June 24, 2024, will be the 30th anniversary of the main reason I can’t stand to watch car chases. That night, like ninety-five million other Americans, I sat on my couch in Anaheim, eating pizza, watching the recently deceased O.J. Simpson’s slow-speed chase through Southern California, and hoping I wasn’t going to have to watch the LAPD shoot him. I had a clear memory of the video of the violent Rodney King beating three years earlier.
I also had no idea I would eventually set my debut novel The Lockhart Women against the backdrop of Simpson’s three trials. I was never a fan, but most people loved him and to this day, everyone usually refers to him by his nickname. Simpson was a celebrated athlete, the first Black star of a national television advertising campaign for Hertz Rent-a-Car, and an actor in more than 30 movies and shows.
To be clear, my book is not about Simpson, nor is it a discussion of whether or not he was guilty. It’s about a woman, Brenda Lockhart, who gets hooked on watching the media coverage of Simpson’s trials to avoid dealing with her divorce, her teenage daughters, and their many bad decisions.
Getting addicted to watching the trial was not that unusual in 1994. Two young, attractive people were brutally murdered, and the suspect was a beloved celebrity. If it sounds like a compelling Netflix series, it eventually was.
In those days there was no Netflix, Google, or Facebook. There was only television and the Simpson trial was everywhere, preempting cartoons and soap operas and introducing cameras to the courtroom and the Kardashian family to the world.
In case you don’t remember, Robert Kardashian was Simpson’s best friend.
The trial was inescapable even for people like me, working a more than full time job during those days as a mid-management accounting supervisor for the Long Beach Post Office. I found the media focus on Marcia Clark’s skirt lengths and hairstyle instead of her prosecutorial skills particularly frustrating because I wore similar suits and also had an unfortunate perm.
Back on June 17, 1994, TV news stations had just begun using helicopters to follow car chases, capturing that iconic image of the white Ford Bronco on the empty freeway and those people holding “Juice is Loose” signs and cheering Simpson on.
We are a nation of celebrity worshippers. Simpson was “loose” because the LAPD had allowed him to remain at Robert Kardashian’s house to tie up some unfinished business. When the specified time to turn himself in came and went, LAPD went to the Kardashian home. To Kardashian’s apparent shock, Simpson had already fled.
Robert Kardashian looked equally shocked when the court clerk read the “not guilty” verdict on the morning of October 3, 1995. One hundred forty-two million people tuned in to watch, including me and my accounting office employees.
So why did I set my novel around the trials? Initially it was because of a writing prompt—“Create a scene around an historical event.” As a first-time novelist in search of a plot, I found it helpful to use the framework of the trials to scaffold my story. It gave me a place to start (June 17, 1994, the night of the slow speed chase) and an ending date to aim for (October 4, 2008, the day Simpson was sentenced to prison for armed robbery.) That time span gave the three troubled Lockhart women enough time to unravel some of their bad decisions.
Using historical details help ground fiction in reality, but those details have to be accurate. I did a ton of research about the trial and the time period (shoutout to the Friends of the Huntington Beach Central Library bookstore and to the daily archives of the Los Angeles Times.) I discovered parallels between my story and the Simpson drama. The Lockhart Women features an entitled athlete, domestic violence, drug abuse, and women’s agency and lack of.
I was personally shocked at the “not guilty” verdict back in 1995 and I was sure the people I worked with felt the same. But later that day when I went into the supply room and found two Black coworkers celebrating privately, I was bewildered. Why were they rejoicing and why did they feel they had to hide it from me?
In hindsight, I imagine it was because I was their boss and they’d already seen my reaction to the not guilty verdict. They assumed (correctly at that time) that a white woman like me wouldn’t understand that whether Simpson was guilty or not wasn’t the point. They were celebrating a Black man beating the odds of an inherently racist criminal justice system. One of my characters has a similar experience to mine and wonders the same things, then goes on living her own complicated life.
Which is what I did too.
Simpson is dead now, but some things haven’t changed. We’re too often blinded by our prejudices and by what we don’t understand. Sometimes we don’t even try to understand each other. We continue to worship celebrities, the Kardashians are still on television, news helicopters keep following car chases, and I still can’t stand them.