2024 marks an incredible 30 years since one of the most violent and scandalous femicides: that of Nicole Brown Simpson. The 35-year-old woman was brutally murdered by her ex-husband O.J. Simpson, practically decapitated, after years of physical and psychological abuse. However, if you ask anyone, we still know little about her. Her most “popular” image is the one bloodied on the steps of her house in Los Angeles, where she was attacked, killed, and found by a neighbor. With the documentary The Life & Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, her family aims to finally change the narrative.

A sad universal story

It has been common – for me – to react to so many true crime docs because they are generally about the killers. The victims? Mentioned briefly, often highlighted only to reveal the brutality of the crime, and their personality or life are also mentioned to contextualize the unfortunate chance that put them in the path of a crime. When I rewatched the excellent Star Plus documentary about O.J., I ended up asking, “But what about Nicole? Who was she? What do we know about her” because she was virtually silent and mentioned only to measure the obsession of the former player, who passed away from cancer in 2024. This documentary is frighteningly the first to talk about HER in three decades.

All of this suggests to me the frightening universality and timelessness of femicide. In the documentary about the criminal, we hear the desperate phone calls from the victims in several attacks before the murder, we know and see the photos of the beatings he received during his jealous attacks, but Nicole is an additional fact in HIS story, almost a comma. Women do not have respect or protagonism even when they lose their lives.

Nicole Brown Simpson was no exception to a habit that proved crucial 30 years ago and still exists today: blaming the victim. The 18-year-old Californian blonde is always introduced as the “waitress O.J. fell in love with,” in other words, a blonde who married him for fame and fortune. As if even if this was close to the truth it wouldn’t matter. She was beaten countless times, was humiliated by her husband many more times and when she tried to stop, she was brutally murdered. There is nothing in the world that justifies blaming her.

If they ask “Why didn’t she break up?” All you have to do is look at the photos of her body to understand the nightmare she lived through. Nicole Brown Simpson was the victim, we cannot reverse the facts like O.J. Simpson’s defense did in the “trial of the century”.

In TV series and films, more negativity

Nicole’s story was so cruelly crushed by O.J.’s legal defense that there was a TV movie in which she was sexy, seductive, and involved with a serial killer who would be the real perpetrator of the murders, not the former player. A crime that only Hollywood in its insensitivity could produce.

However, not even Star Plus’s excellent American Crime Story provides more than a few seconds to talk about Nicole. The series shows the behind-the-scenes of the trial, one that was relevant in several aspects, least of all respecting the victims.

It is delicate to look at the opportunity created by O.J. Simpson‘s defense to reverse the brutal racism that black people still experience in the United States. Before the deaths of Nicole and Ron Goldman, the same police team committed horrific crimes that went unpunished. Nicole and Ron, white, were symbols of the reversal of pain, somehow doubling down on how injustice is intolerable. It is a hideous aspect of what makes this trial rightly known as “the trial of the century.” What was at stake were not individuals, but the system.

Therefore, more than ever, it is time to find out who Nicole Brown Simpson was and how, regardless of her color, she represents so many women who still suffer the same abuse and fate. It was time.

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