The year after my mother’s murder was the year of the OJ Simpson trial. My mother, Crystal Perry, was killed one month and one day before Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, almost to the hour.



Nicole had a daughter, too, and a son. That long year, I kept thinking the daughter was 12, like me, but she was eight. I kept thinking she had found her mother’s body, like I had, but a neighbor had, or, more accurately, the neighbor’s little dog.

When I walked through the living room in the house where I’d been sent to live with an aunt, where the television was constantly tuned to Court TV, I kept seeing the bloody tiles in front of Nicole’s door.



When I went to school, I listened to my classmates’ descriptions of forensic evidence, their theories of what had happened. I waited eagerly for the trial to end, both so I would no longer have to deal with the intense media coverage, and so I could see OJ convicted. Mom’s killer had not yet been identified, so OJ was all I had.



Of course, the end of the OJ Simpson trial didn’t make television any safer for me, and America’s fascination with true crime narratives only gained momentum from then on. Soon, we had Law & Order: SVU and CSI and Cold Case and others, an endless parade of raped and murdered women to entertain us.

The public’s fascination with OJ has continued, from the civil trial in 1997, when he was found liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, to his conviction, in 2007, for kidnapping, armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, crimes that finally landed him in a Nevada jail. That was the year that my mother’s killer was finally tried and convicted, too, although he is serving a life sentence for murder.

Last year saw the popularity of the FX series The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story and the Oscar-winning ESPN documentary OJ: Made in America. Suddenly, OJ was everywhere again. It is impossible for me to get away from this murder.

This past July, a Nevada parole board unanimously decided that OJ could be released later this year, after serving nine years of a sentence that could have stretched to 33 years.



Nevada granted 140 press credentials for the parole hearing. There were 13 million people who tuned in on traditional television and cable networks (this doesn’t count live-streaming on the internet), spending several hours in the middle of a weekday afternoon watching a charismatic ex-football star joke with the parole board.

He said he has always led a “conflict-free life” and should therefore be released. He blamed the crime on his accomplices, saying he didn’t know they would bring guns along, that they had only managed to stay out of jail by turning on him. OJ is 70 years old, he’s behaved well in prison, and the parole board – at least officially –could not take the murders into account when making their decision; the volume of media coverage far outstripped the actual suspense of the proceedings.

OJ was released on Sunday, joining us in what some call the free world, and the media circus is sure to outstrip that of the July hearing.



He claims he plans to lie low upon his release, but even if he doesn’t agree to any interviews, television “news” outlets and others are sure to continue their breathless coverage of all things OJ Simpson, all things murder.

The person who won’t be joining us is Nicole (setting aside Ron Goldman, an innocent bystander and likely not an intended target that night). Nicole, who married a man she loved, then had two children with him. Nicole, who was beaten on several occasions by that man, who called the police multiple times in fear for her life, including a particularly noteworthy 1989 incident in which she shouted to police, “He’s going to kill me!”



Nicole, who would be nearly decapitated in front of her own door five years later. Whose postmortem photos are far too easy to accidentally come across on the internet. Whose perceived moral failings would be repeatedly dragged into the light – most notably in OJ’s “hypothetical confession”, a book entitled If I Did It

– overshadowing her roles as mother, daughter, sister.

Having slogged through 1995 endlessly confronted with a crime far too much like the one that took my devoted, intelligent, hardworking, caring mother, and, worse, with people’s excitement in talking about said crime, I tend to think of myself as cynical in regard to crime narratives. We are flooded with stories of murdered women (and raped-and-murdered women), in books and movies and on television and podcasts, both scripted and unscripted.

The body count on fictional television shows far outstrips real numbers, and the docu-dramas that recount real murders lose sight of the victims – the real, specific people these women were – in favor of sensational and terrifying details.

As I move through the world, trying to avoid photos of bloodspatter, trying to explain to friends why I can’t and won’t listen to Serial, no matter how good it is, the female-murder-industrial complex seems too big to fight against.

As Dr Scott A Bonn, a criminologist who has focused on our fascination with serial killers, writes, watching these shows activates an addictive neural pathway, a satisfying shot of adrenaline that the body immediately wants to repeat.

It feels almost naive to ask people to give up their drug of choice in favor of respect for the victim, who never asked to be exposed, whose specific human attributes are too often forgotten in favor of analyzing what went wrong, why she didn’t leave him, why and how and when he killed her.

Furthermore, the audience for these stories is overwhelmingly female, which feels, to me, either like betrayal – I’m not like that woman, no harm will come to me – or like a society-wide Stockholm syndrome, depending on my mood.

An oft-cited reason for women’s fascination with true crime is that we are watching these shows to learn survival tactics, a depressing conclusion that makes it additionally clear that America is placing the onus on women not to get raped and killed, not on men to not rape and kill.

Millions of Americans know that OJ Simpson was tried in the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994. But far fewer know that later that same year, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act, the very first federal law to acknowledge domestic violence and sexual assault as crimes.

The Violence Against Women Act has created and supported a host of initiatives and resources that have saved lives, many of whose budgets are threatened by a pussy-grabbing executive-in-chief who rode into the White House on the wave of reality television popularity begun by the OJ trial.

And the man currently responsible for enforcing many provisions of the act, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, opposed the law’s reauthorization in 2013, taking issue with new provisions to protect LGBT, Native American and immigrant victims – three groups that, coincidentally enough, receive little attention in the avalanche of stories that disproportionately depict thin, blonde, white victims.

Fortunately, the Violence Against Women Act was ultimately reauthorized in 2013 by a final Senate vote of 78 to 22. Unfortunately, the reauthorization only lasts through September 2018, meaning that it must pass a Republican-controlled Congress and be signed by Trump.

Midterm elections will come too late to shift that balance, but in the meantime, we can pressure our senators and representatives to ensure that the protections of the Violence Against Women Act, and the resources provided by its programs, remain in place. And today, we can turn away from our screens and ignore OJ Simpson.