David Swanson/Reuters

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had a piece yesterday entitled, “O.J. and the Monster Jealousy”, in which she compares O.J. Simpson to Shakespeare’s tragic character Othello.  She comments on the uncontrollable rage that results in the killing of their wives.  Dowd’s take on O.J. Simpson during his trial and now is completely unsympathetic.

Her conclusion:

“O.J. escaped in his criminal trial but not in his civil trial, though he never paid the penalty or expressed any penance.

He did not, however, escape the opprobrium of many in America who felt that he got away with murder.

In 1995, as an acquitted O.J. plotted to rehabilitate himself, I felt that the victims had gotten lost in the circus.

I drove an hour outside Los Angeles to the Ascension cemetery in Lake Forest. There were bougainvilleas, carnations, sunflowers and daisies heaped on the plain dark marble marker at Nicole Brown Simpson’s grave. People had left teddy bears and rosaries.

One little boy wrote a note promising he would never be mean to a woman when he grew up. A mother wrote a note assuring Nicole that her two kids would be OK: “Your children’s guardian angels will take care of them.”

I talked to a woman named Teresa Myers, who stood staring at the grave for a long time. “Maybe she’s better off now because she’s at peace,” Myers told me. “But maybe she’s not because she knows now that nobody can touch him.”

When I left South Bundy on Thursday, I said a little prayer for the victims and their families.  Fred Goldman, Ron Goldman’s  father, said upon hearing of O.J.’s death, “No great loss.”

I feel the same.”

Tony

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