O.J.'s popular image was a wonderful example for conservatives of why liberals who insisted on saying racism was still a big problem in the United States were wrong. O.J. was O.J. Men wanted his charm; women wanted his body. Country clubs that had denied membership to blacks welcomed him to their elite golf courses and clubhouses with open arms. He had what he had because he earned it.

As the story went after O.J.'s arrest, he was never the victim of racial discrimination on the part of the police, prosecutors or the press. His celebrity status, as always, gave him advantages that most white people didn't have. A case in point was his version of the '89 wife-beating charge. His story had been so much more in keeping with his public image that the great majority of people who heard him tell it believed what he said. They believed that he had not beaten Nicole, that the housekeeper had called 911 out of a false perception of danger and someone in the media had blown the incident out of proportion.

That's how influential O.J.'s image was before June 12, 1994. The closest thing he had to a color was orange, for orange juice, the popular beverage with all that healthy, good-tasting vitamin C.

Most people heard noting about the '89 incident because it didn't make that big a splash in the press. Still, O.J. complained that he got a bad deal because the police and prosecutors didn't want to hear his side of the story. His failure to admit his culpability hurt him badly. His attitude about what happened caused many to doubt his credibility about anything involving his relationship with Nicole. And it sounded just plain ridiculous in view of the publicized photos and tapes.

California law assumed O.J.'s guilt on the basis of Nicole's appearance and her initial statements to police that he had beaten her. However, that assumption was contingent on someone making charges that he had battered her before. Nicole refused to do it, so did everyone else who knew the couple well and the cops who had supposedly responded to her "other" 911 calls. Mark Day a police officer who had been one of the two Westec private security guards Nicole called in ’84, when O.J. took a baseball bat to his Mercedes, had no more to report than his partner or Fuhrman’s partner. Still, Fuhrman’s recollection of the incident met the Brentwood city attorney's requirements to prosecute. O.J. pled no contest for reasonst that were more or less the same as Fuhrman was lather to give for his no contest plea on the charge of perjury. Except that now O.J. had a record for beating his wife.

The untold story about O.J.'s plea, apart from Fuhrman's letter that left him with no reasonable choice, was Nicole's next day admission that she had attacked O.J. She said nothing about Michelle, the 100 pound Filipino housekeeper she hated with a passion from then on and socked in the jaw five and a half years later. Photos of the bruises on Nicole’s face and body did not match her story of being punched and kicked by anyone. A bruise on her collar did match O.J.'s story of grabbing her in a headlock and forcing her out of their bedroom door. The bump on her forehead that O.J. couldn’t account for also matched the kind of scuffle he described in which he or she might have banged her head against something without knowing it. The discoloration on her right arm matched the responding officers’ description of the maid trying to yank her out of the squad car by that arm.

Judge Ito did not allow that photo into evidence. It’s a mystery how Edwards’ memory incorporated the "black" eye and the swollen eye onto the photos he took without seeing the photo they appeared in. The poor quality of the Polaroids he took in ’89 of her "battered face" could more accurately be described as pictures of a fair-skinned unhappy woman without makeup. There does seem to be a scratch where he described a cut and one on her right cheek. But those marks are more constant with what bushes or fingernails might do than a fist—the fist of a big, strong, enraged, right-handed man—with arthritis.

We know that Nicole had a nasty bump on the right side of her forehead even though it didn’t show up in Edwards’ photos. It got bigger and redder after she went home. When Al Cowlings dropped by the house and saw it, he insisted on taking her to the hospital where good photos of the bruise on her arm and collar were taken.

No one said a word during the three-minute duration of the 911 tape. Edwards’ squad car was dispatched seconds before it ended and arrived between five and ten minutes later. O.J. was in the house and Nicole was hiding in the bushes when the police car drove past the Rockingham gate, turned right on Ashford and pulled up to the Ashford gate. Nicole stayed hidden as Edwards got out, rang the buzzer and waited for the maid to answer. Edwards told the maid what he thought had happened, that a woman who was being beaten by a man called 911. When the maid insisted there was nothing for them to be concerned about, he told her that he wasn't leaving until he spoke to the woman who called. That's when Nicole rushed out of hiding, crying, "He's going to kill me!"

The marks on her body did not match the story she told Edwards of O.J. grabbing her by the hair and punching her. They did match a fighting tactic that Fuhrman told Laura Hart about. Somewhere around the time of his "1985" visit to Rockingham, the screenwriter recorded him saying, "...if you can't beat 'em face on, you sneak up behind 'em and just grab 'em by the hair and keep punching 'em until they go down." Combined with statements by several police officers to two assistant DAs that Fuhrman was "Nicole's private cop," and the fact that she did have a personal connection to two of Fuhrman’s police buddies, that's worth noting for future reference to "Nicole’s" stories of O.J.’s abuse.

. Could Fuhrman or his friends have been tutoring Nicole in secret on how to handle O.J.? Consider what Fuhrman said on tape about how hard it is "to find a bruise on a nigger."

Evidence that Edwards described of Nicole being slapped on her neck matched the sound at the end of the tape after a woman screamed. The tape did not reveal the presence of a man, let alone one who always talked loud and long about why he was so angry. It did not reveal who slapped whom or who might have returned the slap when the line went dead. It did not reveal who screamed or why. Edwards did not check the ex-football player or his tiny Filipino housekeeper for indications that Nicole may have struck one or both of them. He did not consider that Nicole may have taken so long to run to him because the maid had called 911 because of her and she was hiding from the police.

Fuhrman told Laura Hart how easy it was to physically abuse black men and set them up for whatever charge he wanted to make against them at a later date. In 1986 when Kathleen Bell compared Fuhrman to O.J.'s close friend Marcus Allen and told him that Allen was her white girlfriend's "type," he went ballistic. That's when he told her about going out of his way to harass mixed couples where the man was black and the woman was white and told her of his desire to kill all "niggers."

Fuhrman didn’t go to Rockingham on a domestic dispute call. He didn’t go there at all in the autumn of 1985 when Nicole was in the advance stages of pregnancy with Sydney or the winter of ’85 when Nicole was too depressed to leave the house. He had no legitimate reason for being there and a damn good reason not to have reported it in the fall of 1984 when it happened. He had no legitimate reason to be there in 1985, either. O.J. never claimed that the incident with the baseball bat didn’t happened. He said that it didn’t happen the way Fuhrman described it.

No one in authority thought that the date was important enough to pin down, but the repair records on the broken windshield of the Mercedes Benz or the testimony of the people who did the actual repairs would have given a definitive answer. The Westec Security guards that were called as well as the dispatcher would have also been good sources of testimony, documentation or both on the date of Fuhrman’s first visit to Rockingham. The only way all records of that visit except for Fuhrman’s could have vanished is by careful design. The records that do exist show that what happened between O.J., Nicole and O.J.’s Mercedes Benz involved a call to Westec, not 911 and no threats to Nicole – except for damage to the car she liked to drive.

Fuhrman's ’89 report on the visit is therefore tainted by a demonstrable lie up front that puts everything that happened in a false domestic abuse context. His report (page 47-48) paints a picture of a pimp-like O.J. talking about Nicole as if she were his whore to do with as he pleased. One of the most disturbing things about that picture is the fact that Othello called Desdemona a whore before he killed her and the man Fuhrman described had to see himself as deserving that degree of control over "his" woman.