Sarah tells Mike about the clash of the titans, the fury at the grand jury. We follow Kato, the wise fool of the kingdom, for the week between the murders and the Bronco chase. Digressions include John Travolta, French kickboxing movies and "The Mummy." The celebrity cameos are less numerous than usual but no less absurd.
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Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah tells Mike about the clash of the titans, the fury at the grand jury. We follow Kato, the wise fool of the kingdom, for the week between the murders and the Bronco chase. Digressions include John Travolta, French kickboxing movies and "The Mummy." The celebrity cameos are less numerous than usual but no less absurd.
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
The O.J. Simpson Trial: When Kato Met Marcia
Sarah: I think it's like finding out that Mick Jagger is singing backup on You’re So Vain. I think you can't unhear it and it adds to the experience.
Mike: Welcome to Your Wrong About the podcast, where we tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Sarah: Ooh, that's nice.
Mike: Because we're going to put Kato under oath this episode, right?
Sarah: We are. Yeah, so that was super topical.
Mike: So help us, God.
Sarah: That was beautiful. I do think that the whole truth is fundamentally inaccessible to human beings, that’s my quibble with that. But that is the thing that people say in this situation. So like I'm faulting the legal system. I'm not faulting the tagline.
Mike: I am Michael hops. I'm a reporter for the Huffington post.
Sarah: My name is Sarah Marshall and I'm working on a book about the satanic panic.
Mike: And we are on Patreon at patreon.com/yourewrongabout and lots of other places. And if you're in quarantine and you can't do it right now, or you don't want to, we know it's weird out there and don't feel obligated.
Sarah: Yes. I concur. Do whatever you want under capitalism. People either have too much or not enough money. And all things being a numbers game, you probably are one of the people would not enough, so like buy yourself some fancy butter.
Mike: What are we going to talk about today?
Sarah: We're going to talk about when Kato met Marcia, it's when the Flintstones meet the Jetsons of our story. Are you excited?
Mike: Yeah, we’re getting to the point in like all those anthology movies that came out in the 90s that like follow one character for like an hour and a half and they all meet in like the last 10 minutes.
Sarah: Yeah. We're doing that. We're making a high concept, low budget, 90s miniseries. So we're talking about Brian “Kato” Kaelin. And I would love for you to bring us up to speed about, you know, who is Cato Kaylyn, and what adventures of his have we observed so far in this story?
Mike: Well Kato was a friend of Nicole's who witnessed abuse, but felt himself to be powerless to stop it. And he ended up falling into OJ’s orbit, and then sort of by accident, he ended up becoming the primary alibi witness for OJ on the night that Ron and Nicole were murdered. Since then, he has spoken to the cops and was released back into basically OJ’s custody. He's moved back into the guest house.
Sarah: So when we left Kato, he was sleeping on the floor in OJ’s house on the night of June 13, protecting the housekeeper GG. And so on the morning of Tuesday, June 14, Kato wakes up to find the house full of breakfast, because area restaurants are still sending free food over. And so Kato Kaelin: The Whole Truth by Mark Elliott, which I am relying on for my Kato's eye view, tells us that by early morning, Kato is up, dressed, and returning the dozens of phone calls left on his machine. And he gets a call from Bob Shapiro, who two days before making the announcement publicly that he's taking over as OJ's primary criminal defense attorney, is like, “Hey Kato, I'm taking over as OJ's primary criminal defense attorney, and I have some questions for you.”
And I would also say, I was thinking about this as I was reading the Bob Shapiro parts of my research for this episode. it's interesting to me that there are a lot of really good performances in The People vs OJ Simpson. And yet I don't automatically see and hear them in my head now, except for Shapiro. When I read anything about Bob Shapiro now, I just hear John Travolta in my mind, all of those little eyebrow waves. Ever since that show came out, I was like, is this an okay performance or is it weird? For a while I was like, I think it's really bad, actually. Now, I think it's great. So yeah. So just know that that's in my head, I guess.
So Kato has call with Bob Shapiro. And meanwhile, he's still at OJ’s house where Jermaine Jackson of the Jackson 5 and also Dionne Warwick stop by. There's just a continual stream of people coming by to show their support because they're seeing OJ as a grieving husband at this state, apparently.
Mike: God, does he have any friends that aren't like C-list celebrities?
Sarah: Yeah. Like old, white men who he plays golf with. That's like his two friend groups.
Mike: Those are his two lists on Facebook.
Sarah: Dionne Warwick and the CEO's, those are his friends. And so Mark Slotkin, who's a friend of OJ's, who is married to Robin Greer who's a good friend of Nicole's, stopped by with Bobby Chandler who had been OJ’s teammate. And according to Kato, something weird happened. “Mark Slotkin said out loud that he'd heard something that afternoon about noises outside Kato's room Sunday night. Kato wondered how he knew that. Suddenly Slotkin looked directly at Kato and said, ‘You better get your story straight, man, this is OJ. Think about what you know, and make sure you really know it’.”
Mike: He's being sort of low key intimidated. Do we think it's on orders of Shapiro? Like, who would have told them, potentially?
Sarah: I don’t know. I mean, I can see there are many routes for information to travel in this house where like there seem to be a bunch of people coming in and out and sharing information with each other. So we could have gotten from Shapiro, I think, or from somewhere else. To me, the point is that OJ is sort of network of friends and associates are maybe without needing to all get on the same page and the kind of like a briefing or like, “Hey, like let's protect our friend. Let's make sure that this Kato guy who showed up recently and it was originally living with Nicole and who isn't really of our circle, let's make sure he's on the same page as us. Which is that like our friend couldn't have done this.”
Mike: Do OJ a solid.
Sarah: And so Darnell, OJ’s daughter from his first marriage, volunteers to take Kato to the meeting with Shapiro. And so the house is of course still being staked out by reporters, so they're mobbed on their way out.
Mike: Kato doesn’t have a car? Is this like a man in LA without a car?
