos are going to get out of control in this episode and they're going to stay that way. Can we talk about, I've been thinking about this a lot. Can we talk about who Michael Bolton was? Who was he? Because I think people who have no memory of the nineties probably weren't exposed to Michael Bolton, and like, that's nice for them. 

Mike: Michael Bolton was somebody, he's like an adult contemporary music star. Who it seems like every culture needs a sort of like a whipping boy, like the least cool person imaginable. That was Michael Bolton. 

Sarah: Right. But also that he was that because he was so big. So the thing about Michael Bolton, the way you always would recognize his voice, is that he would be singing about this like very melodramatically emotional content, but in this like very craggy, like Batman voice. Do you know what I mean? Can you hear Michael Bolton then your head?

Mike: No, because I don't think I ever actually heard or, I'm sure I've heard his songs in like elevators, but I can't like name a Michael Bolton song. 

Sarah: Well, Mike, I have a treat for you. 

Mike: Oh no. Don't make me listen to a Michael Bolton song.

Sarah:  Because Paula Barbieri met Michael Bolton when she was in a music video for one of his songs.

Mike: Are you going to make me watch it?

Sarah: So we have  to watch it! So let me first read to you Paula's account of her relationship with Michael Bolton. Paula writes “On the morning of June 12th, 1994, I nearly skipped into LAX for my flight to Las Vegas. I felt healthy and strong for the first time in months. I was 27 years old, but I bubbled like a teenager, like a girl in a new dress, ready to be kissed for the first time.” 

Mike: Okay. So this is the day of the murder. So on the day that Nicole gets killed that morning, Paula flies to Las Vegas. Right. 

Sarah: Yes. “OJ and I had been together for the past two years. We'd had a love affair to pop a thermometer. I shared more of myself with OJ then I ever thought I could share with anyone. I believed I knew him, body and soul, as well as a woman can know a man. But OJ had proven me wrong. He'd lie to me more than once until my trust had crumbled. Even as he swore to me I was the only one, I had a fair suspicion that he'd been with other women, including his ex-wife, Nicole.”

Mike: That sounds like a reasonable suspicion.

Sarah: Yeah. So we know that this is very reasonable. “We were fighting every other day. I couldn't eat or sleep. I lost my usual sparkle at my modeling jobs. You could see it in the photographs. OJ was sapping my life away. Until early that morning of June 12th when I left a 15 minute speech on OJ’s voicemail, what the press would later call a Dear John message. I had to save myself and I did it the only way I knew how. I couldn't afford to give OJ a chance to beguile or seduce me yet again. The year before, the first time we broke up, OJ had walked away from me. Now it was my turn, and this time I'd vowed it would be for keeps. I made explicit what we'd both known for some time, we were through. Now, I was off to see someone new, a man I've been thinking about for months, Michael Bolton.”

Mike: Incredible. 

Sarah: So she goes on to say that, “She made a Michael Bolton video that shot on February 14th, 1994, after she's sitting there sadly thinking about the two years that she's sacrificed to her relationship with OJ. And they film a video for Michael Bolton’s song, Completely. The video that told the story of a man, Michael, who falls in love with a girl while watching her practice her ballet from his apartment across the street. The girl already had a boyfriend, who reminded me a lot of OJ. He's very charismatic and lights up a  room, but he isn't true. You're finally together, the director said simply as we moved into the closing scene, shot under a Hollywood rain. My eyes met Michaels and I felt mesmerized, swallowed up into my character. As I walked toward Michael, I spontaneously shed my raincoat. I had only some very scanty underwear on beneath it. That was how I embraced him, completely.” 

Remember the song is called Completely, “With total abandon, with all of my need and desire. My improvisation took everyone by surprise, run the video on freeze frame, and you'll see Michael's brief double-take, professional that he is. He instantly recovered to meet me in a melting kiss. I threw my arms around his neck and drew one knee up against his hip. My eyes were close to the rain and the moment. I lost track of time and place.”

Mike:  I mean, that's lovely. It's also funny that like, wow, what a professional. Michael Bolton like made out with this extremely hot woman, due to professionalism. 

Sarah: You are having the experience that I had been having the entire time that I've been reading this book, which is like, does Paula know what she's saying?

Mike: I know! But then there's also the thing of like, no women never sort of quite believe how beautiful they are. Like of course Michael Bolton wants to make out with her.

Sarah:  Okay. And so now it's the time now that you have heard Paula's experience of this video and of Michael Bolton. I would like us to watch this video.

Mike: I was hoping to distract you, so you'd forget about that. But, okay. 

Sarah: Nope. That normally would work, but not this time.

Mike: I think again, like I always thought people were like a little overblown-ishly mean to Michael Bolton. He wasn't like, you know, burning books in the street or like. 

Sarah: Yeah,  that’s true. At the same time you haven't watched this video yet. I was watching this video and listening to the song and Paula is like, this is an idea of romance and love that resonates with me, and this is what I want. And I was like, hmm, what does Paula want? So like watch this video and think about what Paula wants and if maybe Paula deserves better from American culture. That's my question.

Mike:  Okay. Wait, so what am I googling? Completely? Oh, there it is. That was easy. It's in like the iMovie sepia filter. Oh, is that her? 

Sarah: Yeah, that's her. 

Mike: Oh, wow. She's like super pretty. She does kind of look like Julia Roberts.

Sarah:  She does. She's clearly like a professional, beautiful person. Like look how shiny her hair is.

Mike: Amazing. We're now cutting to Michael Bolton, who has the thing of like, this is why, it has to be why everybody hated him. Was it he's balding but he has really, really, really long hair, which is just like a weird aesthetic choice. 

Sarah: But like, let's listen to his voice, though.

Mike: Oh, it is  kind of raspy. So now she's dancing. I mean, the thing is if you clean him up a little bit, he'd be like wildly attractive. 

Sarah: You're right.

Mike:  If it wasn't for the fucking hair, I mean, the hair is just atrocious. 

Sarah: No one intervened. Now he's playing baseball with youths. Paula Barbieri is just  a neighborhood model, like she saw him and he's playing baseball with the kids.

Mike: Oh. And they're making eyes at each other like they’re in a fucking gay bar.

Sarah:  Also, like he's supposed to be this kind of greaser, but he lives in a furniture showroom where he plays the piano all day.

Mike:  I can't believe you're doing this to me. 

Sarah: I know. I just feel like you have to know what people consumed at this time. And they were like, I am listening to Michael Bolton, and this is what America has offered to me. 

Mike: It is actually amazing that this was popular. 

Sarah: Also look at what they have Paula wearing. She has on like a leotard with like the-Okay now here's the coat scene. This is improv.

Mike: This is the coat scene? I want to see him double-take.

Sarah:  I don't see that happening. 

Mike: I don't see it now. And now he's like kissing in between her boobs, because he's like, he's really professional.

Sarah: I feel like Michael Bolton could have written that scene.

Mike: So now they've made love. Oh, it's interesting that he has his shirt off, but she's still fully closed. 

