With the release of the new show American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, details from the real-life case have been circulating through various news sources.
When it came to the trial that began in 1994, Linda Deutsch, a reporter for the Associated Press, had one of the best seats in the house.
dailynews.com
Deutsch truly lived a reporter’s dream. She started young as a general assignment reporter in 1969 but was later thrown into the life of court reporting. When she was first sent to backup one of AP’s veteran reporters, she found herself immersed in what we now know to be one of the biggest stories of our time: the trial of Charles Manson.
Throughout her career, Deutsch covered some of the biggest cases our nation has ever seen, including the cases of Patty Hearst, Sirhan Sirhan, and Michael Jackson.
But while her list of sensational cases she has covered is miles long, the one case that stands out to her the most is the trial of O.J. Simpson, or as people like to call it “The Trial of the Century.” Deutsch was praised for her covering of the trial, especially by O.J. Simpson himself, her personally called her to thank her for her fair coverage of the trial. Deutsch remained in contact with Simpson even after the trial and wrote a book on the case titled “Verdict: The Chronicle of the O.J. Simpson Trial.”
In an interview with The Sun, she stated that the Simpson trial was so influential and unique due to the immense amount of media coverage and the fact that it crushed the idea of the American Dream.
Here you had someone who was rich, handsome, healthy, everything America wants to be, and all of a sudden it comes crashing down. That’s a big story in any area. And before O.J. there was no 24-hour-a-day media presence… Having it televised, bringing it into everybody’s home, made a distinct difference in how involved people came.
people.com
We were all OJ-holics, the whole country. There was nobody who didn’t talk about it — on the streets, in the restaurants, in the stores. Everybody seemed to have a stake in the outcome of this trial, and it was a true murder mystery. It was never exactly predictable how it would come out.- Linda Deutsch
Leave a response