Sarah: He does have a car, but it's like, it's parked outside of the compound. And so it's like surrounded by reporters and stuff. So he can't really access it. But Kato says of this, that he's also getting the feeling that everyone in OJ’s camp was trying to make sure he was never completely out of their sight. Which, yeah, I see that. I don't think Kato's being paranoid.
Mike: Yeah. If I had killed someone, that is how I would treat the main witness against me.
Sarah: So Kato is taken, and he meets Bob Shapiro. And Shapiro basically sits him down and starts questioning him first about who is he? Where is he from? What does he do for a living? What's his relationship with Nicole? How long did he live at her house? Had he ever seen her and OJ fighting?
Then they talk about the events of Sunday, the hours leading up to the murder, the trip to McDonald's, the duffel bag, the thumps on the wall. And throughout this, Shapiro’s cell phone keeps ringing. Finally, he gets a call that makes him happy, and he announces that they have retained a forensics expert that they wanted for the defense team. And throughout this meaning, Shapiro's kind of assembling the defense team as they go and calling around and signing on experts.
Mike: He's showing up in the post credit sequence of all of their movies and inviting them to join. Is Kato still telling the same story that he told the cops? Is he editing his story already?
Sarah: According to Kato, he is telling the same story consistently the whole time. Which is that he was on the phone with his friend, Rachel, he heard thumps on the wall of his guest house, at what will turn out later to be the time that OJ would have been re-entering the property. Although of course Kato at the time has no way of knowing that. And tell me what else you remember of Kato's sort of being a witness to that night.
Mike: So he had gone to McDonald's with OJ. OJ was acting really weird, but in a way that Kato couldn't really put his finger on. They came back, OJ was still acting weird and then Kato heard this thump, and he went out to the guest house and went to the main house, and OJ was supposed to catch a flight that night. And the limo driver is waiting outside the house and OJ is still acting weird. And then Kato sees this mysterious blue duffle bag that we now think is like the murder clothes. But at the time, Kato was just like, “Huh, an extra duffle bag.” And then nobody ever talks about it ever again.
Sarah: Yeah. And Kato is also the last person who saw OJ before the murders took place. So Kato is the single most important person in terms of establishing the timeline. And the timeline really is pretty key here. So yeah, isn't it weird? It's like, you know, those fairy tales like the one about the sort of town fool who goes to a strange kingdom to seek his fortune and he accidentally saves the king because he's waving away a mosquito, but the king thinks he's waving him over. And so he gets up and then his throne is struck by lightning and it's like, my God, this man is a genius. Like, I feel like Kato is just accidentally important in that way.
Mike: He's like Forrest Gump. He's just stumbling through all of these world historical events without really having any inkling of how big of a deal he's going to be in all of them.
Sarah: Yeah. And who could imagine, also.
Mike: Certainly not Kato. So Bob is questioning Kato. “He's taking all these cell phone calls and putting the team together. And eventually “Shapiro asked Kato how he was doing. Kato said ‘Fine’ and said again that he would be totally honest about everything. That's all we want you to do, Kato, just tell the truth.”
Mike: Poor, naive Kato.
Sarah: “When the interview concluded, Shapiro turned off the tape recorder. Kato asked him to tell OJ that he loved him, missed him, and was praying for him. Shapiro then silently stared at Kato for a long time before speaking. When he does…” this is kind of meshing well with Michelle Remembers in terms of like, kind of a confused narrator.
Mike: Because also Shapiro must be listening to this and thinking, “Holy shit, this is so incriminating.”
Sarah: I feel like Bob Shapiro was like, this man is playing five dimensional chess with me. What kind of game is he up to by asking me to pray for OJ? And Kato is just like, I just wish him well.
Mike: And Kato has no idea the information that he's sitting on and how incriminating it is, and how perfectly it matches with the timeline of the murders. And he's just like, well, of course, I'm going to tell the truth, tell the truth, and then everything's going to be fine. And Shapiro is probably like, oh fuck, this guy tells the truth, we're never going to win this case.
Sarah: And I don't even think he's necessarily that innocent about it. Like I think he does have kind of a weird, you know, he's aware of the fact that he was being weird. Like he's like, OJ has been weird. This is weird. This just feels, I feel sick to my stomach about this whole thing.
Mike: We should also keep in mind that Kato wrote this book. So it's also very much in Kato's incentives to be like, all I wanted to do was tell the truth, so he could be playing up his sort of lap dog innocence a little bit.
Sarah: Yes. I think we also experience multiple things at once. You know, I think that like his reaction immediately following the murders could be fundamentally one of innocence and also self-interest. Because we've seen him to be a self-interested guy, and he also has real reason to fear OJ and his associates. They're powerful and clearly can inflict some damage.
So Kato asked Shapiro to tell OJ he loved him, missed him, and was praying for him. “Shapiro then silently stared at Kato for a long time before speaking. When he did, his words were pointed. ‘Do you think he did it Kato?’ Kato then returned the stare. After a pause he said, ‘God, I hope not’.”
Mike: Poor Kato.
Sarah: I love that. That's an honest answer. If you wanted to smooth things over with OJ’s lawyer, he'd be like, no, of course I don't, he's not capable of that. But he's like, I sure hope he didn’t.
Mike: Gee willikers, mister.
Sarah: So they have a two hour interview, and then Arnell does come and pick Kato up. And then afterwards, Kato is basically describing to Arnell what Bob Shapiro asked him and how he responded. And as he's describing the thumps on the wall, he says, “I noticed for the first time that Al Cowlings was standing behind her.” Al Cowlings being a very close friend of OJs and the guy who's going to be his driver in the Bronco chase in a few days. So Kato says, “I noticed for the first time that Al Cowlings was standing behind her, staring at me with a look of disgust on his face. I smiled at him and nodded, but he didn't smile back. I wondered what that was all about. I felt sick to my stomach, even though I hadn't eaten in nearly two days. I couldn't understand why AC had looked at me like that. I hadn't done anything.”
