‘The Life and Crime of Nicole Brown Simpson’: The 10-Year Journey

Although Lifetime first announced the four-part docuseries, The Life and Crime of Nicole Brown Simpsonon April 12 — one day after OJ Simpson died of metastatic prostate cancer at the age of 76 — the project is actually going on a decade, says one of its executive producers, Melissa Moore.

“It’s 10 years in the making,” says Moore The Hollywood Reporter in the conversation below. “I contacted Denise Brown first on the topic of domestic violence. I am a survivor of domestic violence myself, and we connected by attending speaking events and galas, raising money. Over the last decade a friendship and trust began to build, so much so that I was introduced to the other Brown sisters, Dominique and Tanya, and then in 2016 they introduced me to the Simpsons, and that trust continued then. with my relationship with Brie and Jesse,” Moore says of her co-executive producers, Brie Miranda Bryant and Jesse Daniels, both of whom worked on the Lifetime documentary. Surviving R. Kelly.

The painstaking process of conducting hundreds of hours of interviews captured with Nicole’s loved ones – such as her sisters and close friends Kris Jenner, Faye Resnick and Kato Kaelin, as well as Detective Tom Lange, who oversaw the investigation into the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994 — started about a year ago. It was the 30th anniversary of Nicole’s death that prompted the sisters to initiate the project.

“On New Year’s Denise called me and said, ‘I’m ready.’ It will soon be the 30th anniversary. It’s now or never. It’s time to tell Nicole’s story,” Moore recalls. “I thought, ‘Wow, it’s finally happening.’ This is something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, and it’s hard to say really – there was a personal drive in me that wanted to tell this story that was right with Brie, that was right with Jesse . It was almost like Kismet that we all came together and were all united in this north star of telling Nicole’s story in a way that can never be duplicated. I hope we have been so defining in this document that it can never be duplicated.”

Below, Moore, Daniels and Bryant talk with THR about their research process and the personal knowledge they gained about who Nicole was in the midst of gathering the documents.

What was Lifetime the right home for this docuseries?

MELISSA MOORE Lifetime is a brand centered around survivors and female voices, and that’s what I felt was missing here. That if I close my eyes and think about Nicole’s voice, I wouldn’t be able to hear her, but if I closed my eyes, I could tell you exactly what OJ’s voice sounds like, and that’s a tragedy for me. That she is the victim in this horrific murder case and we don’t even know what her voice sounds like.

Have you talked to Nicole’s kids, Sydney and Justin, about being part of the docuseries?

DIES Obviously, the time of their father’s passing away had a great effect (on them). They lost their mother 30 years ago, now they lost their father. That’s something to consider.

How did the process begin? Did you start with archival research or interviewing the sisters?

JESSE DANIELS It was parallel. The second meeting with the sisters, Dominique opened her trunk and there were boxes and boxes of tapes and rolls in all kinds of formats. So, from an archive point of view, we’ve got our work cut out for us. It’s one of those big problems of having hours and hours and hours of footage in there that we had to immediately start digitizing because no one knew what was in there.

DIES Something special about the footage you see in this documentary is that it was at one point on the bottom of the ocean in a container. When the Browns moved from Germany to Laguna in Monarch Bay, their shipping container with some of their belongings fell off the ship and they eventually recovered some of it. So it was a heavy, heavy pressure when we started digitizing the footage because it’s very fragile.

DANIELS But archivally, it’s so important to have that layer where we can hear Nicole’s voice, we see her as a child, we see that relationship forming between Nicole and her sisters as a child. It adds such an emotional layer to being able to see that in relation to interviews. It really brings Nicole to life.

Nicole’s journals also shed more light on what her life was like with OJ. What was it like for you to read those entries?

DIES I feel like it was her voice from the grave and this was a story she wanted to share. It was buried in a safe that was meant to save her at one point. I know that the creation of this journal was to document the abuse so that at some point it could be released. And in that safe were letters from OJ to her apologizing for the abuse. It was a collection of timelines that she was using for her freedom, which she ultimately never got. So I felt that they were her words from the grave and that they were never used in the trial is amazing.

DANIELS The diary entries, along with our interviews, I believe give viewers a comprehensive look at the abuse that went on behind closed doors for so many years and how much Nicole fought in her own way, sometimes alone. That was a huge focus of ours. This story is not just about her murder, but the years leading up to it.

