The crime
The June 12, 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

The story
I mentioned back when you-all selected In Contempt that I looked forward to reading Christopher Darden’s take on the OJ Simpson case, not least because he’s one of only a handful of figures who declined to engage with OJ: Made in America. When that documentary came out, I felt disappointed that Darden hadn’t participated, although I understood he’d have had a range of valid reasons for declining…but he occupied a unique position in that grindingly horrible story, and I thought it might have contributed to the greater (albeit bleak) context and understanding OJ:MIA created.

On the other side of the book, though, the aforementioned unique position reminds me of that apocryphal story about George Harrison answering a pro-forma teen-mag interviewer’s question about what it’s like to be a Beatle with, “What’s it like not to be one?” It’s a perfectly good question; it just doesn’t have an answer that can be made legible to anyone outside the cone of sui generis.