Mike: I guess they're preemptively mad at him for betraying OJ, I guess. Is that what's going on?
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I feel like you have direct anger at people who know things that implicate people you love, right? Like that's frowning at the messenger. And Kato says, “I had the feeling I was being watched. That anything I said and did was being monitored, evaluated. I suddenly felt the need to get out of there.” And it's like, yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a positive direction.
Mike: Get an Airbnb, move out of the guest house.
Sarah: So he calls his friend Grant, who was the friend he was with in Aspen when he met Nicole. And Grant picks him up and takes him to his house. But right before Kato leaves, he gets a phone call from Howard Weitzman, OJ’s original lawyer who then puts OJ on with him. And he says, “Juice, how are you? Is everything okay? ‘Yeah’, OJ drawled. ‘I'm okay.’ ‘What can I do for you? Anything?’ ‘Just tell the truth’.” So he's being told in this kind of like creepy, coded way, like just tell the truth, Kato, just tell them what you know.
Mile: I'm sure you're going to do the right thing. Just do the right thing.
Sarah: I'm sure you're not going to betray OJ. So Kato spends the night at Grant's, but then he asked Grant to take him back to OJ the next morning, because it's the day of Nicole's wake and he has to get a suit. Originally, Kato was supposed to ride in one of the two limos that had been reserved for the family to Nicole's wake, but then at the last second, they're like, no, no family only, Kato can't come. Then they let Arnell and OJ and some of Jason's friends in the limos. Apparently, this is the moment when Kato knows that there's a rift between him and the Simpsons.
Mike: That's interesting that that little thing is what made it clear to him.
Sarah: Yeah. That is like how we realize things where it's like stuff really piles up and becomes pretty obvious. And then like a little thing happens and you're like, oh my God, I'm not in the family limos.
Mike: Yeah. It sounds really trivial. But like finding out that you're not in a group chat with like people that you know is like legitimately devastating and this feels like the nineties equivalent of that. You're like, you're not going to give me a ride.
Sarah: Yeah. Because in the nineties, the economy was so good that people, whenever they wanted to gossip, they just rode around in a limo. Let’s trick people into thinking that millennials really believe that. So Kato ends up driving himself to the wake and he has to fight his way through a crowd of people. I just want you to envision this, because it's like a part of the daily lives of a lot of the people who the story is about. And it's just such a weird thing to imagine. He's like, okay, fine. I will drive my own car. I'm kind of worried it won't start because it's been five days, but that's the least of my problems because the entire street is mobbed and there's people all over it.
And so he gets his car started and then he's trying to get out of his parking spot and there's just gawkers and camera people. The street is just packed. Like I can't imagine. It would be like driving through the zombies and the mummy or the followers of the mummy and the mummy. I don't know.
Mike: I can always tell when you've seen a movie recently, when all of your metaphors come from the same movie.
Sarah: I’ve always seen the Mummy recently, to be fair. It's rarely a time in my life when I can't be described as having watched The Mummy recently.
Mike: This is like the third ‘it's like that one time in The Mummy’.
Sarah: Well, that movie has everything, Mike. In a way, most things are like that one time in The Mummy.
So I don't know what to tell you, but he does get to the wake. It makes him think of how he and Nicole used to go to church together because they were both raised Catholic. And he goes to view Nicole's body. And the book says he was surprised to see how genuinely beautiful she seemed in death. She was dressed in a black blouse that completely covered her neck all the way up to the chin, which of course is because of the wounds to her neck that killed her, because she was almost beheaded. And Kato prays for her. And then after he leaves the viewing, he sees that OJ is sitting down and sort of wailing, it seems, performatively. And he's saying, “I no longer have a wife, I'm left without a wife. There's no more Nicole. I don't have Nicole anymore.”
And Kato was like, I can't handle this any longer, I have to go. Like, I just can't watch this. But as he's getting up to go, Cora Fishman, who's one of Nicole's close friends, comes up to Kato and throws her arms around him and kind of is sobbing and hugging him. And then she goes up to OJ, and according to Kato, starts pounding on his chest and saying, “What happened? What about the kids?” And OJ says, “I loved her too much.” And Cora says, “Why did you do this? How could you do this?”
Mike: Woah! At the funeral?
Sarah: Yeah. Multiple people heard him say, “I loved her too much”, at Nicole's wake. And then what's interesting to me too, is that at the end of all this at the end of feeling like he's being monitored by OJ’s friends and family and kind of pushed around, he's like, well, I guess I'll sleep at OJ’s again tonight. Then he like, once again, sleeps in a corner of the living room on the floor. And it's like, why Kato?
Mike: Sleep at Grant's house. Yeah. He must have other friends that he doesn't happen to mention in the book. I mean, he must have many people whose couch he can crash on.
Sarah: Yeah. He's an affable guy. Kato is everybody's friend. Like I feel like he has lots of living room floors he could be sleeping in. So I don't know. I can see that being motivated partly by him wanting to like, not make the Simpson family think that he feels weird about anything, you know, for his own safety. And also maybe out of being a people pleaser.
And the next day is the funeral where Nicole is buried in Dana Point, where her parents live, and Kato sees OJ that day. And he goes to OJ and says, “I love you.” And OJ says, “Sorry to put you through this, Kato”. And Kato says, “I just want you to know I'll be there for you always and any way I can”. Which is like, what are you offering, Kato? What's that about?
Mike: Yeah. And it's also weird that he hasn't concluded that OJ did it.
Sarah: I can see him being in denial, but it's like, he does seem to get on some level. We're not getting a lot of him being like, but clearly, I thought he was innocent at this time. Like Paula was very careful to be like, I could not conceive of the possibility that OJ could have killed anyone. So it just did not enter the transom of my mind. And like, we don't get that from Cato.