Sarah: That's how sex happened in the nineties. Women kept their leotards on.

Mike: Oh my God. It seems to be winding down. I've never been happier. I don't know. It's still, it's still happening. Oh was that it? Okay. That was a nightmare.

Sarah:  Tell me how you feel about all that.

Mike: It's the nineties-est thing you've ever made me do.

Sarah: To this point. Yeah. What really stands out to me about that song is that the final word of a song in this kind of a like croony song is important, right. And Mart of your World from the little mermaid, the last word is ‘world’, because that's what the song is about. You know, it's like the last idea that you want to convey. The last word and the last note that he hangs onto in the song is ‘me’ and Paula quotes the lyrics of her book. She quotes the part that says, I want to give my heart completely to someone who will completely give their heart to only me.

Mike:  I'm seeing it in all caps now.

Sarah: Yeah. And it's just like, okay. At best that's a neutral and at worst, you're talking about wanting to own someone. 

Mike: Right. But so what this says to me, to link it back OJ, is it like she seems kind of naive or like, she seems like someone who isn't necessarily super, I mean, she's kind of like Nicole in a way, right? She's kind of young, isn't super savvy, isn't super cynical about men. I mean, it seems like she's very open-hearted and so does that characterize her relationship with OJ? Just this kind of like we're into each other. It's all going to be fine, kind of mode?

Sarah:  It's interesting. So they get together when she's 25 and he's 44, which is a big age difference and a big power difference. But at the same time, like 25 is a world away from 18. And she's been on her own since she was a teenager. She's been modeling since she was a teenager. She was traveling alone in Europe, hanging out with Roman Polanski when she was 17 years old. So she's been around the block. She was a teenage model. She's hung out with a lot of sex criminals. And so by the time she meets OJ, I think that she believes, you know, an incredible amount of what he tells her. 

Mike: Oh yeah, because you said last episode that he's a consummate liar. So I'm assuming that he's not telling her very much accurate information about his relationship with Nicole and what's happening.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. Version of OJ's relationship with Nicole is going to sound different to you than the version we've heard to this point. And so at the same time that she believes a lot of what he's saying, she has some sense of what maybe not a healthy relationship, but a survivable relationship is like. And she says immediately after the murders that he has never been physically violent with her.

Mike:  Interesting. 

Sarah: And that seems to be true. And I think it's also really interesting to talk about here as we talk about what Paula says did happen in the relationship, like what we can see in this relationship that's consistent with the way that he treated Nicole. Even as that behavior didn't, according to Paula's version, get nearly to the degree that it got to with Nicole. I think it's part of the same spectrum. Okay. But I think that it's at different places.

Mike: Meaning that he was controlling and capricious and jealous, but it just never escalated to the physical violence.

Sarah:  Yeah. Or like it got, it got physical, but in a, not to nearly the same degree, you know, or that there was jealousy and controllingness, but also not to the same degree. You know? Because I think the way he treated Nicole, on the way we talked about his treatment of her, it seems to me, like he felt in some way that she controlled some part of his ego. I mean, I think with the way that his relationship with Nicole started, I think it's so important that she was 18 years old and barely out in the world at the time. And like, if it hadn't been her, you know, that he found and who took that role in his life, I think it would have been some other girl who was out on like wobbly little baby deer legs.

Mike: Right. Right. And so how does that contrast with Paula? Just Paula has more power when they meet, or…

Sarah:  I think that as an adult when they meet, but also, I just the fact that Nicole has never left that place in his life, you know? And if you still are fixated on spying on someone else, then like how much energy can you really bring to, I mean, and of course he did follow Paula around, but like not as menacingly, right. Or not that we know of. 

Mike: Right. Like you said, like when he's not with Nicole, he goes back to Paula, but then he sort of leaves her for Nicole, right?

Sarah: Yeah. And so she has left this message basically saying, I can't keep doing this anymore. Like you only come to me when Nicole rejects you and like you betrayed my trust enough times at this point that like, I just can't like, I'm protecting myself. I can't do this anymore. And then she goes to Las Vegas with Michael Bolton.

Mike: So she gets together with OJ. She leaves him the voicemail saying I can't do this. She's seeing the pattern with Nicole. She leaves him. She goes to Vegas, and she hooks up with Michael Bolton?

Sarah:  Yes. So it's June 12th, 1994.

Mike: Is that the day of the murders? 

Sarah: Yes. Paula Barbieri broke up with OJ that morning in a voicemail and then flew to Las Vegas to be with Michael Bolton. So first of all, Paula, when she gets to Vegas goes to see Michael play softball, which apparently, he does a lot. He's a powerful man who really fills out a Jersey, according to her book.

Mike: He has the haircut of someone who plays a lot of softball. I'm sorry.

Sarah: I don’t think that's really an insult. 

Mike: I'm sure he's such a nice guy. I feel bad.

Sarah: It's not to imply that someone plays a lot of softball. It's a very good hobby. “When Michael went up to the plate and hit the ball hard, I whooped and cheered for him. It took me back to my adolescents in Panama City, Florida when my girlfriends and I had crushes on the community college athletes and the dorms across from my house.” 

And so she goes and meets up with Michael and she's wearing a Chanel style dress with a pleated skirt and a gold link chain at the waist. ”I felt very pretty that night. I wanted Michael to like what he saw”. And excuses herself later in the evening to check her voicemail and sees that she has actually, I don't even know if the phrase, if the word ‘voicemail’ existed back then. She excuses herself to check her phone messages and sees that she has three messages from OJ. The first message says, “Girl, what is it now? I thought we were going to fill the house with babies.” She writes much later. “OJ would testify that he'd hoped I could take him to the airport for a late flight to Chicago. Thank heaven I wasn't around. Had I given OJ that ride, I would have landed in some very hot legal water.” 

Which I have written in the margin, I don't know Paula. “The third call was different. ‘I understand what you mean’, OJ said. His tone was darker, softer, resigned. The message unnerved me. Had OJ accepted our breakup or was this just another ploy to put me off my guard? What would his next move be? During OJ’s  civil trial, the plaintiffs would place into evidence a phone log. It suggested that he'd left the third message at 10:03 PM, roughly half an hour before two people died at 875 South Bundy drive.” 

Mike: Wow. So he's like drunk dialing Paula right before he goes and does it, according to the prosecutor's timeline?

Sarah: I don't know if he was drunk at the time, but he, you know, yeah, he was calling her within half an hour of when the murders took place. 

Mike: Wow. Okay. 

Sarah: I mean, what do you make of that if we're talking about his frame of mind?

Mike: I want to know what you think. All I have is ‘mm okay’. That’s all I have! 

Sarah:  That's why I asked you, I've been talking this whole time.

Mike:  I'm in suspense. 

Sarah: I'm the one who's running out of spit here, man.

Mike: I mean, it just shows up all over the map he was, it's interesting. 

Sarah: How so? 

