Nicole Simpson knew someday her husband would kill her. Sheâd told many people, including her sister, Denise, that heâd kill her and get away with it. In fact, you can take a battered womanâs knowledge of her abuserâs capacity to inflict harm and evade consequences to the bank.
But five days before Nicole Simpson was murdered, she knew, for sure, she would die. How? Why? Something had happened: a confrontation, a threatening phone call, an unwanted visit, an aggressive act from Simpson directed at her. She told no one, because, after seventeen years of torment, she knew there was no one to tell. The police virtually everywhere ignore assault against women by their male intimates, so that any husband can be a brutal cop with tacit state protection; in Los Angeles, the police visited Nicole Simpsonâs abuser at home as fans.
Remember the video showing Simpson, after the ballet recital, with the Brown familyâintroduced by the defense to show Simpsonâs pleasant demeanor. Hours later, Nicole Simpson was dead. In the video, she is as far from Simpson, physically, as she can manage. He does not nod or gesture to her. He kisses her mother, embraces and kisses her sister, and bear-hugs her father. They all reciprocate. She must have been the loneliest woman in the world. What would Nicole Simpson have had to do to be safe? Go underground, change her appearance and identity, get cash without leaving a trail, take her children and runâall within days of her call to the shelter. She would have had to end all communication with family and friends, without explanation, for years, as well as leave her home and everything familiar.
With this abuserâs wealth and power, he would have had her hunted down; a dream team of lawyers would have taken her children from her. She would have been the villainâreckless, a slut, reviled for stealing the children of a hero. If his abuse of her is of no consequence now that sheâs been murdered, how irrelevant would it have been as she, resourceless, tried to make a court and the public understand that she needed to run for her life?
Nicole Simpson knew she couldnât prevail, and she didnât try. Instead of running, she did what the therapists said: be firm, draw a line. So she drew the sort of line they meant: he could come to the recital but not sit with her or go to dinner with her familyâa line that was no defense against death. Believing he would kill her, she did what most battered women do: kept up the appearance of normality. There was no equal justice for her, no self-defense she felt entitled to. Society had already left her to die.
On the same day the police who beat Rodney G. King were acquitted in Simi Valley, a white husband who had raped, beaten, and tortured his wife, also white, was acquitted of marital rape in South Carolina. He had kept her tied to a bed for hours, her mouth gagged with adhesive tape. He videotaped a half hour of her ordeal, during which he cut her breasts with a knife. The jury, which saw the videotape, had eight women on it. Asked why they acquitted, they said he needed help. They looked right through the victimâ afraid to recognize any part of themselves, shamed by her violation. There were no riots afterward.
The governing reality for women of all races is that there is no escape from male violence, because it is inside and outside, intimate and predatory.
While race-hate has been expressed through forced segregation, woman-hate is expressed through forced closeness, which makes punishment swift, easy, and sure. In private, women often empathize with one another, across race and class, because their experiences with men are so much the same. But in public, including on juries, women rarely dare. For this reason, no matter how many women are batteredâno matter how many football stadiums battered women could fill on any given dayâeach one is alone.
Surrounded by family, friends, and a community of affluent acquaintances, Nicole Simpson was alone. Having turned to police, prosecutors, victims aid, therapists, and a womenâs shelter, she was still alone. Ronald L. Goldman may have been the only person in seventeen years with the courage to try to intervene physically in an attack on her; and heâs dead, killed by the same hand that killed her, an expensively gloved, extra-large hand.
Though the legal system has mostly consoled and protected batterers, when a woman is being beaten, itâs the batterer who has to be stopped; as Malcolm X used to say, âby any means necessaryââa principle women, all women, had better learn. A woman has a right to her own bed, a home she canât be thrown out of, and for her body not to be ransacked and broken into. She has a right to safe refuge, to expect her family and friends to stop the battererâ by law or forceâbefore sheâs dead. She has a constitutional right to a gun and a legal right to kill if she believes sheâs going to be killed. And a battererâs repeated assaults should lawfully be taken as intent to kill.
Everybodyâs against wife abuse, but whoâs prepared to stop it?
Andrea Dworkin, In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson
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