Mike: I mean, I guess he doesn't know about like the blood and all that kind of other evidence at this point. But still it's like, you've seen somebody act violently towards someone and she dies. I mean, it’s just interesting to me that Kato hasn't been like, it was clear to me that he killed her and I had to do this whole fake thing so that he wouldn't kill me, too. Whereas what he's actually saying in the book is more like, I didn't really know if he did it or not.
Sarah: And then you have to remember that this book is based on taped interviews that Kato did with the author before he gave testimony at OJ’s trial. So the degree to which he needs to be equivocating right now, so that he doesn't say anything that contradicts his testimony later, that's all part of this also.
Mike: Right. So there's some weird game theory-shit going on about what's going to end up incriminating him.
Sarah: Yeah. What could end up potentially incriminating him if he changes his story later, or if he caves to any kind of pressure from OJ’s camp. Because by his own account, he is fearful of his own safety.
Mike: So hard to know what to believe in these accounts.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, once again, like why go to the trouble of constructing a meticulously made unreliable narrator book when you can just read a celebrity memoir from the nineties. There are a bunch of balloons at the funeral reception at the Brown's home, and Kato tells Justin - Nicole's son - that if he writes a note to his mother, he'll tie it onto the balloon and send it to her.
Mike: Oh, that's sweet.
Sarah: Yeah. I know. I'm like, damn Kato. That's like, that's smart. I feel like Kato, he's a kind person.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. He seems like he gets kids on like a fundamental level.
Sarah: Right? Yeah, I think so. And so, according to Kato, Justin writes a note that says, “Mommy, I miss you. I know you're in heaven.” And Kato attaches the note to the balloon and Justin became very excited as he watched it until it completely disappeared into the high, clear sky.
And then later on at the reception he's watching OJ with Sydney and Justin. And as he says later has the feeling that this is the last unsupervised meeting that they're going to have for a while. So, you know, in his head he's like, yep, they're going to take OJ in pretty soon. So Kato does go to Grant's house that night and apparently Grant is very focused on Kato’s newfound fame. He's talking about how much Kato has been on TV the last few days, because of course the cameras keep catching him going in and out of OJ’s house. And he say, when they make the TV movie out of your life, they better call me.
Mike: Oh my God. Tone it down, Grant, somebody died.
Sarah: According to Kato, Grant kept talking about how much money he'd already turned down to tell as much as he knew, which is like nothing. He said he'd been offered upward of $100,000. Kato responded by saying he was grateful for his support. And apparently Grant's girlfriend is also hungry for all the details and keeps pestering Kato for information. And Grant also tells Kato at one point that he found a bucket outside of one of his windows and a bunch of cigarette butts on the ground next to the bucket, from what he deduces someone has been surveilling their house.
Mike: Grant's house?
Sarah: Yeah. Where Kato is staying. Kato says “I began to wonder, was I a target?” And it's like, maybe, but more likely it was the media.
Mike: I mean, this speaks to the absurd economics of the news media at the time, a hundred thousand dollars for fucking Grant, who has like nothing interesting to say.
Sarah: Yeah, you can't get $100,000 for like a blockbuster, non-fiction book advance. There was a time apparently in this country when he can get $100,000 for Kato Kaelin’s friend’s testimony.
Mike: Which would have been third hand information about OJ, right? Like a friend of a friend of OJ.
Sarah: Kato is a hot stock right now.
Mike: It’s also the way that it shapes the incentives. Because Grant has every reason to lie. He knows that a hundred thousand bucks is only going to go to him if he has juicy stuff to say, right. So it's in his interest to say like, yeah, Kato told me that OJ was like, yeah but I'm going to kill her on Wednesday or whatever. Like he needs to punch this up. You know have, if you start drawing the circles around like OJ and then OJ’s friends and then OJ’s friends of friends, you've got like hundreds of people who could potentially make tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars from exaggerated scoops of what was really going on behind the scenes. And all of them have an incentive to lie. Like this is not a way to discover the truth about a situation. Just pour money on it and see what happens.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, later on, we're going to learn about Paula’s experience with the tabloids. Which includes them just completely making up all kinds of stuff about her and what she's up to sexually, and having a threesome with OJ and AC. To which she responds, “Did they think I was trying to make alphabet soup?”
Mike: Oh, that's pretty good, Paula. That's pretty good.
Sarah: That's a pretty good joke.
Mike: And also, you're saying about the media incentives at this point too, is that if you're a reporter, you need to come back to your editor with a good story. You don't necessarily need to come back with a true story. Because the fact is, tabloids don’t really run corrections. And even if they did, it would be on page 5,035 and nobody would notice anyway. So even if you have a sense that like somebody is kind of a cynical operator who one time chatted to Nicole and OJ at the grocery store and they really don't have much, and you can tell they're playing up their story because you're going to give them $10,000. You don't really have an incentive to be like, eh, we're just not going to run this, this sounds fake. You're just going to fucking run it. Because it's going to get the equivalent of page views at the time.
Sarah: It's a terrible system.
Mike: Yeah, it's bad.
Sarah: And also, it's removing from the record, your role in the conversation, which potentially was substantial, and which connects to our Michelle Remembers series, which this one makes look really short.
So you're Kato Kaelin, you're a simple soul from Milwaukee.
Mike: With an amazing torso.
Sarah: With an amazing torso and beautiful hair. And you came to the big city to seek your fortune. And you worked as a comedy waiter. And now at the end of this past whirlwind week of your life, you're staying with your friend Grant, who's pestering you about what's going on and wants to play you in a TV movie.
And so into all this, add the sound of a telephone ringing at six in the morning on Friday, the 17th of June. And it is a call from detectives Tippin and Carr, saying that they would like to take Kato in for just a little bit more questioning and to be ready at eight o'clock.
Mike: Is this, do I know this date? Is this the grand jury/Bronco chase day?
Sarah: Yes, this is June 17th.
Mike: Ooh. This is like ‘the room where it happens’. This is like the big day when everything comes together.