Mike: Because if we believe that he killed them, which I think we both do, it means that like, at the same time, he's in a jealous rage against Nicole. He's also kind of trying to get back with someone else.  It's just weird that people's brains work that way. That you can hold those two ideas in your mind at the same time. That like, why doesn't Nicole Love me anymore? And also like, yeah, I think it's going to work out pretty well with this other chick. Like it's yeah. I mean, it's stupid to say it doesn't make any sense because none of it makes sense, but like, it doesn't make any sense. It's just weird.

Sarah:  To me it makes sense because it seems like all of the factors that combine that day, when you look at each of them in turn, you know, the on again, off again, reconciliation between them, the fact that she had finally broken things off with him, the fact that he had reported her to the IRS, which really turned her against him, the fact that she was looking at attempting this move to Malibu, which would mean that she wouldn't be living five minutes away from him anymore, that she, you know, was leaving his control. You know, you look at all of those factors converging and then the events of that night, him not being asked to come to dinner and being explicitly barred from joining the family after the recital. 

And then add to that, the fact that Paula had broken up with him in a voicemail. And like, did that tip the scales in favor of him committing murder? I don't know. I think it's like, I think it's interesting that it's hard to talk about that potentially being a factor in the murders, without it feeling like we're blaming this poor woman who just tried to break up with her horrible boyfriend.

Mike:  Yeah. Which seems like a very prudent thing for her to be doing.

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And like, I don't know. I think it brings us to the area where I think it becomes clear to us that centering conversations around blame is not the most useful thing for us to be doing. I think that we can talk about, you know, what was everything that was going on and OJ Simpson's head on June 12th, 1994, that could have led him to drive to Nicole's house and kill her and Ron Goldman. That we can have that conversation without that, at the same time, you know, implicitly being, and whose fault is it aside from his? Let's blame a woman. You know, this is not, blame a woman, the hit board game of the 1990s. 

Mike: I think it's important to separate the person from the situation that you can say, like the situation of being broken up with his like Plan B girlfriend.

Sarah:  And who breaks up with him essentially because she knows she's the plan B girlfriend. And it's like, I'm very tired of being the Plan B girlfriend. 

Mike: Yeah. And she's smart enough to know exactly what is going on. Right. That all of his bullshit is not getting through to her, that like the situation I just got broken up with saying like that situation might have contributed to his actions later that night is different than saying, the woman who broke up with him contributed to his actions.

Sarah: Right. Which is just like a different way of thinking about our responsibility to each other than like cable news and codependent people are willing to think in. Which is like, you know, that it is not Paula's responsibility to protect OJ Simpson from himself, and all of the violence that he may be capable of. In the same way that it wasn't Nicole's responsibility to prevent him from beating her. So she gets that message and she's like, eh, whatever I'm with Michael Bolton.

Mike: Yeah. I want her to go out and just like, bang the hell out of Michael Bolton right now. I've never said that before, but I hope that's how this ends.

Sarah:  I'm sad to disappoint. According to Paula, she says, “At 2:00 AM, everyone had left the suite except Michael and me. We talked for a long while, had one last glass of champagne. Then it was really good night, as Michael had to get up early the next day to work with a celebrated song writer, Diane Warren. We had a long goodnight kiss, and I felt the same wild energy between us that I'd experienced on the set four months before, the same sweetness and mystery and raw attraction, all were present and accounted for.”

Mike: As a person who has turned down on a lot of things, because I need to get up early. I like deeply understand Michael Bolton for the first time in my life.

Sarah:  You feel like you can empathize with Michael Bolton?

Mike: It's like, this is a good thing, but I'm not going to do it because like I have shit to do tomorrow. 

Sarah: Yeah. See that's, that's what I love about doing this show. We never know who we're going to feel a strange feeling of kinship with. Today it could be Michael Bolton, tomorrow who knows. 

And so the next morning she puts on a sunshine yellow bikini and joins Michael by the pool. She writes, “When Michael caught his bodyguard ogling me and my bikini, he joked with the guy because it's, you I'll let you get away with looking at her like that. Here we go, I thought. I'd reached the phase with Michael where, you know, you really like a man, but he keeps surprising you. Michael's looks, his manner, his little turns of speech, everything was fresh and appealing.” 

What a weird moment, like there's no transition between those two things. So later in the day, her cell phone rings and it's Tom, her theatrical manager. She writes, “As soon as I heard his voice strain, nearly breaking, I got scared. ‘Something terrible has happened to Nicole’, Tom said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Go back to your room. I'll call you there’.” 

She goes to her room. She stops at the gift shop to get Marlboro Lights, which she smokes when her nerves are shot, she says. Interestingly, both Nicole and Paula smoked during their relationships with OJ and hid their smoking from him because he was a bully about it. 

Mike: That's like weirdly controlling, too. 

Sarah: “The phone was ringing as we passed through the door. ‘Turn on the television’, Tom said. Now he sounded even worse. Within 10 seconds I'd heard the nation's top news story. Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman had been found murdered near the front steps of Nicole's condo. I felt like I'd been hit in the head with a brick. I sank crying to my knees and pictures of the murder scene flashed over the TV, I prayed hysterically, please, please, please forgive me, please, please, please forgive me, please, please, please. I was pleading with a woman I'd barely known when she was alive. I was asking forgiveness from the person I despised in my most anguished hours. I had been full of resentment because she'd beaten me and taken my man away.” Isn't that amazing phrasing. ‘She'd beaten me’.

Mike:  That sucks. 

Sarah: Like the, of course that means bested in a contest, but it's like, Nicole is the one getting beaten here and Nicole's not beating anyone, you know, but it's like, because these two women are turned against each other, competing over OJ Simpson, this is the way she sees it. 

Mike: I know.  The same, like armpit of a man. You know, my whole thing with getting super bummed out when like people who should get along end up in rivalries due to bullshit. And this is pushing all my buttons of that.

Sarah:  And people who are rivals because their situations are so similar.

Mike: Yeah. Oh man. 

Sarah: And she writes, “How many times had I wished, my own awful private secret, breathed allowed to no one, that Nicole would just vanish from the face of this earth. You must be careful what you wish for. I was sickened with guilt. As I knelt before the television, nearly out of my head, I was sure of one thing, something had been taken from me that morning and I'd never get it back.” This is an interesting moment because she's propelled into such intent guilt, but then it also, like, because of that becomes about her, right. 

Mike:  I didn't want to say that cause that sounds mean, but yeah, a little bit. 

Sarah: Well, it's not, I’m not  saying it meanly, I'm saying in a like, well, that seems to be happening kind of a way. Yeah. And I, and that's what we do, right? It's like, we do find ways to make huge, terrible things happening to other people somehow about us. If it's, you know, as a way to cope. 

Mike: Humans are narcissistic creatures. And yeah, I always feel like my worst self when like some tragic, heartbreaking thing happens in like Beirut. And I'm like, I was there for two days in 2007. It was so great. But like, it's not, that's not adding anything. It just feels like you, of course feel more emotions when something happens to something that you're like connected to, even in a tangential way.

