NewsNation host and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams opened up on Thursday about getting a big break in journalism as a reporter on the O.J. Simpson murder trial after it was announced that Simpson had died following a battle with prostate cancer.
“O.J. Simpson died today, and for me, it’s actually an incredibly odd day because I covered every day of both his criminal and civil cases from inside the courtroom, and there weren’t many of us,” began Abrams on his show Dan Abrams Live. “The reality is his cases jumpstarted my career, and yet he was a murderer. It’s sort of a troubling reality I’ve always had to live with.”
Abrams proceeded to tell the story about how he ended up as a courtroom reporter for Court TV at the age of 27, less than two years after leaving law school, and was suddenly assigned to the Simpson case due to the network’s two main reporters being busy on other assignments.
“They sent me out to cover that initial proceeding and I had no sense that I was about to devote the next two years of my life to covering the trial of a generation,” Abrams recalled.
Recalling the massive amount of evidence that seemed to indicate Simpson had killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, Abrams said, “It was a mountain of evidence like I have never seen in a case that has gone to trial. Ever. But despite all of that, those of us who were in court every day were not surprised by the verdict.”
Later in the segment, Abrams said:
The bottom line is that the country, in my view rightly, was convinced that a killer got away with it, and yet on a kind of personal level, his legal issues, more importantly, the deaths of two people, the murders of two people, changed my life. It’s kind of an off thing to reconcile.
“I was doing my job, I think I did it well enough,” Abrams continued. “But at the end of the day, it’s also true the deaths of two totally innocent people helped make my career, and I have guilt about…
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