Sarah: I don't understand that reference, but yes. One of Kato's friends in LA is a guy named Alan Mehrez, who was the producer of Savate, which is a film that Kato worked on in the past. And so at this stage Kato calls Alan, because Alan used to be a lawyer before he went into movies, and is like, can you be my lawyer?
Mike: That's how normal people get lawyers.
Sarah: Yeah. They call their friend, Alan, the only lawyer they know. And Alan's like, I'm not a criminal lawyer, and I'm like a French kickboxing movie guy now. So no, but I can refer you to someone. And Kato's like, “Yes, please find someone to represent me. I have no idea what to do.” I imagine that he is like Winona Ryder in Reality Bites when Ben Stiller asks her if she has a lawyer, and she's like, “I don't have a lawyer, I don't even have a dentist.”
This is a good time to cut to Marcia's account. Do you want to do that? Okay, so what kind of transition do we need to establish that we're in Marcia’s POV? Like what music would you use to signify her or something?
Mike: We need like a horizontal white.
Sarah: And then we cut to Marsha standing, windswept on Tatooine. So we're on Tatooine, Marcia is at the LA District Attorney's office. And can you remind us of where we last left Marcia?
Mike: Yes, she is investigating this crime and increasingly irritated with the cops for being super-duper incompetent. And she's the only one who is taking this seriously. And so in a sort of Hail Mary pass, the LA District Attorney has decided to start essentially their own investigation by launching a grand jury hearing. In which they can call witnesses and get them under oath and kind of lock their stories in, in a way that the police are unwilling to do.
Sarah: Yeah. The DA's office convening the grand jury after Marcia has been pushing for it as a way to circumvent the police, to me has the feeling of Marsha saying to the LAPD, “I drink your milkshake.” It's very satisfying to me.
So after Gil Garcetti decides to convene the grand jury, the following day as Marcia’s leaving the office on Thursday, she's already starting to hear rumors of the LAPD negotiating with Bob Shapiro to have OJ voluntarily surrender. So it's Thursday night. Marcia is like, okay, things are coming together. We're going to convene the grand jury. We're going to see OJ surrender himself tomorrow, apparently. And with all that in mind she says, first order of business, reel in Kato Kaelin. OJ Simpson was clearly Kato's benefactor. I can just about bet that had Kato known Simpson was a suspect, he would not have spoken so freely about the thump, for instance, and risk dumping his meal ticket. And so Marcia decides like, okay, Kato knows more than he's said to us so far, he's withholding or being coy with us because he doesn't want to implicate this guy who's supporting his Hollywood lifestyle. So we’ve got to get him in and grill them a little bit.
Mike: This reminds me, I think there's something really typical about the way that we think that other people are making way more calculations than they are. Because actually Kato is just kind of clueless.
Sarah: Yeah, let's talk about Kato’s adventures this week. Like has he been cagey? Or like yeah, really acted in his own self-interest in any way?
Mike: He's not like doing this, like 10 moves ahead type of chess. So like, I'll give them this piece of information, probably withhold this other one to protect OJ. He's just like, yeah, we went to McDonald's, it was fine. Like he hasn't really-
Sarah: Or he’s like, I feel a weird feeling about it, but I don't know. It's like, right. You don't know, like you have incomplete information.
I think the problem with what Kato saw, both in his own life and at trial, is that it looks bad for OJ but it doesn't turn the key in any way, in terms of his lack of an alibi. You can look at everything Kato knows and be like, well, OJ can still be innocent. Everything that Kato observed is true. And it's like, yeah, he could be like, Kato is not able to hang this guy. He's not as useful as the prosecution would like him to be. He's in this weird nether zone.
Mike: And if he's making a calculation on like, I don't want to lose my free rent when this guy goes to jail, which I think on some level we all make calculations based on how we personally benefit. But I think most of those calculations are invisible to us. And I don't think Kato is sitting there like this, guy's my meal ticket. I must change my story. I think that's probably affecting him in some way, but not, not in a way that like, he's deliberately masking his true feelings.
Sarah: Yeah. He's not like Wadsworth in Clue. Yeah. It was a good deal and now he has to come up with more money than he had before, so that's a factor. But like, I think it's also fair to imagine that he could be shocked and focused on the fact that his friend has been stabbed to death and maybe his other friend did it. And maybe he has some degree of responsibility for that. Like, those wheels might not be turning consciously, but that doesn't mean that that's not somewhere in his mind also.
Mike: But Marcia doesn't know all that.
Sarah: And Marcia’s view of Kato is, you know, he's an obstacle of course, about the fact that he shouldn't have been palling around with OJ during this time and OJ shouldn’t have had access to him.
Mike: And she probably wants to compensate for all the fuck-ups that the LAPD are making. Right. So if they're going too slow, she's going to go really fast to try to get as much information out of him as fast as possible.
Sarah: Exactly. So to this point, Kato doesn't know that a grand jury is what's going on. And I doubt that he knows what a grand jury is. He just knows that the cops want to talk to him again. And the last time the police talked to him, they detained him for like eight hours. Kato's already been treated like a suspect and that is the kind of experience that makes you think I should probably get a lawyer. That's probably a good idea. Like this might be Kato's best idea in this entire book, and this is the thing he's going to be punished for most.
So they subpoena Kato, and the detectives tell him he's required to appear before a grand jury today. And Kato says fine, except he has no idea what a grand jury is.
Mike: Yes. I did not know this until like two weeks ago, so I'm with Kato on this.
Sarah: He eventually ended up at the DA's office, was taken into a room and introduced to David Kahn Los Angele DA, and Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark. I just wish we had dramatic music to play or something.
Mike: I know you want like the camera to zoom in on her as she like turns around like who's this Cato guy.
Sarah: Yes. And she's smoking. “Clark, dressed in a blue business suit seemed to Kato quite friendly, too friendly, especially when she opened her eyes wide, put a big smile on her face and said, ‘Hi, how you doing? Can I get you anything? We're going to have a great time’.”
