By all accounts, Nicole Brown Simpson endured a deluge of horrible abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, football superstar O.J. Simpson, before she and her friend Ron Goldman were murdered nearly 30 years ago. But a new Lifetime documentary about Nicole’s “life and murder” highlights just how bizarre O.J.’s methods could be when it came to tormenting the mother of his children.
The first two episodes of The Life & Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, which premieres this Saturday night, June 1, at 8 p.m. ET, includes interviews with all three of Brown Simpson’s living sisters: Denise, Dominique and Tanya.
In Episode One, Denise, Brown Simpson’s eldest sister, describes an incident that she says took place at Christmas 1988, when the entire family decided to go on vacation in Hawaii.
“We went over to Hawaii, and it was really a great trip, until it wasn’t,” Denise says in the documentary, before describing a disturbing incident that took place while Brown Simpson, O.J., Al Cowlings and others were at lunch at a restaurant in Hawaii.
“There was a gay couple that was sitting at the table, and they thought that Justin was just beautiful,” Denise continues, referring to Nicole Brown Simpson and O.J.’s younger son; a baby at the time. The couple also had a daughter, Sydney. “One of the guys, he kissed Justin on the forehead, and it was like, so sweet and so nice, and as soon as we walked outside, all hell broke loose.”
The documentary then cuts to archival interview footage of Cowlings.
“After Nicole had let the man hold the baby, she took the baby back, O.J. supposedly had said, ‘Why did you let that gay guy hold my baby,’ or something like that,” Cowlings says in the footage. “And she says, ‘Why are you concerned about him being gay? Your father is gay.’ And O.J. got very upset. He was going to fly off the island that night.”
“How could you let a gay man kiss my son,” Denise recounts to Lifetime. “[Nicole] ran out of the car. [O.J.] was going crazy. She ended up taking off and going with my parents. I couldn’t get out of the car anymore, because he was driving like a lunatic in the parking lot, and then we ended up going back to the hotel.”
As we were going back, I said, ‘Slow down, calm down, the guy didn’t hurt him, it was nothing, it was no big deal,’” Denise continues. “The next day, I saw her with a long-sleeved shirt on and I said, ‘Nicole, it’s hot,’” but her sister insisted upon remaining in the shade with Justin.
It was only when she discovered Nicole’s diary much later that she realized Simpson “had her up against the wall [and] over the balcony, doing the usual,” as Denise put it. Onscreen, Lifetime shows a snippet from Brown Simpson’s diary in which she documented the alleged incident.
“1988,” the page from Nicole Brown Simpson’s diary reads. “Gay man kissed Justin. O.J. threw me up against walls in our hotel & on the floor. Put bruises on my arms & back. The window scarred me—thought he’d throw me out.”
As for Cowlings’ comments about Simpson’s father’s sexuality, those revelations previously came to light eight years ago in directly Ezra Edelman’s Oscar-winning documentary O.J.: Made In America. That film intimated that Simpson’s domestic violence stemmed from his complicated relationship with his father, Jimmy Lee Simpson, who came out as gay later in life and died of AIDS in in the mid-1980s.
LAPD officer Ron Shipp, a friend of Simpson, said in the 2016 documentary that Nicole approached him and asked if he believed Simpson beat her because his father was gay. Shipp responded, “I don’t know, but a lot of it has to do with their self-esteem.”
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