On this date June 12 in 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered by O.J. Simpson. Photo credit: AP. pic.twitter.com/mMcrJiAquH— Jeffrey Guterman (@JeffreyGuterman) June 12, 2019
This is what I wrote five years ago on the 20th anniversary:
There's been quite a bit of retrospective "where are they now?" coverage of the Simpson anniversary, and the trial itself has been credited with, or blamed for, giving birth to everything from reality television to the Kardashians. (Robert Kardashian, father of Kim, Kourtney, Khloé and Rob, and ex-husband of Kris, was one of O.J.'s best friends and served as a member of the "Dream" defense team. It was from his house that O.J. disappeared on the day of the Bronco chase.) If the Kardashian name hadn't become well known during the trial, would the E network have been willing to take a chance on a reality show about the family? No way to know, and anyway, I digress.
People who are old enough say that they'll "always remember where they were" when they first heard of JFK's assassination, the Challenger explosion and the events of 9/11. The white Bronco chase is sometimes included in that category, which tells you how big of a deal, or at least how surreal, it was at the time. The television networks all cut away from regular programming to show it live, presumably not wanting to miss the excitement if O.J. blew his brains out, which he apparently was threatening to do. Eventually he came home and surrendered to police, and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Twenty years later the world is different in all kinds of ways. Robert Kardashian's children rule the reality TV universe. We have a black family in the White House, not something that would have been predictable given the polarizing racial divisions the O.J. case exposed, and his attorneys exploited. And of course, O.J. is rotting in jail, although for a separate crime. A fitting outcome to a very strange story. (Note that this post was written on June 17, 2014, the 20th anniversary of the Bronco chase. Read the entire post here.)
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