This does kind of read like Michelle Remembers. She's like, I'm your special nurse, Kato. “I knew right then and there she was going to be trouble”, he said. She asked me to follow her. Once again, I was on the go. She took me to her office, which I couldn't help noticing had a large poster of Jim Morrison on one wall. When she saw me looking at it, she smiled and said, You like Jim Morrison? So do I.”
Mike: Wait, so is he under oath? Is he like, how is this working?
Sarah: No. Okay. He's not under oath. He's being brought in for chat at this point. “She says, ‘Are you a friend of OJ Simpson’s?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A friend of Nicole's as well?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You live in OJ's guest house, right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘A nice guest house?’ ‘Very nice.’ ‘You have a bed?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘By a back wall, right?’ Kato felt he was being treated like a preschooler and it wasn't going for it. ‘Would you mind if I waited for my lawyer?’ That's when Clark's demeanor took a sudden radical shift, her smile disappeared, her eyes grew harder. ‘What are you hiding, Mr. Kaelin?’ Carr chimed in, ‘Yeah, Kato, what are you hiding? Come on. You can trust us.’ ‘Geez, you guys are trying to trick me. I want to wait for my lawyer.’ ‘What are you hiding? Marcia Clark said louder this time.’ ‘I've got nothing to hide. I'll talk to you. I'll tell you everything I know. I just want to wait for my lawyer.’ ‘Fine,’ Marcia said, and continued.”
And then she keeps questioning him. So that's Kato's version. We're going to have a little rashomon here and we're going to get Marsha's version now. What do you think about that?
Mike: That's just seems unethical. Like this is how the justice system is supposed to work. The minute somebody says ‘lawyer’, you stop, you take a step back and you get them a lawyer. Like that's the foundation of the whole thing.
Sarah: And my feeling about all this is like, listen, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm not a lawyer. I have an MFA in fiction, but it does seem to me that it's like not a bad idea to just have everyone have a lawyer if they want one just as a general default. Like, that's just how it is.
So here's Marcia's version. “It's Friday morning and she is in her office when she gets a call from one of the cops on detail who says Kaelin’s here with us, but he says he won't talk unless his lawyer is with him. This was extremely unusual, witnesses don't arrive in the company of lawyers unless they're worried about being charged with a crime. From what I could see, Brian Kaelin had no criminal liability. The events he'd witnessed on the night of June 12 had clearly occurred after the murders. I was afraid that his request for an attorney meant that Simpson had gotten to him.”
And it's like, Marcia, you're not wrong. Like OJ has gotten to him several times, but like he has a pure, silly heart. And he wants a lawyer because that's a citizen’s right.
Mike: Yeah. It's weird. How many people within the justice system cannot fathom that the justice system itself, traumatizes people? Like, why would you want a lawyer? It's because I've read books.
Sarah: It's not like Lenny Briscoe offers to help you straighten everything out. And like, understands that you're telling the truth.
Mike: I feel like her job depends on her not knowing. I mean, this is like the whole problem is that it's not a Marcia problem, it's like a prosecutor problem.
Sarah: Yeah. Oh yeah. This is the culture that she's in. Yeah, absolutely.
Mike: A prosecutor's job is literally to believe what the cops say and to never believe suspects.
Sarah: Yeah. And also again, like structurally, she can't show frustration at the police or the other lawyers she's working with. And not just because of the way the system is set up, which already is dumb, but because she's a woman, which makes it even less functional for her, it appears. And so who can she take out her aggression on, but Kato Kaelin. “The cops, come into my office at a little past nine, I look up from my paperwork and saw for the first time that wild mane of dirty blonde hair, casual hip clothes, goofy surfer boy slouch.” My first thought, chill out, man.
Mike: She fucking hates him so much. It's so palpable.
Sarah: And Kato’s just like, well, that's just your opinion, man. And people feel this way about Kato. A lot of people. It's like, oh, I fucking hate that Kato Kaelin guy. And it's like, why, do you hate puppies also?
It's so funny I said that because the next line is, “’Hey guy’, I greeted him. Casual seemed the way to go. He shook my hand and fidgeted like a puppy.” Puppies don't really fidget. She's conveying the idea. So that's good. She asks him if he feels prepared to go before a grand jury. She says he answered in half sentences, nodding a lot, managing to say very little. “Great, I thought this guy can barely handle small talk. What's going to happen when we put him on the stand?”
Mike: But there's no such thing as small talk with the prosecutor. Like this is what drives me nuts. Like you're acting like we're just two people at a party. Like, what do you do? How long have you lived in LA? That's not what's happening.
Sarah: Right? Like you need to behave as if you know that he knows that you have the power to send him up the river.
Mike: This is a situation in which he is legally required through a subpoena to speak with you, regardless of what the content of your conversation is like, what's your favorite Marvel movie? All of it takes place under the structure of like he is being compelled to be there. There is no such thing as small talk under those circumstances, and Marcia should know that.
Sarah: Yeah. And then it's like, if someone is in a position of power, how do you make them behave in a way that is respectful to the amount of power that they have over anyone. It's tough. And also, maybe that means that the official roles that we give people shouldn't be so powerful if people are consistently uncomfortable with having that much.
Mike: Yeah. And if it's systematically invisible to them. Yeah.
Sarah: Like if we're going to give it to them, let's not render it invisible. So Marcia says, “I cut to the chase. Do you remember what you were doing when you heard the thump on your wall? I think I was talking to my friend, Rachel.” Okay. That was what he had told the cops. And again, she's like trying to outfox him, and it's like Marcia, he's just sleepy.
Mike: Just talk to him, just ask him stuff.
Sarah: And I love how she's like, I tried to approach him, and he was taciturn and weird. And so I had to play hardball. And Kato’s interpretation is like, she was being weird and fake and treating me like a child. I didn't like it. I just wanted to be back at the Beach Fever set. I understood that world. That's what I imagine he's thinking.