Sarah: But that's like your point of access to it.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. Like that's how humans work. 

Sarah: Yeah. So Paula immediately feels tortured with guilt because she spent the last two years thinking of Nicole as like this person who she like had hardly ever seen, who was more of an idea to her, who was this beautiful blonde distant woman who was OJ’s ex-wife, who OJ said was seeing other people, and he was seeing other people ,and they were moving on. So why was OJ going to Disneyland with Nicole and the kids? And why was Nicole showing up in New York at Christmas unannounced after previously canceling at the last minute? There's just this sense of intense territoriality, right?

Mike: I mean, she's doing the thing where like the situation is that the guy, you're seeing has a wife that he cannot break ties with, but she's transferring her anger and disappointment at the situation onto Nicole as a person. I think we all do this a lot. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. Yes. We have all been Paula at one time in our lives. Many of us have been Nicole at one time in our lives. A lot of us have been Kris Jenner or Faye Resnick. I don't even know what that means, but like it’s somewhere. The truth is out there. That's why America was so compelled by this story, right? Because it's about human relationships and romantic relationships and themes of betrayal and dependence and rage and denial. We all experience these things to some degree in our personal lives. Normally, by the grace of God, no one gets killed. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I think looking back, it's, I think people's gut reactions are behind more than we admit they are. I think that a lot of the blame of women in stories like this are, I don't want to say like, it's because men are men, but-

Sarah:  Men are men, though.

Mike: Like on a gut level, like you get where OJ is coming from in a way that you don't get where Nicole's coming from. Right? Like I have a wife, she can nag me sometimes. She sometimes makes fun of my work. She sometimes doesn't have dinner on the table. OJ represents an escalation of feelings that I have had, and so I get those feelings, whereas like a woman who sort of lives in terror, lives in constant anxiety, who's constantly tip-toeing around to not set off her boyfriend. Who's acting out that anxiety in various ways like with her sexuality, with drugs, with cuddling with Faye Resnick, with whatever like that, doesn't hit men at like a gut level. And so it's like her pain is academic and his pain is real. 

Sarah: Yeah. And we also assume that the world is for other people, the way that we experience it, and that other people are treated the way that we're treated. If you're a middle-class white person, it is an incredibly dangerous way to assume the world works. Like you will be wrong. And in a way that could have dire consequences for everyone. 

Mike: Yeah. Looking back at the nineties, I do think that those feelings are behind Amy Fisher and Monica Lewinsky in all of these scandals.

Sarah:  Tonya Harding, Anna Nicole Smith. Well, and I think what you're also saying here is it, you see men, on the whole, like American kind of white cisgender heterosexual heteronormative. I'm making kind of a wax on wax off gesture right now. I don't know why I'm opening a portal, but this kind of strain of masculinity, to be very ready to identify with the abuser and very reluctant to identify with the abused. What's interesting to me about that is that men are very abused in American society. Like men are often abused by their fathers or by male relatives. Like there's a lot of emotional abuse. A lot of physical abuse. Boys are sexually abused a lot in a way that isn't recognized culturally. Men are also abused at work a lot. Like, I think there's often a component of emotional abuse and like pressure cooker male workplace things.

Mike:  Totally. Right. I've seen Martin Scorsese movies. Yeah. 

Sarah: Right. So it's interesting to me that like men want to take on this perspective of like, I don't know what it's like to live in terror of someone. And it's like, yeah you do, it's just not consistent with your role that you're supposed to be playing in society as an adult or something like that. Right. You know, but men know what it's like to be abused. Men know what it's like to be Nicole. Gosh. So we left off with Paula. After Paula finds out that Nicole has been murdered, she checks her messages again and finds several more messages from OJ, all saying in effect, I need to talk to you right away. Please call me. 

Mike: Oh, wow. Were they after he allegedly committed the murder? 

Sarah: Yeah. Because he appears at his house at about 11:00 PM and a limo that he ordered being driven by a man named Allen Park, who will later be an important witness, takes him to the airport where he flies to Chicago. Once he reaches Chicago, he receives a phone call telling him about the murders.

Mike: Oh, okay.

Sarah:  And then flies back to LA.

Mike: So the timeline, the prosecution timeline is he kills Nicole and Ron at 10:30. Drives home, showers, I guess, and then gets in the car, flies to Chicago. And then the next day flies back.

Sarah:  There's a lot of debate surrounding the showers, I guess. And the 10:30.

Mike: I shouldn't have added that. Okay. 

Sarah: Be as vague as possible. 

Mike: I forget that every single tiny detail has been combed over.

Sarah:  Every single thing is going to be picked over, but to be as vague as possible, the prosecution narrative will be that OJ leaves the message for pilot 10:03, goes to Nicole's house, murders Nicole and Ron, drives back home, gets in his limo at about 11, and is driven by Allen Park to the airport and then catches a flight to Chicago. He's called and informed of the murders and then flies back to LA as soon as he can.

Mike: You know, what's a detail that I remember from the actual case happening and made me think that OJ did it? And I think that was like an impression that I had for the whole time. Tell me if it's true, is that the cops call up OJ and they say Nicole is dead. And he replies with, “Oh no, she's been murdered”, without them saying that to him. Is that true? Or was that just like a rumor I heard in the school yard?

Sarah:  Okay I’m going to read you a passage from Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life to answer your question. And this is the detectives calling OJ, “Phillips called the hotel at 6:05 AM and asked to be put through to OJ Simpson's room. Though he recognized the voice, the detectives still asked, ‘Is this OJ Simpson?’ ‘Yes. Who is this?’ Phillips chose his words carefully when he delivered news of Nicole's death to OJ. ‘This is detective Phillips from the Los Angeles police department. I have some bad news for you. Your ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, has been killed.’ Simpson was distraught. ‘Oh my God. Nicole is killed? Oh my God. Is she dead?’ Phillips tried to calm him. ‘Mr. Simpson, please try to get a hold of yourself. We have your children at the west Los Angeles police station. I need to talk to you about that’.” And then OJ tells him he's going to get out of Chicago on the first available flight. And then Phillips gives the phone to OJ’s oldest child from his first marriage, Arnell, who makes arrangements with him and then Toobin writes, “Phillips never spoke to Simpson again. Later, the detective found it worth noting what Simpson did not say in their brief conversation. Simpson never asked how or when Nicole had been “killed”. Phillips had not said, and Simpson did not ask, whether she had been killed in an accident or a murder.” 

So I should say that differently. The LAPD calls OJ and tells him Nicole has been killed, but they don't tell him how and he doesn't ask. 

Mike: Okay. So it's not as bad as what I heard when I was 12, but it's pretty bad. 

Sarah: Yeah. And how so? 

Mike: I don't know. I mean, as we've discussed so many times. You can't say, like, that's not how I would react if one of my loved ones was killed. Because like I have no idea how I would react if one of my loved ones was killed, but one assumes that if I had news that someone like my parents were killed in their home last night, I would want to know like, who did it? Was it a gas leak?

