NewsNation’s Dan Abrams said he felt “guilt” for getting his big break in journalism from reporting on the OJ Simpson trial and “the deaths of two totally innocent people.”
“OJ 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,” Abrams said to open his “Dan Abrams Live” show Thursday.
“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 added, Mediaite earlier reported.
Abrams went on to share that he covered the high-profile case as a courtroom reporter for CourtTV at age 27 — less than two years after graduating law school.
Abrams, now 57, was only assigned the Simpson case because the network’s two main court reporters were busy on other assignments, according to Mediaite.
“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 of working with CourtTV, which captured every moment of the legal drama.
“It was a mountain of evidence like I have never seen in a case that has gone to trial. Ever,” he added.
Simpson was infamously arrested for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and Ron Goldman following a slow-speed car chase in his white Bronco on June 17, 1994.
At trial, he struggled to try on a blood-stained glove that prosecutors argued linked him to the crime scene, prompting one of his defense attorneys, Johnnie Cochran, to insist that, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
Simson’s “Dream Team” of lawyers — Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, Robert Shapiro, and more — would boast to jurors that the evidence against Simpson was “contaminated, compromised and ultimately corrupted.”
Per the prosecution’s story, on June 12, 1994, Simpson had driven over to try to reconcile with Brown, then 35 — whom he had beaten for years before they split two years earlier — but she refused. In “a final act of control,” he stabbed her to death on the walkway leading to her Brentwood condominium.
Goldman, 25, worked as a waiter at the restaurant Mezzaluna, and is believed to have stopped by Brown’s home after his shift to return her mother’s reading glasses.
The pair was found stabbed to death shortly after midnight.
“But despite all of that, those of us who were in court every day were not surprised by the verdict,” Abrams said.
Simpson was acquitted of the double murder in October 1995.
“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,” Abrams added. “It’s kind of an off thing to reconcile.”
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“I was doing my job, I think I did it well enough,” Abrams continued, according to Mediaite. “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 that. I always have.”
He concluded the segment, which aired following the news that Simpson had died Thursday of prostate cancer age 76: “So today I’m not thinking about the family of OJ Simpson. I’m thinking about the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown. It breaks my heart that I benefited my career so much as a result of their loved ones being killed by OJ Simpson.”
Following his five-year stint at CourtTV, Abrams went on to work for media giants MSNBC and ABC before launching his own media firm, Abrams Media.
In 2009, he launched Mediaite and he’s hosted “Dan Abrams Live” on NewsNation since 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.