Mike: Let him back into the French Kung Fu movie.
Sarah: And so Marcia says, “Did you tell her about what you'd heard?” This is about Rachel. And he says, ‘I really don't want to say anything until my attorney gets here. I mean, you seem really nice and all, and I really want to help you out, but I really can't talk about the case with Adam. I'm real, sorry. Really Marcia, I am.’ His words tumbled over each other as he squirmed in his seat and cast me beseeching look. I wasn't buying this act. Kato wasn't as dumb as he appeared. He cut off the questioning expertly. ‘Kato, I don't get it’, I told him. ‘Why do you think you need a lawyer? As far as I can, tell you have no liability whatsoever’.”
Mike: Marcia!
Sarah. I know. And in Kato's description, Marcia continues rapid fire questioning for a while. “And then Mr. Kaelin, Marcia Clark finally said leaning in and smiling. Are you having fun yet?”
Mike: Oh God.
Sarah: “He looked at her and said, ‘Hey, is there a two drink minimum?’ With that the tension broke and everyone started, of all things, to laugh.” I love it that this is Kato's version where he breaks the tension by telling a joke. And like, even though they're like badgering him and being kind of mean to him, they all laugh because he’s funny.
Mike: Those are his comedy waiter skills coming out.
Sarah: Yeah. And then right after Kato tells his joke, he says a man who looks to Kato like Wallace Shawn comes in with Kato's friend, Alan, and this is his lawyer, Bill Gonego. Yeah. So it's comforting to imagine Wallace Shawn coming to Kato's rescue.
And so Kato's lawyer goes up to Marcia and says, “My client will remain silent, and I'll answer any further questions for him.” Marcia Clark looked at her watch “It's five to one, you can have three minutes with your client before we take him to the grand jury, he’s scheduled to appear at one o'clock”. “That's ridiculous”, Gonego said, “How can you subpoena him for a grand jury the same day you want him to testify?” Clark stared hard at Gonego. “Mr. Kaelin is going to testify at one o'clock, and that's that.”
Mike: Lawyers are dope, get them.
Sarah: And then Kato's lawyer turns to him and says, “We're going to go down to the grand jury and ask for an intervention. That's a postponement, trust me on this.” And so Marcia is like, okay, time to go. And Kato's lawyer says I haven't even had the chance to look at the police reports. Like we haven't prepared in any way. This is truly ridiculous. And Marcia says to Kato, “You're going to testify. That's that.” She turned back to Gonego and added, “If you try to stop him, I'll have you arrested for obstruction of justice”. In response, Gonego tore a piece of paper from a pad and wrote down all that he wanted Kato to say on the stand. It read, ‘On the advice of my attorney, I must respectfully decline to answer and assert my right to remain silent.”
Mike: Wow. But there is something really, I mean, after all this research I did on a white collar crime, it is really remarkable that like, this is how rich people do rich people justice is like, you simply don't say anything under any circumstances.
Sarah: You should never talk to the police for any reason if you can possibly avoid it.
Mike: It's like their strategy is always like, wait, say zero. Because if you say nothing, they can't catch you in any lies. If you say like, “Oh, I couldn't have done this crime because like I was in Tampa with my friend.” Then they can check. Were you in Tampa? Are their plane tickets? Who's your friend, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you just say literally nothing, they have to actually prove you did the crime. They can't just catch you in one lie. And once they catch you in one lie, it's easy to find other lies and make you look guilty.
Sarah: And also, don't talk to them because you think no harm can come of it because you're innocent. because innocent people don't always seem innocent.
Mike: Ah, so Kato's lawyer is telling him to treat this like he's a rich person, which is good advice.
Sarah: Yes. He's like you have burnout hair, but you're going to get rich person justice. And so Kato is led to the grand jury room and he, “It looks like nothing so much as a college lecture hall.” It's like he's back at UW Eau Clair. And so they swear him in, and Marcia starts questioning him about the night of June 12th. And basically no matter what she asks, Kato just reads off his piece of paper and says, “On the advice of my attorney, I must respectfully decline to answer and assert my right to remain silent.”
Mike: Good message disciplined by Kato.
Sarah: As we have said before, he does well if he's given direction.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Is this chapter of Marsha's book in all caps? THIS BURNOUT WOULDN’T SAY SHIT.
Sarah: There's some italics. So the way Marcia describes all of this is Kato's lawyer asked to have the weekend to prep Kato to testify before the grand jury on Monday instead of Friday, and to go over the police statement. And Marcia’s like, that's ridiculous, the statement is two pages long, you don't need the whole weekend. All you're doing is opening up more time and space for the witness to be contaminated and for OJ and his crowd and his lawyers to get to him. No, it's hard because it's like, yeah, that's true. But Kato is not really plotting any of that to believe his account. It's like you are right, he's kind of not the person who you need to be putting the fear of God into.
Mike: And also, Kato has basic rights under the justice system. Sorry, Marcia.
Sarah: Kato Kaelin has rights. It's in the constitution. It says Kato Kaelin has rights.
And so before the grand jury testimony begins, she gets a call from Patty Jo Fairbanks, who is the senior legal assistant at the DA's office. And Marcia goes to see her and learns that OJ was supposed to turn himself in to Parker Center this morning and he did not. And the whole voluntary surrender thing that was supposed to be happening did not happen.
Mike: So Marcia is in a bad mood when she gets into that grand jury room.
Sarah: Bad mood. Bad mood Marcia. Yeah. And all of the bad choices that have been made this whole week, Marcia is having the experience that many people have now had courtesy of experiencing an epidemic where if you're one of the people who’s like worried more and earlier than other people in your life, you get to have the delightful experience of being ignored. And then potentially watching the consequences occur and you're like, I could have stopped it if I had done my job better, but I wasn't able to. So like, I don't feel good, I feel bad.
Mike: Yeah. And everything that you've predicted is coming true.
