Her voice trembling and her face streaked with tears, Nicole Brown's sister asserted Friday that O.J. Simpson once threw his wife against a wall before physically ejecting her from their home and on another occasion grabbed her by the crotch in public and proclaimed "this belongs to me."
The testimony from Denise Brown was the most wrenching, and damaging to the defendant, to date. Though prosecutors outlined these accusations during preliminary hearings, it was presumably the first time jurors had heard about them and, in any case, they sounded far more powerful when recounted by a weeping relative of the murder victim than in a recitation by a lawyer.Brown's very presence on the witness stand electrified the courtroom, and her stark appearance - dressed all in black, with her hair pulled back tightly and a single angel dangling from her left ear - fueled the sense of drama.
From the start of her brief appearance, interrupted until Monday morning after she broke down sobbing, Brown seemed to be choking back tears. At the time she let go, she was recounting the most violent of the episodes she described, which allegedly took place on an evening when Brown, her boyfriend, her sister and Simpson had been drinking margaritas at a Mexican restaurant.
Afterward, she said, they all returned to Simpson's house for more drinks and conversation. When she told the football great that he took Nicole for granted, Brown testified, first he yelled, threw pictures from the walls and then went upstairs to fling down his wife's clothing.
Then, she continued, he "grabbed Nicole, told her to get out of his house, wanted us all out of his house, picked her up, threw her against a wall, picked her up and threw her out of the house." She said that her sister fell onto her "elbows and butt," and that Simpson subsequently grabbed her boyfriend and her and threw them out of the house as well.
Brown appeared so overcome at this point that prosecutor Chris Darden asked if she was all right. "Yes," she replied, "It's just so hard."
The moment, the first in which one of the murder victim's relatives had publicly confronted Simpson, was so gripping that his lawyers cried foul.
Defense counsel Johnnie Cochran told reporters afterward that "we kept trying to say it's not fair." Asked what wasn't fair, he responded: "If it was planned, is that fair?"