Sarah:  Right. I do feel like it's probably common for people to ask like how as the first question. Cause that's the thing that makes something seem real to you.

Mike: Right, right. But on the other hand, there's also much better evidence that he committed the murders.

Sarah: Right. There's other stuff there too. It's not just that. It's not just him not asking how Nicole was killed. We haven't jumped to this conclusion. So she checks her messages. She has a bunch of messages from OJ on June 13 saying, “I need to talk to you, please call me.” And a message from her mom saying whatever you do promise me that you won't go back to Los Angeles. What do you think Paula did? 

Mike: She went back to Los Angeles, I guess we knew, right? 

Sarah: Yes, we do know. That's still a good guess. Before she does that, Paula turns on her TV as millions of Americans are doing at this point and sees the first images that will be associated with the OJ Simpson trial and of OJ himself and his role in it, which is, first him arriving at his home in Brentwood, because the media is already there. And then him being handcuffed by the police who are going to take him in and interview him. So she's watching it and she writes, “It was true. OJ was a suspect. That's impossible, I thought. I couldn't imagine how OJ  could cope with what was happening. It must be tearing him apart.”

Mike:  Oh, interesting. Okay. 

Sarah: What do you think of that? 

Mike: Well, she's empathizing with him, which is interesting. So she's not thinking that he did it, immediately.

Sarah: I feel like Paul’s real reactions are going to be the opposite of what you would do. Like pretty consistently, in this. Her friend, Mickey, Michael Bolton's friend, Mickey Sherman says to her, “Did OJ ever hit you?” And she says, “No, he didn't”. And she writes, “As volatile as our relationship had been, as obsessively jealous as OJ could be, I didn't consider him a violent man. His rage had scared me once or twice, and I'd seen him go berserk in a hotel room, but that was as far as it had gone.” 

What's interesting to me about that is that it's like not the right question. Maybe it's like, has he ever hit, you know, but like, has OJ ever scared you? Yes. And I think that this is a clue that in American culture, there's still this idea that's very pervasive. That's like, anything that is not actual violence is not that serious. Mickey also tells her not to call OJ back because he might say something incriminating to her and then she'll have a legal dilemma on her hands. No one wants that. 

And she writes, “Despite Mickey's warning, I thought about calling OJ back. He had no idea where I was, and he needed to talk to me.” And so she does call him and talks to him. She thinks as he's coming home from Parker Center after he's been questioned by the police, in a  questioning that we're going to talk about in more detail in the next episode. And she says, “How are you doing”, straining to sound normal. ‘I need you’, OJ said. His voice was flat and  dull, like a bad imitation of himself. Then he asked me a question. ‘What happened to the messages I left you last night?” And she tells him she erased them, and he says, ‘Good. I don't need them to start picking on that, too.’ She writes, “That sounded reasonable to me. If the police were looking to stick these crimes on OJ, it was a terrible mistake. I wouldn't want his messages confusing things even more. I was glad that I'd erased them.”

Mike:  It's interesting that she's writing this in 1997, because this is after we've gone through the trial after whatever evidence, bloody glove, all the other stuff. So she's like in, she's like all her chips for OJ.

Sarah:  I think, regardless of how she feels in 1997, she's describing how she felt in 1994. And I think that it makes sense that you would go maybe hard in one direction. So you also like are shielding yourself from the fear that it's your fault somehow, if he did do it, which like, I don't see it as Paula's fault, but I'm pretty sure Paula sees it as Paula’s fault. Paula sees a lot of things as Paula's fault. I think it would make sense, in the position she's in to be like, he couldn't have done it. He couldn't possibly have done it. And now this man I love needs me in a way he's never needed me before.

Mike:  Hmm. It's like a sort of caretaking/rescuing kind of role.

Sarah:  Yeah. And when has OJ needed to be rescued before? So she has dinner that night. And then she calls OJ at his house in Brentwood where his sister Shirley answered the phone. She says he's in really bad shape. They've put him to bed and he's asked not to be disturbed unless Paula calls. And so Shirley puts her through to OJ. She asked how he's doing. And he says, “Every time Shirley goes out of the room, I pick up the gun. If she wasn't here, I would have done it.” And Paula says, “You can't do that. People who commit suicide don't go to heaven.” 

Mike: Interesting.

Sarah:  I think that's a very sweet detail about who she is at this time. And this is the book that she writes after she's been saved. She's like, okay, the first order of business here, we got to keep OJ from committing suicide because then he won't go to heaven. I certainly think that it's entirely possible for her to, on some level, understand that he is entirely capable of the murders and also want to make sure he doesn't go to hell. And OJ says to her, “You've got to come back. I need you.” And she writes “For me, it was a pivotal point. Once I heard OJ’s pain, my decision was made. I might've broken up with the man, but that didn't change my human obligation to him. If I didn't go back, OJ would die. It was, I thought, that simple. Besides, I was responsible here. Hadn't I wished the fatal wish?”

Mike: Wow, fuck.

Sarah: She calls her mom and tells her what she's going to do. And her mom says, he's going to kill you both. And she says, “Even as I tried to calm her, I thought to myself, that would be all right, too”. And then Michael Bolton comes in.

Mike: What? Again?

Sarah: Yes, no transition. You know, she's told her mother she's going to go be with OJ Simson. She says, “I would do what had to be done. And whatever happened to me would be okay. And then Michael came to my room, concern furrowed into his face because.” Which is already pretty furrow-y most of the time.

Mike: His face is already pretty concerned. 

Sarah: And then Michael Bolton is there. And what do you think Michael Bolton does?

Mike: Sleep with her? I keep wanting her to run away with Michael Bolton, even though I know that that's not what happened.

Sarah: Yeah. That's so sweet. It's like, you're watching a horror movie and you're like, why don’t you not split up? How about no one go into that basement. According to Paula, Michael says, “You don't realize the magnitude this is going to take”, he said. “You can't even imagine how it's going to change your life”. She says, “I can handle this”. And then Michael “softly touched my face. He witnessed me.’ I won't be able to be there for you’, he said, ‘It's too huge’.”

Mike: This is like the end of a Western

Sarah  It is! Michael Bolton softly touched my face. And then he got up onto his horse and rode away from the town he had just saved, that I was the mayor of now.

Mike: I gotta say, Michael Bolton comes off quite well in this whole narrative.

Sarah: Michael Bolton is like the unsung hero of the OJ Simpson trial. He is the one person who doesn't emerge looking worse. Michael Bolton looks much better if you know him primarily through his work and the OJ Simpson trial. 

Mike: Yeah, waking up early.

Sarah:  He's touching Paula Barbieri’s cheeks softly, before he sends her into like this nightmare. 

Mike: No kidding. I mean, she, yeah, she should have, she should have bounced. 

Sarah: I know. It's not like you'd been there.

