Jeffrey Toobin - The Run of His Life - The People v. O. J. Simpson

Nicole liked the Bundy condo, in part because of its location near a school. Nicole wanted to be close to a playground because her children would no longer have a yard. McKenna negotiated a deal for Nicole to buy the house for $625,000, but she wound up paying an additional $30,000. “The seller was this television producer who was in financial trouble, so Nicole had to pay all the seller’s closing costs, too,” McKenna explained. “She just really wanted that place.”

In January 1994, when Nicole moved into the Bundy condominium, her relationship with O.J. oscillated between reconciliation and a final breach, and the financial tensions between them escalated. The first point of conflict revolved around a man named Kato Kaelin. Although the Simpson affair made the name Kato synonymous with houseguest, his original relationship to Nicole was the more familiar one of tenant to landlord. Kaelin had rented her guest house at Gretna Green for five hundred dollars a month, a figure he could reduce somewhat by baby-sitting for her children. (During this period Sydney and Justin grew so fond of Kato that they named their pet Akita after him.) When Nicole moved to Bundy, she and Kaelin planned to continue the deal, with Kato paying to stay in a small guest suite wedged between the garage and kitchen. Shortly before the move, however, O.J. told Kaelin that although he had had no objections to his living in a separate guest house at Gretna Green, he didn’t want him living under the same roof as his ex-wife. Simpson’s solution was to give Kaelin a rent-free guest house at his home on Rockingham. O.J.’s offer thus simultaneously removed a potential rival for Nicole’s affections and took money out of his ex-wife’s pocket. It also led ultimately to Kaelin’s prominent place in the history of freeloading.

In May 1994, O.J. and Nicole’s final attempt at a reconciliation ended, leading to a financial controversy that dwarfed the dispute over Kato Kaelin. Around Memorial Day, less than six months after she and her children had settled into the Bundy condominium, Nicole called Jeane McKenna and said they would have to move out because O.J. was threatening to report her to the Internal Revenue Service.

When Nicole had sold her rental property in San Francisco she had invested the proceeds in the home on Bundy, but she apparently told the IRS that the new place was also a rental property. As a result, she had avoided tax on the initial sale. For tax purposes, she kept Rockingham as her official residence. Around Memorial Day, O.J. told her that he would no longer permit her to use his address. “He’s threatening to tell the IRS that I’m living in Bundy,” Nicole told McKenna. As a legal matter, O.J. seems to have had a point, but McKenna scoffed at the idea that Simpson would force his children to move for the second time in a year. “Oh yes he is,” Nicole told her broker. “Of course he is-the asshole.” In the entry in her diary for June 3, Nicole quoted the exact words of O.J.’s threat: “You hang up on me last nite, you’re gonna pay for this bitch, you’re holding money from the IRS, you’re going to jail you fucking cunt. You think you can do any fucking thing you want, you’ve got it comming-I’ve already talked to my lawyers about this bitch-they’ll get you for tax evasion, bitch, I’ll see to it. You’re not going to have a dime left bitch etc.”

On Monday, June 6, O.J. delivered on his threat. He put his warning in icily official terms, in a typed, formal letter to his ex-wife, which began: “Dear Nicole, On advice of legal counsel, and because of the change in our circumstances, I am compelled to put you on written notice that you do not have my permission or authority to use my permanent home address at 360 North Rockingham… as your residence or mailing address for any purpose… I cannot take part in any action by you that might intentionally or unintentionally be misleading to the Internal Revenue Service…” Nicole showed the letter to her friend Cynthia Shahian on June 7. Not surprisingly, Nicole was horrified by it-especially by the prospect of being forced to move out of Bundy so soon after she and her children had moved in. The same day Shahian saw the letter, June 7, Nicole also telephoned the Sojourn shelter for battered women in Santa Monica to report that she was being stalked by O.J.

On Thursday, June 9, on Nicole’s instructions, McKenna officially put 875 South Bundy up for lease, asking $4,800 a month. “Drop dead gorgeous 1991 townhome in the heart of Brentwood” was how McKenna described the property in the listing. Nicole told Jeane McKenna that if she stayed at Bundy, it would cost her $90,000 in taxes, which was just about all the money she had in the world. She didn’t want to sacrifice that stake, so she decided to look for a new place to live with her kids.

The following morning, Friday, June 10, Nicole spoke with her friend Ron Hardy, a bartender and host at several Los Angeles nightspots. Nicole explained that she was just about to leave to go look at houses with McKenna. “She was happy,” Hardy later recalled. “She said everything’s great, she hadn’t felt this good in a while. She felt that she had finally put O.J. behind her.” Nicole made dinner plans with Hardy for Monday night, then spent the rest of the day with McKenna seeking a place to lease. “We were together all day, looking at houses,” McKenna later recalled. “She knew the kids really liked Bundy and wouldn’t want to move, so she wanted to do something special for them, to give them something they would want-especially a pool. And by the end of the day, we found a place for her in Malibu, a one-story contemporary with a pool and a view of the ocean, for five thousand a month. I remember walking up the hill there with her. We were smoking. Nobody smokes in Brentwood, so we used to sneak it together, and she was saying, like she couldn’t really believe it, ‘I can really do this. I can lease the house and move. I can really do this.’ ”

Nicole called McKenna on Saturday night to ask when the FOR LEASE sign would go up in front of her condo. “She was anxious to have it up,” McKenna said, “because she wanted to get on with her life, but also because she wanted O.J. to see it, to say ‘Screw you’ to him.” As it turned out, McKenna was then in the process of switching real estate agencies, so she couldn’t locate an appropriate sign until the following day, Sunday, June 12. At about seven that evening, a colleague from McKenna’s new office dropped off a sign with her just as she was leaving for a dinner party. McKenna figured she would put it up at Nicole’s afterward. She put her hammer in the car.

McKenna’s dinner party was in Beverly Hills, so as she was driving home she had to decide which way she was going to turn on Bundy. “At the time,” McKenna remembered later, “I lived north on Bundy and she lived south. I remember looking at the clock in my car when I hit the intersection of Bundy and San Vicente. It was 10:15. It would have taken me five minutes to get to her house. I said, ‘Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow.’ ”

On the night of June 12, 1994, Pablo Fenjves watched the top of the ten o’clock news with his wife, Jai, a costume designer, in their third-floor master bedroom. They lived about sixty yards north of Nicole Simpson’s condominium. Both Nicole’s and Fenjves’s backdoors opened onto the same alley, though they had never met. Nicole had moved into the neighborhood shortly after Fenjves. In fact, 875 South Bundy was on the market when Fenjves was looking at houses, and he had walked through it during his search. He had found it too narrow, too expensive, and too noisy, which were common opinions about the property.