OJ.’s acquittal resonated loudly among those blacks who have experienced decades of injustice in the criminal-justice system. Yet women and victim advocates say the quieter message is equally dire: men can beat their wives, perhaps even kill them, and go unpunished. About 1.8 million women are abused every year-one every 16 seconds, according to Murray Straus, codirector of the University of New Hampshire Family Research Lab. “O.J.” has already entered the lexicon as a verb for torture. Before Nicole’s death, abusers commonly said, “‘Bitch, I’m going to kill you’,” says Rob Schroeder, director of Safespace, a public shelter in Miami. “Now they’re saying, ‘Bitch, I’m going to O.J. you’.” A Boston woman told shelter workers her husband branded her leg with a hot iron, threatening to out-O.J.O.J. And one Orange County, Calif., license plate was framed with a personal warning: “If O.J. walks, my ex-wife better start running.” Abuse experts worry that Simpson’s release may force victims to retreat into their private hell, discouraging them from seeking legal help. Standing in the dark just minutes from Simpson’s Rockingham-es-tate celebration party, Denise Brown told a gathering of candle-carrying protesters the verdict was saying, “You can rape, you can stalk, you can kill, and it’s quite all right.”
How did the panel of two men and 10 women so swiftly dismiss O.J.’s violent past as a prelude to murder? There were police reports of a half-clothed Nicole hiding in fear by her door. There were Nicole’s haunting souvenirs in the safe-deposit box–photos of her bruised face, O.J.’s tortured apology, a will naming her middle sister, Dominique, as guardian of her children. “It’s like writing: In the event of my death,” said prosecutor Marcia Clark in her closing statements. “She knew. He’s going to kill me.”
One answer may lie, ironically, in the gender of the jurors. Jury studies show that women have a particularly hard time sympathizing with battered women who bring their attackers to court. Female jurors are more likely than men to blame the accuser for her injuries. They tend to comb the testimony for any indication why this unsettling woman before them is exaggerating–why she could never be them. “It’s too scary for many women to realize they, too, are vulnerable to being victimized,” says Joan Zorza, senior attorney at New York’s National Center on Women and Family Law, “so they think it’s her fault.” If gender biases were not enough to keep the jury skeptical, Nicole was also rich. She owned a condo, a flashy car and sexy clothes. She wasn’t trapped by poverty, says Ann Jones, author of “Next Time She’ll Be Dead,” a book about battering. She could, less affluent women may think, have bought herself a bodyguard.
Black women in particular find domestic-abuse evidence to be a tough sell–especially when the defendant is a black man. Long before juror Brenda Moran called the do-mestic-violence evidence a “waste of time,” jury experts–including the prosecution’s own-predicted black women on the panel might turn a deaf ear to Nicole’s 911 calls for help. Polls throughout the trial showed thata majority of black women believed Simpson was framed by the LAPD. Barbara Cochran Berry, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran’s ex-wife, told NEWSWEEK her recent book alleging physical abuse at Johnnie’s hands was received with sympathy by whites. African-Americans, however, considered it a work of treason. In an odd twist to the blame-the-victim impulse, black women often see domestic violence through the prism of race–and class–not gender. By portraying her prominent husband as arrogant, petty and sometimes brutal, Berry had betrayed not only Johnnie, but all black men. (Cochran denies his ex-wife’s allegations.) Racism, it’s believed, can do more damage than a fist. “In O.J. they see their sons,” says Donna Ferrato, author of “Living With the Enemy” and cofounder of the Domestic Abuse Awareness Project. “They get very protective.”
Even with such a high-profile setback for domestie-abuse victims, family-violence experts see some hopeful signs. As media coverage of the ease and its aftermath continues to expose spousal abuse, attitudes may slowly change. After all, advocates say, Anita Hill may not have bumped Clarence Thomas from the Supreme Court, but her case helped bring sexual harassment into the open. Ever since O.J. was named as the key suspect in Nicole’s brutal slaying, calls for help from battered-women’s shelters increased by 25 percent, says Robert Geffner, president of the Family Violence and Sexual Assault Institute in Tyler, Texas. “They saw Nicole, and they finally recognized the danger they were in.” Many police departments are taking abuse cases more seriously. Five years ago “only the heinous beasts who broke bones” were arrested in Dade County, Fla., says Schroeder. Now arrests are up, and more batterers are getting treatment. Even corporate America is waking up. State Farm Life Insurance, once skewered for denying a woman insurance because she was a victim of domestic violence, has just launched a family-abuse prevention campaign.
Still, awareness by itself has yet to stop the worst forms of violence. Four women a day die at the hands of their husbands, ex-husbands or boyfriends, according to an analysis of FBI homicide data by James Alan Fox of Northeastern University–the highest rate in nearly two decades. Black women are three times as likely as whites to be killed in domestic violence. Prosecutors need to do a better job of making this gruesome link between murder and abuse very clear for jurors, say legal experts. Courts need to be more aware that children in violent homes are at high risk of being harmed. Richard Gelles, head of the University of Rhode Island’s Family Violence Research Program, found that six out of l0 batterers also abuse their children. “We have to work even harder to protect battered women and their children,” Gelles says, or they “will believe the criminal-justice system can’t help them.”
Other victim advocates think it’s time the courts and police focus less on just protecting the woman and more on reforming her abuser. “Batterers can be turned around,” says Donna Ferrato, through treatment, fines, even jail time. “Imagine if back in 1989, O.J. had to pay a $50,000 fine, go to a batterers program for a year and maybe be censored by Hertz.” Nicole, she thinks, would still be alive.