OJ’s alleged pattern of abuse is established early in episode one with his ex-wife, Marguerite Simpson. Her sister, Veterdata Jones, is featured in the document. Did Marguerite refuse to attend?

DANIELS We addressed everyone. There are 50 interviews we did for this series and for the 50 who agreed, we reached out to countless others to interview and try to build as comprehensive and dynamic a story as possible. Certainly Marguerite was one of the people we addressed.

And the same goes for Nicole and OJ’s friends AC (Al Cowlings) and Marcus Allen?

DANIELS Absolute. That reminds me of Surviving R. Kelly. Our school of thought is that we don’t know what we don’t know. So our job, especially in telling Nicole’s story, which has never been documented before, is that we have to reach as many people as possible, because everyone had a story. Some people were huge parts of Nicole’s life. They were a sister, they were best friends, others only had a moment with Nicole, but their story mattered a lot too. So this was our process for reaching the 50 participants who interviewed us.

How did April OJ approval affect production? Was there a figure you discussed that could be part of this series?

DANIELS We were as surprised as everyone else to hear of his passing. We were already very far into production. Nothing has changed in terms of our timeline, on top of which we’ve always focused on Nicole. So, from a creative point of view, not much has changed. As part of our pitching process, there was going to be a point where we were going to reach out to OJ as part of our journalistic process with this story, but we never got around to it.

Did the peculiar nature of this crime and the coverage it received in the 90s make it easier to find footage to include?

DIES harder I would say. There’s a high bar because when it comes to these really huge milestone moments in the case; it has been very well documented and defined and unearthed. Getting access to it was difficult. Part of the access we got was through lead detective Tom Lange. The audio you hear in the Bronco is of Simpson and Tom negotiating and having a conversation. But we always wanted to bring Nicole back, so in Bronco Chase, the conversation OJ has with Detective Tom is about Rockingham, about how he took Nicole there for his first date. It reminds you that this is a story about two people who were once in love and went into a horrible pattern.

DANIELS In addition, our post team really went through every piece of archive you can imagine, because the goal was not to show the same clips that we are used to seeing every day. So the big challenge was, where are those clips that are out there that people haven’t seen? And our posting team, our archivist, has been really instrumental in finding new material, as well as our participants.

What new insights did you discover that particularly struck you while working on this project?

BRIE MIRANDA BRYANT I think there were so many nuances and connective tissues that we had to create about this particular story that were just never explained. There are some truly extraordinary works evolving around this process of the century. You have Ezra Edelman’s speech, you have The People v. OJ Simpsona lot of information has been shared over 30 years but The Life and Crime of Nicole Brown Simpson it is different because we had never heard of her before to understand her as a wife and a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend. So touching the shades and creating a fabric out of it was interesting in itself. I think the thing that we also did that was quite interesting and different from anything else is to talk about the consequences of the process. Most of that work stopped at the trial, and it didn’t end there for her family and her friends and her children.

What impressed you most about who Nicole was?

DIES I feel like I know her because of all the conversations I’ve had with her sisters. Her voice sounds like Denise’s voice to me. When I hear it on the tape, I hear Denise talking. What I loved about Nicole is her idea of ​​love. She loved flowers and beauty and wanted to be this Martha Stewart-like kind of mother. And it felt very warm. She models this after her own mother, “Dita”. I also found her to be a beautiful and loyal friend. Everyone talked about her loyalty. She was not a girl who was impressed by material things, but she was a beauty and a natural beauty as well.

DANIELS There are two sides to Nicole that come to mind because all I knew was Nicole the victim. On a personal level, I’m also a parent, so I knew Nicole as a mother. I feel like I’ve built a very strong connection with her as a mother and as a parent through this process. The other big surprise for me was meeting Nicole as a fighter. She, in her own way, fought. And even though she didn’t survive that, she was definitely a fighter for many, many years, and I think people will be surprised by that.

BRYANT You can see that fight too. You see that struggle in Denise, in their mother’s stories. She sacrificed herself so that she could continue the relationship with her grandchildren. And when Denise speaks, I feel that strife. So for me, this is for the people who knew her and loved her, who were so lucky to have her. I feel we are so lucky to have gotten to know her through this and the Brown family.

The Life and Crime of Nicole Brown Simpson aired its first two episodes on Saturday and will conclude on Sunday with its final two episodes at 8pm ET/PT on Lifetime.