Prosecutors: Simpson Hit First Wife / A Domestic-Violence Police Call Was Reported. For The De-fense, There Was Talk That A Top Attorney Would Be Fired
Monday, October 28th, 2002BYLINE: Andrea Ford and Jim Newton, LOS ANGELES TIMES, This article contains in-formation from the Associated Press.
SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. A04
LENGTH: 726 words
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
In a motion unsealed late yesterday, prosecutors for the first time said that O.J. Simpson struck his first wife and that he called her hours before he was scheduled to surrender to police last June.
The documents allege that in his call to Marquerite Simpson Thomas on June 17, Simpson said he was suicidal and had been framed for the slayings of his second wife and her friend.
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, which are scheduled to begin tomor-row.
“No final decision has been made on that yet,” said Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who has played an increasingly significant role in the Simpson team since last fall. “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 first wife, Mar-querite Thomas.
Attached to the prosecution motion unsealed yesterday is a statement of Los Angeles Police Officer Terry G. Schauer, who said he responded to a domestic- violence call at the Simpsons’ home approximately 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 the day he was arrested in the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. He has pleaded not guilty.
“Not only can Mrs. Thomas prove prior acts of domestic violence by the defen-dant but she can testify to the statements that the defendant made on June 17, 1994, the day of his arrest,” the papers say.
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 older son) quickly got on the phone and told his father not to kill himself and that everyone needed him.”
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 L. 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 in-vestigator working with the Simpson team, former Los Angeles Police Detective Bill Pavelic also known as William Bill Pavelic and Zvonko Bill Pavelic, baited several traps for Bailey, at one point seeing to it that the Boston attorney received word of a false lead.
The feud has escalated to the point that Shapiro and Bailey are not speaking to each other and Shapiro has removed his mentor’s name from his office station-ery.
While the defense team attempts to stem its infighting, lawyers on both sides are rushing to resolve a few lingering issues before opening statements. Also unsealed yesterday was a defense motion objecting to the prosecution’s planned use of more than 200 recently announced possible witnesses.
That list, attached to the defense motion, includes Nicole Simpson’s sister Tanya Brown; Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman; former baseball star Steve Garvey; former Simpson football teammate Reggie MacKenzie; and porn actress Jennifer Peace, who has said she dated Simpson friend Al Cowlings and has information about the case.
LOAD-DATE: October 28, 2002
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH