Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [151]
“He actually bulldozed his way onto the show,” said a former Warner Books publicist, “but then he got blindsided because they also booked Ron Goldman’s family. Dershowitz was annoyed and kept mentioning his book over and over again. So much so that Oprah turned to her audience and made fun of him, saying, ‘What’s the name of the book again?’ They all chorused the title. He was definitely overdoing it.… And if you and your book don’t get the love treatment on her show, you lose.” Dershowitz’s book sank without a trace.
The most controversial O. J. shows Oprah did were her February 20 and 24, 1997, interviews with Mark Fuhrman, who swore in court that he had never used the word nigger. Tape recordings and witnesses proved he had lied, and Oprah pressed him on it.
“What do you mean there are no right or wrong answers? What about the truth?” she said. “Do you think you are a racist?”
Fuhrman said no.
“Why not? If you could use those words, why not? Do you believe you can use the N word and not be a racist?”
Even as she made clear her disgust with the detective, she was criticized in black newspapers for having had him on the show in the first place, especially during Black History Month. The Chicago Defender quoted former Illinois appellate court judge Eugene Pincham as saying it was “a slap in the face” to the country’s African American community. Oprah admitted that her interview with Fuhrman provoked more viewer response than any other topic in the history of her show. She later interviewed the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, when they published their books about losing the case, and she especially empathized with Darden. “He felt that that trial—133 days—was a total waste of his life and time,” Oprah said.
As she started her new season in September 1997, Oprah’s producers suggested she interview Paula Barbieri, the Playboy model who had written a book about her relationship with O. J. Simpson. “When I heard that I said: ‘Let me tell you this: OJ is over. I’m not going to go into another season discussing what should have already been over two years ago,’ ” Oprah reiterated to the Chicago Sun-Times. “ ‘Paula Barbieri is not going to run my life. You hear me? It ain’t gonna be Paula Barbieri.’ I said, ‘I didn’t come twelve years of doing this show to start off a new season doing Paula Barbieri.’ ”
Someone suggested that Oprah’s indignation might have been tinged by losing exclusivity to Larry King, Diane Sawyer, and Matt Lauer, all of whom had lined up to interview Barbieri. Richard Roeper, who had interviewed her two days before, accused Oprah of utter hypocrisy.
“Barbieri has accepted Jesus Christ as her savior and has abandoned Hollywood for a life of church work,” he wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Shouldn’t Oprah be hugging her on camera and whispering, ‘You go, girl!’ as the tears flow?”
Weeks after the Barbieri brouhaha, Oprah decided to do a show titled “What’s Black Enough?” During the two-and-a-half-hour taping on September 30, 1997, members of her audience criticized her for coddling white viewers and for having Mark Fuhrman on during Black History Month. She had scheduled the air date for October 8, 1997, but she canceled the show, possibly because she did not want to be publicly vilified and seen as the focus of so much racial dissension.
Reverberations from the O. J. Simpson trial continued for years. Following his acquittal in the criminal trial, he was later found liable in a civil trial for the wrongful deaths, and the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were awarded $33.5 million in damages, which the Goldmans sought to collect