Mike: But I also don't want to blame her. Like, it seems like it's very understandable that she didn't. I don't want to be the Entertainment Weekly person and be like, oh then why didn't you take him back? Like, it seems like he needed rescuing.

Sarah: I think you’re coming at it from a different direction, because I think what you're saying is that you want good things for Paula and you want her to have been able to be like, you know what? This is not my problem. You know, he doesn't have squatter's rights. I broke up earlier in the day. You want her to be able to move on. And I think the situation is just that she clearly wasn't ready and that she felt like she's been competing with Nicole this entire time. And now Nicole is finally gone. That doesn't mean she wanted this to happen. It doesn't mean it's her fault, but it's true. Like he used to be mostly emotionally dependent on Nicole and she could never get past that. And now Nicole isn't there anymore because he killed her. So he has to be dependent on Paula. 

Mike: And she believes him to be innocent at this point. And so she perceives it as like supporting her boyfriend through like an ordeal in which he's being blamed for this tragic event that he had nothing to do with. 

Sarah: Yeah. And even if she believed him to be guilty, you know, people, people stay in relationships with people who they know to be guilty. That happens too, you know, it's a complicated moral calculus, but I think a lot of it often has to do with feeling that someone truly needs you, because if they're in jail, you know, they do. And also, guilty people need love. I'm the first to announce that position publicly, you know.

Mike: Sure.

Sarah:  And so she flies back to LA where she's picked up by Allen Park. Who's the same limo driver who drove OJ to the airport the night of the murders.

Mike: Yes. Foreshadowing. 

Sarah: She's taken deep into San Fernando valley, deep into the valley to Robert Kardashian's house, where OJ is being kept. 

Mike: So wait, who the fuck is Robert Kardashians, are they just friends?

Sarah: Yeah. Robert Kardashian is a random Armenian millionaire who was an old friend of OJ Simpson's and who basically reactivates his law license. I don't think that's the right terminology. That sounds like superhero language, but he-

Mike: Re-animates.

Sarah: Yes. He re-animates himself as a lawyer to become a member of OJ's defense team. That he's, I think, most valuable to the defense team as an old and trusted friend of OJ.

Mike: Okay. So OJ staying at his house. And so she goes there to move in with OJ at that giant house. 

Sarah: Yeah and Robert Kardashian’s house is the de facto headquarters of the defense team right now, because OJ has already brought Robert Shapiro on board as his lawyer. And Paula actually knows Bob Shapiro from earlier because she's been a Hollywood mover and shaker for a few years now. He's kind of known as a lawyer to the stars. And she writes, “and now I was back at OJ’s side, back where I belonged.” She says she thinks a lot about the various guns OJ has, that he has guns locked in his office at home and a revolver he keeps in the car. And that this also makes her think, even if OJ was capable of killing someone, a claim I would not accept, why use a knife when he had a gun?

Mike: I mean that sounds like the internet sleuthery that happens after any terrible thing, where people are like, well, his LinkedIn profile says he used to live in Fresno. So why would he kill someone in LA? Like where it's like, you're just taking these random pieces of evidence and trying to fit them into some sort of narrative when they're actually kind of meaningless.

Sarah: Right? Like it doesn't, to me, it doesn't feel, it's not like, oh yeah, you know, because I mean, to me, the first thing I think of is like, well, killing someone with a gun isn't personal. You wouldn't kill your ex-wife who you’re still obsessed with a gun. You know, like maybe you would, but I much more strongly associate this kind of this closeup, you know, I can see the power I have over you, form of assault with the kind of domestic abuse that he's been subjecting her to for all this time where it's close up, close range battery. And the other thing that she says, and that a lot of people said is, you know, well, why would he throw away his whole life? Why would he do that? That's not logical. It doesn't make sense. He had everything, he had all the money in the world. He had fame, he had the love of the public. Like, why would he throw that away? And it's like, well, because murder, isn't a rational decision. 

Mike: Right? Why would he tease his wife about making, like, gaining too much weight? Like that's not logical, like nothing he's done so far is logical.

Sarah:  Domestic violence isn't fully either, but he did that for 15 years. But Paula just immediately goes into this mindset of like, we have to protect OJ. Like OJ might kill himself. OJ’s really fractal right now. OJ’s  in a bad place. I have to protect him and keep his spirits up and like, make sure that, you know, that he's safe. That's my only job. And that's all I have to think about. So she's at OJ’s house. OJ has come home from Nicole's viewing and the funeral will follow that. She writes “that afternoon I heard some noise at the front door and rushed to the entryway. It was OJ, shellshocked. He seemed so sad and beaten. His face was drawn. His Brawny shoulders hunched down. He looked somehow smaller than the cheerful confident man I'd left four days before. Seeing Nicole in her casket must have destroyed him.

Mike: Did he see her in the casket? I thought she was almost decapitated.

Sarah: She was, but they still had an open casket funeral for her. And he spent what people described  as  a worrying amount of time at the open casket during the viewing. So she writes, “he hugged me with more needs than strength. Like a man clinging to a life raft in the middle of the ocean.” She takes him into his room. She helps him undress. And there's a line that is just, you're just, I’ll just read it to you. “I watched him crumble into bed. That was a knife to my heart. To see the most exuberant person in the world look so helpless and vulnerable.”

Mike: I don’t know what to make of that. It's so weird.

Sarah:  It's just interesting to me, because I assume this was ghost written, there's not a ghost writer credited, but this is written in a very polished, I am a freelancer dancing as fast as I can, kind of a way. I mean, I write like that. I know how it's done. This is published by Little Brown, who knows how many people worked on this project. It's stunning to me that no one at any time in the process said, maybe we shouldn't let Paula say or the person writing as Paula say that anything was metaphorically like a knife to her anywhere 

Mike: Yeah. There should be some Control F for like a couple of keywords before they publish these books. 

Sarah: Yes, exactly. And it's just like, it is clear based on the general emotional tenor of the whole thing that she's describing and her attitude toward OJ and the way she is seeing him is that, you know, if there's any truth to this at all, she is just fixating on how wounded he is and how, how weak is and how he's a little lost lamb and he needs her. You know, and how he's being so traumatized by the horrific murder of his wife. And she's just not allowing herself to have the thought or to hear the thoughts. You know, the, the murder was so terrible because he probably committed it. 

Mike: Right. Does she ever have a conversation with him where she's like, I need to know what you were doing at 10:30 PM on June 12th?

Sarah: Not that she writes about. And what happened is that she immediately, she essentially comes out as a member of the defense. 

Mike: Comes out like publicly? Like there's media swarming around.

Sarah:  I guess. Yeah. Like her mom and Panama City, Florida is being besieged by media. 

Mike: Jeez. That was the time before all the journalists got laid off and there were still enough bodies to do stuff like that.

Sarah: They're like, let's send 30 people to Panama City Florida.

Mike: For the mom of the girlfriend. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I feel like the OJ Simpson trial was like, when unions were strong, there was just so much media work, you know, and OJ Simpson. So they're keeping OJ sedated at the Kardashians mans.

