O.J. Simpson met Nicole Brown in 1977 and divorced his first wife, Marguerite, in 1979. They were married on Feb. 2, 1985; Sydney was born eight months later, and Justin was born in 1988.
“You guys never do anything,” Nicole told police when they were called to the Rockingham house in the early morning hours of Jan. 1, 1989, according to reports about that night. “You never do anything. You come out. You’ve been here eight times. And you never do anything about him.” Simpson insisted he didn’t beat Nicole, only pushed her out of bed. Then, told he needed to go with the officers to the police station, he drove off instead. A few days later, Nicole went to the station and said she didn’t really want them to proceed with a prosecution, but she consented to out-of-court mediation.
On May 24, 1989, Simpson was sentenced to 24 months of probation, ordered to perform 120 hours of community service and pay fines totaling $470, and was told to attend counseling twice a week (he was allowed to do it by phone) after pleading no contest to misdemeanor domestic violence.
Nicole eventually moved out with Justin and Sydney and filed for divorce in February 1992. They settled that October, with O.J. agreeing to pay her a lump sum of $433,750, plus $10,000 a month in child support, and she retained the title of a rental property. She eventually bought a condo at 875 S. Bundy Drive in Brentwood.
Nicole moved into her new place in January 1994. All the while, Simpson was alternately threatening her and trying to get back together. According to prosecutors and witnesses, O.J. had stood outside and looked through her window on multiple occasions, including one time when she was having sex with a boyfriend.
Per Jeffrey Toobin’s 1996 book The Run of His Life, in a diary entry from June 3, 1994, Nicole detailed a recent threat from Simpson: “‘You hang up on me last nite, you’re gonna pay for this bitch, you’re holding money from the IRS , you’re going to jail you f–king c–t. You think you can do any f–king thing you want, you’ve got it comming [sic]—I’ve already talked to my lawyers about this bitch–they’ll get you for tax evasion, bitch, I’ll see to it. You’re not going to have a dime left bitch’ etc.”
She called a battered women’s shelter in Santa Monica on June 7, 1994, to lament that her ex was stalking her.
On June 12, 1994, she attended Sydney’s dance recital, as did O.J., and afterward she had dinner with the kids and members of her family at Mezzaluna in Brentwood. At 9:40, Juditha Brown, Nicole’s mom, called her daughter to say she’d left her glasses at the restaurant. Nicole called the restaurant and asked her friend Ron Goldman, a waiter there, if he could drop them off at her house. He left the restaurant at 9:50 p.m.
A neighbor who lived diagonally across the alley behind Nicole’s place said he heard a dog start barking at 10:15 p.m.</