Roy Firestone trended on Twitter during ‘O.J.’ and it wasn’t good
There were many jaw-dropping and cringe-inducing moments during Tuesday night’s “O.J.: Made in America” Part 2, and the most unlikely came courtesy of a long-ago interview.
Footage was shown of an interview O.J. Simpson did on the ESPN show “Sports Look” (later known as “Up Close”) with broadcaster Roy Firestone. In the undated interview, Firestone comes off as a fawning fan instead of a tough questioner, broaching a New Year’s Eve incident in 1988 which Simpson and wife Nicole argued and Simpson beat her so badly she needed to go to the hospital.
Simpson was actually charged for this event. According to Nicole, it was the ninth time Los Angeles police were called to the couple’s Brentwood home to respond to a domestic incident. They hadn’t done anything the first eight times.
But at the time of the interview Firestone apparently didn’t know that Simpson pled no contest to spousal battery. Though prosecutors recommended a month in jail for Simpson because of the severity of the beating, the judge in the case simply gave him community service, which Simpson completed at a golf course.
“Not to dredge it up again, but more or less, talk about how things can get distorted to such a point that you are portrayed as a bad guy. New Year’s Eve, you had too much to drink…” Firestone said, with Simpson interrupting him to say, “My wife and I have been together for 12 years and when I look at it, it really wasn’t that big of a fight. But because of it being New Year’s Eve, because it’s 3 o’clock in the morning, just finished a big party. It got a little loud”, finishing the lie with a laugh.
And then Firestone ramped up the idolatry: “Here’s my point. The point I’m making, Juice…it got to such a point that you were portrayed in the press for a while there like a wife beater!” Simpson says that bothered him and bothered his family, that no one was hurt and it was “no big deal.”
A little later, another clip is shown from the interview, with Firestone asking about the kind of public and corporate reaction Simpson got and gushing about how “extremely well-involved” Simpson is in the business world, listing some of the companies he was partnered with.
Twitter was rightfully very tough on Firestone, including some current ESPN personalities:
As it turns out, Firestone addressed the interview on Twitter last month. Apparently ESPN had randomly shown the old clip; Firestone took to Twitter to try to explain the interview.
Firestone also tweeted that Simpson had never been charged with domestic violence before the murder of Nicole and Ron Goldman, but that wasn’t true.
It doesn’t look like Firestone tweets too often (his most recent post was on Saturday, on an interview he did with Muhammad Ali), but if he checks the site today, he’s going to see a lot written about him that he likely wasn’t expecting.