Mike: Like, medically?

Sarah:  Yeah. Dr. Saul Faerstein, a psychiatrist who the dream team has brought on, gives Paula sedatives and tells her to give OJ pill in the morning and a pill at night, and to make sure that he doesn't have access to the bottle, wink, wink.

Mike: Like a dog. 

Sarah: This is great. “Then I met the owner of the house, Robert Kardashians, who'd been out with OJ that afternoon. He was short and intense, friendly, but contained, like a character out of the godfather with some big secrets to protect. Kardashians said they'd been staying with OJ every minute. The only time OJ had been on his own was in the bathroom. Now it would be my turn.” So she's essentially guarding him. Like they have him on suicide watch and the Kardashians home and Encino.

Mike: There's interesting psychology going on here with Kardashian, too. It's a very interesting thing for like a man to do for another man. 

Sarah: He's doing what Paula’s doing. 

Mike: He's doing exactly what Paul is doing. He's going into like rescuer mode. 

Sarah: I never thought of that before.

Mike: But not for like romantic reasons. Just for like personal. I mean, I guess he's just like an empathic dude. 

Sarah: But in the way that like men seem fixated on OJ. Right. Because in the same way that when OJ met Nicole or she was like, who? What? Who's OJ, Simson? When Paula met OJ, she was like, who, what? But Robert Kardashians knows the golden age of OJ Simpson, and their friendship was forged in that time. And he feels that kind of loyalty to past OJ and the way that a lot of men seem to do.

Mike: The way you do to like John Lennon or the way that people get fixated on these like entertainment stars who are sort of larger than actual people to them.

Sarah: So she sits there that night and watches OJ sleep. She mentally plays back the answering machine message that she had left for him on Sunday morning and says to herself, “had I said the wrong thing? Had I somehow set off this terrible chain of events?”

Mike: But that assumes that he killed Nicole.

Sarah:  Yes. That's what I've been thinking. Right? Like isn't there tacitly in there, It's like, right? Like if it, if he didn't kill anyone, then why would it matter what she said to him that morning? Paula Barbieri would be very easy to cross examine. The next morning, she lays out his clothes for him to wear to the funeral. And she writes, “I did all I could, but how do you help a man who seems dead inside? How do you give him his life back?” And so she cleans the room and makes the bed with new sheets. This is like the epitome of women's work. Right? You're like my boyfriend has been accused of murder, so I'm going to come to his aid emotionally and I will clean his house. And she writes about, you know, everyone has the TV on downstairs, and she hears just little stray words about trails of blood, about gloves, about, you know, essentially the evidence that's already coming out in the media against OJ Simpson. And she says, I shut my ears to all of it.

Mike: It's so weird. 

Sarah: How so?

Mike: It's a person who's just not showing interest in the other person. It's just fascinating to me. Like, why wouldn't you want to know some details about the crime that your boyfriend is accused of? Like it's, it's baffling. It's totally baffling to me.

Sarah:  Well, if you're already thinking to yourself, like, are the murders my fault? I mean, not that he committed them, but are they my fault? In a way that could not possibly connect logically. So at that point you really have to shield yourself from any information that could be damning.

Mike: I guess.

Sarah:  And he gets back from the funeral and he's, you know, he's still drugged, but he apparently, we'll just say out of nowhere, who would do this to Nicole. So the morning of June 17th, Paula leaves OJ, groggily watching another movie on TCM, which is his favorite channel, and goes downstairs to get some cantaloupe, which has his favorite breakfast. “In the kitchen I found Bob Shapiro, OJ's newly appointed attorney, freshly creased, as always.” Bob tells her that she needs to stay downstairs, and the cantaloupe needs to wait because he needs to go upstairs and talk to OJ because it's time for them to tell OJ that they're taking him into Parker center to give himself up and be arrested.

Mike: Okay. Parker centers, like the LAPD thing?

Sarah:  Parker center, where's the LAPD headquarters at this time. And Paula is completely shocked because she has been focusing on keeping him afloat emotionally for another hour. And then the way Paula describes it after OJ gets the news that he's going to have to go in and be arrested. There's just this eerie sense that he's saying goodbye to everyone. And she writes later, at least, she's convinced that he's going to kill himself as soon as possible. Not in Robert Kardashian's house, but somewhere soon. And so his friend AC Cowlings comes over, she describes him and OJ as crying together. And he gets out some paper and starts writing and writes the letter that Robert Kardashians will read to the public.

Mike: Yes, one of the few scenes I remember for the Ryan Murphy show time. 

Sarah: And around this time, OJ says  to Paula, I want you to go. I don't want you to be around when the press are here. I want you to be able to- well, let me read it to you. He says, “he looks at her and says, Paula, I don't want you here with all the photographers coming. You should be with your family. Please pack your things and go. I was moved by his effort to protect me, to gain some control over the tumble around him. I'll wait until you leave and then I'll go, I said. Don't argue with me, he said, more pleading than impatient. Just get your stuff together and have Tom come get you.” And basically, he gets his way and puts her in a car. She says, I love you. I'll be there for you. I love you. I'll be there for you. And he's like, listen, remember that guy you told me about that you knew in high school who was like a devout Christian and never would have cheated on his partner. And you always talk about him  when I say that all men cheat, go home and marry that guy.

Mike: That's like some Harry and the Henderson shit. That's also such a fucking abuser move. All men cheat, bullshit. That's like, it's like such a classic, I'm going to cheat on you, move. He has been reading Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. And you know, she doesn't want to be sent away. And she writes about feeling like it was quote us against the world.

Mike: Also a bad sign. 

Sarah: Do you remember that phrase?

Mike: Yeah! It was from Nicole’s letter.

Sarah:  Aha. Thank you. 

Mike: Yes, that was also their thing.

Sarah:  You're my star student. 

Mike: I don't know. I mean, I don't, I'm sure many people say that, who are not in abusive relationships and it's totally fine, but it's like, it's not a way of looking at the world that I empathize with, or like understand on a gut level. Like, I don't get it. 

Sarah: I feel like you and I have a really great relationship, but we never like it's us against the world.

Mike: Yeah. Like, yeah, the anger, like the haters raining down on us. Like, that's just a weird way to go through life, thinking that you're constantly under assault.

Sarah:  And then she talks about, she's being driven home, and you know, she just suddenly thinks like an innocent man, just like surrendering. Like if he didn't commit these murders, then that doesn't make sense. And she says like, he killed them, didn't he? And then she's like, no, no, he didn't. Of course he didn't, you know. And like, she, like, these moments erupt in her, but she just immediately smothers them, basically. 

And so she goes to her friend Tom's house and the police come to talk to her. There are helicopters overhead. And Tom says, “Paula, there's a path on the side of the mountain. You can make it out the back way”. And she's like, “No, I'm not going to run down the mountain”. Like I didn't do anything. I'll talk to the police and the police come and talk to her and she doesn't know anything. 

