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T A B L E__T A L K

Matt Drudge: Love him or leave him in the Media area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Double snooze
By Geoff Edgers
Doubletake aspires to show ordinary people -- but its writers keep sticking their heads in the way.
(02/02/98)

Hollywoodland
By Catherine Seipp
City of broad pooper-scoopers
(01/30/98)

Gossip: Too important to leave to amateurs like Ted Koppel?
By Deborah Mitchell
Has the press bottomed out? Editors, gossips face off in NY
(01/29/98)

Have you Yanks gone crazy?
By Jurek Martin
A British journalist decries the media-whipped frenzy over President Clinton's private life
(01/28/98)

The $17.6 billion touchdown
By Steven Stark
Why we'll be paying for macho TV execs' exorbitant football deal
(01/27/98)

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Did he say anything juicy that didn't make it into the piece?

There was one comment that didn't make it into the piece. I asked him about bitterness and anger, and if he was feeling that. He said, "Strangely enough, if I am angry at anybody, I am angry at Nicole. In the last few months of her life, she was not the woman that I knew for 17 years." I said, "You mean, you think she got in with the wrong people and got herself killed. Is that why you are angry at her?" He didn't really say yes or no, he just kept saying over and over that she had changed, that she wasn't the same person he had known. He didn't even say, "Nicole, you got yourself killed and I had to take the rap." There is this unsettling vagueness about the way he talks about some of this stuff, that makes one become suspicious, not because of what he says, but because of what he doesn't say clearly enough.

Did you get the feeling that he was being intentionally vague?

I think that a lot of his speech patterns, the way he talks, is kind of hyper-loquacious, but it seems like it is designed to conceal something. It seems like it is obfuscating rather than clarifying. There is so much that he says and it is coming at you so fast, and it goes in so many different directions, that the end result is strangely confusing. You wonder how to make heads or tails out of it.

So all you can do is to reprint it, to quote him directly. But the readers, as well as the reporter I imagine, are left scratching their heads.

The fact is that the mystery remains inside his head. Like I said in the piece, just because you're sitting next to him, and talking to him, doesn't mean you are any closer to understanding him.

Spending time with him, did you formulate an opinion one way or another about his innocence?

I don't know. I wouldn't say that I formulated an opinion from having spent time with him. It is hard not to formulate the popular, common opinion when you read the data, when you read the evidence. But if anything, being around him contradicts that conclusion. It is like emotionally, you think he has to be innocent, and intellectually, you think he has to be guilty.

One of the portraits that you paint of him is of a man who in some ways is divorced from reality.

I think so. I have said that, and Larry Schiller said years ago on Larry King, "If O.J. Simpson committed this crime, it no longer exists in his mind." What he said to me was if he did this, it is just so heinous to him, and so grotesque and unthinkable that he has had to, in order to survive, put it out of his mind. The other thing we all know from our lives is that when we do feel guilty about something, there are ways that we revise it in our own minds. So we can re-imagine what really happened. We rewrite our own story. I think many people are delusional about their own lives and behaviors, over much smaller things. If you then imagine applying that to something truly horrific, it kind of makes sense to me that what the psyche would do in a situation like that is just to go into total denial, which is an emotional denial. It's not necessarily so much "I didn't physically do this" as much as it is an "I couldn't have done this." I try not to diverge into the position that he did it. Saying I don't know isn't the same thing as saying I don't have a brain and I can't read evidence. It is kind of more democratic to keep an open mind, even about O.J.

You said you didn't follow the case, but did he become a fascinating subject to you as you were doing the story?

What is fascinating about all this is that we are all so compulsively interested in the finer shades of this one human being, as if it is going to give us some larger answer to some much larger question. In one of the drafts of my piece I compared the O.J. hysteria to something I read in this book called "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," which chronicles mass hysteria through the ages. One of the funniest chapters was about something called "tulipomania," which was this mania for tulips which seized Holland in the 16th century. The Dutch aristocracy would sink entire fortunes, everything they had, into one tulip bulb. The craze spread, and it spread into neighboring countries, and more and more money was being sunk into these tulips, and one of these bulbs became the most sought after of all, it was called the Semper Augustus bulb. In one draft I said O.J. is to the media as the Semper Augustus bulb was to these Dutch noblemen. The most priceless thing imaginable. Then they snapped out of it and the whole thing caused the whole Dutch economy to collapse, and it had serious economic ramifications for decades, if not centuries, to come. So that whole phenomenon of people en masse being seized by something kind of obscure and applying tremendous weight to it, when actually it is --

Just a bulb.

Yeah. That is what is what fascinates me about the O.J. case. Being on the inside of the mania is a weird place to be. Being on all of these shows talking about all this stuff, as if it matters as much as we are all talking about it.
SALON | Feb. 3, 1998