Scenes From A Bad Marriage

WITH OPENING ARGUMENTS IN THE trial of O.J. Simpson set to begin at last, the biggest challenge for the prosecution isn't the missing murder weapon or the reliability of DNA evidence or the makeup of the jury. It's the defendant's smile. Whatever damage has been done in recent months to Simpson's image as the world's most genial jock, it will still be hard to make jurors put aside the old impressions of him. Unless they can imagine O.J. in a murderous rage, it won't matter even if the state offers them DNA blood tests with his autograph on every drop.

That is why so much hinged upon last week's hearing to decide whether the jury should hear evidence that O.J. had beaten and threatened Nicole Brown Simpson from the earliest days of their acquaintance until just before she and Ron Goldman were slashed to death. Based upon the physical evidence alone, lead prosecutor Marcia Clark can make a strong circumstantial case. But to persuade jurors to picture O.J. with a knife in his hand, she may also need to present them with some of the uglier scenes from the Simpson marriage.

There was no shortage of these in the 85 pages of court documents, many of them sworn statements by witnesses, that prosecutors presented to Judge Lance Ito. O.J. throwing Nicole against a wall, knocking her to a sidewalk, shattering her car windshield with a baseball bat, locking her in a wine closet, drunkenly pushing her from their Rolls-Royce as it drifted through a parking lot -- one after another the alleged episodes unfolded. When violence wasn't the major theme, it was humiliation. In one scene, O.J. taunted a pregnant Nicole as a "fat pig" and demanded that she abort their child.

Some of the most chilling accusations came from a witness who won't be able to testify. In November prosecutors opened Nicole's safety-deposit box. Inside they found an archive detailing her abuse at O.J.'s hands, including a written narrative that she drew up for her lawyer during the couple's 1992 divorce proceedings. In it she describes being knocked around by Simpson as early as 1977. When she accused him that year of sleeping with another woman, Nicole wrote, "He threw a fit, chased me, grabbed me, threw me into walls." In a New York hotel room a few years later, she says, Simpson "beat me for hours as I kept crawling for the door" and forced her to have sex while he went on smacking her. The box also held Polaroids that show Nicole's face badly bruised, news clips about O.J.'s 1989 plea of no contest to charges of spousal abuse and three letters from him asking her forgiveness.

To prove that Simpson was stalking his ex-wife, prosecutors also want the court to hear from neighbors who say they saw him peering through the windows of her condo. Just five days before her murder, Nicole contacted a shelter for battered women. The district attorney's office wants the records of her conversations there.