And then she, you know, like the rest of America, is watching TV. And no one knows where OJ is or where he's disappeared to. All they know is that he and he and AC have run off from Robert Kardashians’ house instead of him turning himself in. And Robert Kardashian, as you remember, reads her letter aloud on tv.

Mike: So the Bronco chase has started? 

Sarah: No, this was before. 

Mike: Right,  so he disappears. It's coming back to me now. So he disappears. Kardashian reads this like suicide note-ish letter. And then we learn about the Bronco, right. 

Sarah: So let’s actually end  right before the Bronco chase. Okay. We'll pick that up with Marcia. How about that? And so let's end with what OJ. wrote to Paula in his, maybe a suicide note, maybe not, letter. “Paula, what can I say? You are  special. I'm sorry we're not going to have our chance. God brought you to me, I now see. As I leave, you'll be in my thoughts.”

Mike: It seems like the universe is calling out for her to leave this guy. But it sounds like she didn't and she's with him throughout the whole trial. Or is she not? 

Sarah: No, she was.

Mike: Oh, no. 

Sarah: So, okay. So, but, well, what do you think of that? What she wrote?

Mike: She should have left!

Sarah:  How come, like, based on that?

Mike: It’s so dumb to be like, she should have left, because like people don't always behave in emotionally perfect ways. I mean, to me, I just think that I think a thing that is very difficult for most people to understand is that in relationships, a lot of our attraction to other people has a big component of the role that they allow us to play, right? That they allow us to take care or be taken care of. That's a big component of sort of what makes you feel comfortable with another person in a way that is often invisible to you. And it sounds like OJ was just pressing all of her, like I need to take care of people, buttons, and like, we're going to get through this together, thing. I mean I always think of the guy that I dated in Denmark who was really boring, and nothing was working and like, we weren't all that attracted to each other. And then I met up with him, like to break up with him. And then he mentioned sort of offhand, he's like, yeah, I, I grew up in an orphanage and like, my parents are like alcoholics and like, I'm still in  various legal battles. And immediately in my brain, I was like, I can make this work. It was like maybe, maybe it's worth a shot.

Sarah: Are you a Paula?

Mike:  I mean, I think everybody's a little bit of a Paula.

Sarah:  We're all, we've all got Paula in us. Think about the fact that Paula is 27. What were you like when you were 27?

Mike: I was literally 27 when that happened.

Sarah:  So you did exactly like she did, like, OJ I break up with you and he's like, but I'm going to jail.

Mike: Yeah. Nothing about this is working. And then it's like, oh, but now it's like complicated in this thing. And like, you need me. Right. It's like that need that sort of draws you in.

Sarah:  But it's also like, it's the only way that she's going to have any power in a relationship with OJ Simpson. I mean, it actually reminds me of my favorite novel, Jane Eyre, that I wrote a terrible master's thesis about, where the fact that the character of Mr. Rochester is like a good brooding lover, but probably bad husband material. And the way to get around that is, spoiler alert, by making him mostly blind and losing the use of one hand. Which is essentially,  like she can only have power in the relationship because he's disabled now. Paula Barbieri is experiencing her Jane Eyre moment. Like this is like that mean review we read said that this reads like a romance novel, and it does because this is like a romance novel plot, honestly. They're brought together because he needs her. Like, these are the stories that girls are told for our entire lives. Tale as old as time, Mike. 

Mike: If the same story was told and like he didn't do it-

Sarah: Oh my God. And he would be played by the real Julia Roberts.

Mike: It would take on a whole different tenor, right. That like, she is standing with him through this horrifying ordeal. And like her instincts are good. It's just in this particular case, like the coin flip is that like, it's not somebody who is worthy of this rescue mission that she's attempting or, I mean, if you really want to blame her and be like 1994 people, like she should have shown more interest in the actual facts of the case before she launched the rescue mission.

Sarah: I mean, I guess we're getting into a question of like, what is the moral value of what she did, I guess. And I don't think that she did anything wrong. I think that Paula’s only victim is Paula. And the only question is whether she now regrets the year and a half of her life that she gave to supporting OJ during his trial and the fact that she rushed back into this relationship and stayed in it, you know, and that's like that's for her to work out.

Mike: It is weird. Like the moral culpability of being too loyal is weird, because in a way it's a virtue, but then if you also don't have limits to that loyalty, then it can be enabling and it can be really bad. Right? 

Sarah: It can be enabling too, you can put other people in danger as a result. I mean, that's not the case here, but we can become complicit in violence and abuse if we have undue loyalty toward dangerous people.

Mike: Right? Your opinion of her depends on whether or not you think that the information was available to her to put a limit on her loyalty at that point.

Sarah:  I feel like, I mean, obviously the information was available to her because she was effectively a member of the defense team. Like she could have pulled Barry Scheck aside at any time and been like, so tell me, like, how does this DNA stuff work? Right. She didn't. And my sense of what happened with her is that she was so attached to OJ and attached to the position that she found herself in now that he was in jail. And now that he was acting entirely emotionally dependent on her, she wanted to stay in the relationship, and she felt that it was her job to stay in the relationship. Maybe not as, as she didn't see the relationship as romantic, she told herself it wasn't romantic. She told herself that she was there, like as his friend, but regardless of what label you put on it, she was there as his unconditional supporter and protector. And to me, like, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Like clearly she couldn't do anything else, or she would have, because anything else would have been better for her. The point is, I think that there's a great sense of public judgment against her and against any woman who would do something similar. And I don't entirely understand where that comes from.

Mike: I mean, maybe people found out that she was dating Michael Bolton and that's really, what's behind all of it. People saw that video. 

Sarah: I feel like that would have helped her. It was 94, people loved Michael Bolton. So we're going to stop here for now. If you want to find out what happens next, before we release another episode, there are other sources of information.

Mike: Are we directing people to other shows for spoilers?

Sarah: I think people know there are other shows. I think they're aware. I'm making a funny joke because it's a comical understatement. That was what the joke was. Thank you for destroying it. 

Mike: You have to tell me these things beforehand.

Sarah:  In front of our children. I'm saying, if you find yourself thinking, there's only three episodes of this OJ Simpson series, I need more. And if you somehow don't know that there's other stuff out there, there is,

Mike: Personally, I'm not looking up shit because I don't want spoilers. 

Sarah: No, you don't get to, everyone else does. I'm talking to everyone but you. You have to stay like, OJ Simpson once said to Paula Barbieri, “as far as I'm concerned, you were a Virgin before you met me.”

Mike: Oh my God. 

Sarah: Oh yeah. That's real gross. Yeah. 

Mike: It was so light and funny. And then OJ said something gross. 

Sarah: What are you most excited to learn about next? Like what are you most curious about? 

Mike: I'm so excited to talk about Marcia Clark. 

Sarah: Next time. Marcia Clark, I’m going to get some Glenlivet and drink it in her honor. Cause that's, that's her favorite. 

Mike: I'm going to change my hairstyle and nobody's going to care because men can do that. Some other people can't.