Simpson Accused of Hitting 1st Wife
Orlando Sentinel (Florida)
Simpson Accused of Hitting 1st Wife;Court Papers say the Incident was 20 Years Ago.Also say O. J. Planned Suicide the day of his Arrest
By Line: Compiled From Wire Reports
Section: A Section; Pg. A1
Dateline: Los Angeles
Court papers released Tuesday contended that O.J. Simpson hit his first wife and called her the day he was supposed to surrender on murder charges to say he had been framed and planned to kill himself.
The new disclosures came as Simpson’s lead trial lawyer suggested that he was considering firing at least one of the defense team’s top attorneys to settle a disruptive feud before opening statements, scheduled to begin Thursday.
“No final decision has been made on that yet,” said Johnnie Cochran Jr. “All things are possible.”
As Cochran worked to resolve the dispute, the Simpson team was confronted with public airing of the allegation that Simpson once hit his ex-wife, Marque-rite Simpson Thomas. Attached to the prosecution motion unsealed Tuesday is a statement of Los Angeles police Officer Terry Schauer, who said he responded to a domestic violence call at Simpson’s home about 20 years ago.
“His first wife was there with two small children,” Schauer said in a state-ment last year. “She told us that she had been hit by her husband, O.J. Simpson, who left the location. . . . Some other officers took her from the house, and, I believe, took her and the children to the Holiday Inn at Sunset and the 405 freeway, where she spent the night.”
The allegation marks the first time that Simpson has been publicly accused of striking his first wife, and it contradicts her contention that she was not a victim of domestic abuse.
In their motion, which seeks to compel Thomas to testify at Simpson’s murder trial, prosecutors also state that they want to question her about a call Simp-son made June 17, the day of the televised freeway chase and the day he was ar-rested in the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.
Shortly before he was scheduled to turn himself in to police, Simpson called his former wife and children and “told everyone that he was ‘framed,’ for the murders and was going to commit suicide,” the motion states. “Jason (Simpson, O.J. Simpson’s oldest son) quickly got on the phone and told his father not to kill himself and that everyone needed him.”
Thomas told police that in addition to talking about his suicide plans, Simp-son asked her to promise that his younger children, whose mother was white, would learn about their black heritage.
“O.J. wanted her to promise,” the documents said. “She stated that she would try.”
The details about that call and about the latest domestic abuse allegation surfaced amid signs that the defense team remains badly divided. In recent days, Cochran has been attempting to mediate a feud between Robert Shapiro and F. Lee Bailey, prominent lawyers and longtime friends whose relationship has broken over allegations of news leaks within the Simpson team.
According to sources in the team, tensions erupted when an investigator work-ing for Bailey accused Shapiro of selling a transcript of Simpson’s June 13 statement to police to the Star, a supermarket tabloid. Shapiro denied that, and the editor of the Star said this week that Shapiro was not the source of the transcript.
Seeking to root out the source of that and other leaks, sources say an inves-tigator working with the Simpson team, former Los Angeles police Detective Bill Pavelic, baited several traps for Bailey, at one point seeing to it that the Boston attorney received word of a false lead regarding the Simpson case.
When a reporter called another member of the defense team to verify the re-port, defense sources say Pavelic felt he had confirmed that Bailey was the source.
While the defense team attempts to stem its infighting, lawyers on both sides of the case are rushing to resolve a few lingering issues before opening state-ments. Also unsealed Tuesday was a defense motion objecting to the prosecution’s planned use of more than 200 recently announced possible witnesses.
That list of potential witnesses, attached to the defense motion, includes the father and sister of Goldman, as well as dozens of acquaintances of O.J. and Nicole Simpson.
Among others, it includes such notables as former baseball star Steve Garvey and Simpson football teammate Reggie MacKenzie.
The list released Tuesday marks the first time that either side has publicly disclosed names of people it might call, but sources say it includes many who will not actually take the stand. The number of witnesses they are allowed to call about domestic abuse allegations will be influenced by Superior Court Judge Lance Ito’s decision about how much of that evidence the jury will be allowed to hear.
Ito had said he hoped to have that ruling Tuesday, but it was not finished by day’s end. He is expected to rule today.
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