‘The People v. O.J. Simpson,’ Episode 9: Our Fact-Checking Recap
One would hope that an LAPD officer spewing racial epithets and accounts of gratuitous violence perpetrated on civilians would never be described as “manna from heaven.” Of course, if there were ever a sufficiently cynical and grotesque occasion for this to happen, it would be the lingering murder trial of O.J. Simpson.
LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman was an important witness for the prosecution; in American Crime Story, he’s introduced early on as one of the initial responders to the murder scene on South Bundy Drive, and one of the four detectives who visited O.J. to inform him of the crime. But he was also the officer who had filed for disability and a pension in the early 1980s, citing that working in minority neighborhoods had caused him to “[sustain] seriously disabling psychiatric symptomatology”— the case that initially pushed attorney Robert Shapiro to construct the “dirty LAPD” narrative that would eventually win O.J.’s freedom.
That case was bad enough to make the defense believe that there could be a smoking gun out there somewhere, so they got Fuhrman on the stand to swear that he’d hadn’t uttered the n-word in the past decade. Then, when they found a struggling screenwriter who had 13 hours of tape of Fuhrman expressing just about every bigoted sentiment one could imagine — including some particularly nasty things about high-ranking LAPD officer Peggy York, a.k.a. Judge Lance Ito’s wife — his credibility was shot. Worse, he told stories of planting evidence and framing people of color. Never mind O.J.’s history of domestic violence or the overwhelming physical evidence that painted the Juice as guilty; they had a cop on tape admitting to misconduct. This was the big bombshell in the trial, and the final nail in the coffin the prosecution had built for themselves.
So it’s not surprising, then, that most of tonight’s The People v. O.J. Simpson revolves around the tapes — where they came from, what was on them, what the public knew that the jury did not. And while the show sticks close to the truth, the writers do depart a little from the primary source material, Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life. Below, five details from Episode Nine, fact-checked and rated on a one-to-five “Glove” scale.