In December 1994, investigators from the Los Angeles County prosecutor’s office drilled open a safe deposit box that had belonged to Nicole Brown Simpson containing Polaroids of her with a battered face and letters from O.J. Simpson apologizing for abusing her. “The message in the box was clear,” wrote Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the bombshell trial of Simpson for Brown Simpson’s murder, in a book about the case, “‘In the event of my death, look for this guy.’” These pieces of evidence were presented in a trial that captivated the nation, showing the public a pattern of abuse and control in detail. Almost 30 years later, the case got renewed attention after Simpson’s death, the New York Times reports. After a monthslong trial in 1995, Simpson was acquitted of killing Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman. A civil trial later found O.J. liable for their deaths. His trial, which prompted national conversations about race, celebrity, policing and discrimination, also served as a landmark moment in the evolving understanding of domestic violence.
Media coverage of domestic abuse surged afterward, and the fervent attention encouraged many abuse survivors to reach out for help, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “The murder of Nicole Brown Simpson brought private violence into public view,” said Amanda Pyron of the Network, an advocacy organization in Chicago. “It forced people to really reckon with their feelings on relationship violence and the role of law enforcement in keeping women safe. According to a 2023 report from the nonprofit Violence Policy Center, the rate of murders committed by men against women in the U.S. fell between 1996 and 2014, when around 1.1 out of every 100,000 women were killed. It began increasing in 2015, with a sharper uptick during the pandemic, when lockdowns kept many women at home with their abusers, reaching a rate of 1.3 per 100,000 women in 2020. The vast majority of those women knew the men who killed them, the report said, and most of them had been in intimate partnerships.