Sarah: Yeah. And it didn't matter that I was right. No one listened to me and probably at the same thing happened that they still wouldn't listen to me. And damn you Kato with your stupid, freewheeling lifestyle, and your half sentences, and your luscious hair!
Mike: And your kickboxing lawyer, damnit!
Sarah: Yeah. So the phone rang, Robert Shapiro. Marcia gets on the phone with Bob and says, “What's going on, Bob? This is no time to screw around.” “Marcia, I promise you he's coming in”, said Shapiro. This is where I'm seeing John Travolta in my head.
Mike: I do hear it as John Travolta. My God. Yeah. That might be you, though.
Sarah: “What do you mean?” I shot back. “He's had all week to get his things together. What are you guys doing?” “He's being checked out by some doctors”, said Shapiro. His speech was infuriatingly slow. His tone condescending. “I'm sure you've heard that he's very depressed. We just need to be sure that he doesn't go into custody in a suicidal frame of mind.” “Oh, I'm sure he's depressed”, I snorted.
And so she and Bob have calls back and forth basically with her being like, “Bring him the fuck in.” And Bob's like, “Can't just yet. Still working on it.” And then he's like putting her on the phone with other people. Like he puts Saul Faerstein, the forensic psychiatrist they've retained on the phone with her just to kill time, I think. It's very childish if that's what's going on. And she asked Faerstein for directions to the house, and he kind of seems to be giving her an evasive answer. And she says, “Doctor, you better stop playing games here. Do you understand that you're obstructing justice? That's a criminal charge and I don't think you need a record like that. Do you?”
Mike: Wow. She's just throwing out these threats, man. She's desperate.
Sarah: I mean, things are bad. It's like she’s like, will you respect the power that I have as an officer of the court? And they're like, no.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, she also must know that these charges wouldn't stick too, and they know that the charters wouldn't stay.
Sarah: I mean, she's just seeing if it gets them to snap into line, I think. And so she kind of has to end these conversations without any resolution, because she has to go start questioning Kato. So she has to take a deep breath and compose herself and go into the grand jury amphitheater and announce that she's going to do her opening statement on Monday. And she's going to have Kato testify on Friday, which is like, that seems weird. And you know, she's like, we really need this guy on the record, like right the fuck now. She calls Kato to the stand. She has him spell his name, which he does. And she says, “Well, at least he could spell his name.” And she starts questioning him. And he reads from his piece of paper. “You seem to be reading from a piece of yellow paper, I see, did your attorney write that out for you this morning?”
Mike: Yeah, don’t fall for it, Kato.
Sarah: “On the advice of my attorney I must respectfully decline to answer and assert my constitutional right to remain silent.”
Mike: Don't break character.
Sarah: “I couldn't believe that this twerp was taking the fifth. He'd read from that paper three more times before the fore person warned him that his refusal to answer questions was “without legal cause”, and then if he persisted in his refusal, he would be held in contempt. Now we had to find a judge to do just that, pronto.”
Mike: Oh, so they retaliated.
Sarah: Yeah. She's like, fuck this guy. We're going to get him in front of a judge and threaten him with contempt and force him to testify.
Mike: Although aren't there scenarios under which like he would have come in and she could have interviewed him with a lawyer present and actually gotten this stuff. Like he hasn't been particularly coy about what happened that night. I mean, he told the cops.
Sarah: Right. He was forthcoming with the cops, but Marcia thinks he's withholding information for whatever reason.
Mike: Right. It seems like we've now escalated into this. Like it's a big official thing and it's like, she's taken it to this new level.
Sarah: It's hard. Cause it's like, t's not like it would have been ideal to have him have a whole weekend to iron things out and for potentially the defendant. Cause she doesn't know that he's going to end up in jail later today. And certainly the defendant circle and his lawyers to get more access to Kato and to manipulate his testimony. Like that's a real problem and that's already been taking place, so like she's not wrong. It's just, I feel like she, it feels like she's behaving in a really adversarial way with him and then getting upset when he's noticing that, because she's kind of coming in really aggressively and he's like, Hey, that feels threatening to me, I'm going to protect myself. And she's like, why is he doing that?
It's like, Marcia, like maybe you have no option but to treat him adversarially given the situation. But like, you have to at least be aware that like, you're going to get that response and then not keep escalating it.
Mike: So what happens when they get him in front of the other judge?
Sarah: I will tell you. Interestingly, Kato's book goes more into the legal issues than Marcia’s does. And so Kato takes the stand again. He is asked if he's going to cooperate and he says, “On the advice of my attorney, I must respectfully decline to answer and assert my constitutional right to remain silent.”
Mike: I'm the decider.
Sarah: And so then he's declared to be in contempt of the grand jury, and is taken down for an immediate hearing. And so we're told in Kato's book, “One of the major issues was whether in fact Kato could be granted immunity before the grand jury. Which would then automatically remove his fifth amendment right, which is his right to remain silent.”
Mike: Right. Cause they can't throw you in jail. So you're then compelled to be like, yes, I killed that dude. Or like, yes, I stole that candy bar or whatever it is. Right. You can't incriminate yourself if you can't go to jail.
Sarah: Yeah. And so at the superior court hearing, Marcia's asked why she won't just grant Kato immunity for his testimony, because that would seem to cut the Gordian knot. “She responded that it might taint Kato's value as a prosecution witness, by suggesting that he indeed had something to hide. And the DA's office had been forced to ‘bargain’ for his testimony. Besides, she admitted, Kato, wasn't entitled to immunity because he had already told the police what they wanted to know. And so the guy points out that there are really two issues involved, one having to do with the fifth amendment, the other with the sixth, a person's right to counsel. If a person wants to confer with his lawyer, the judge pointed out, he's entitled to do so. Especially if he's a witness and not a defendant.”
Mike: Thank you, judge.
Sarah: Yeah. Thank you, Judge Chulager. This, of course, was at the heart of the dispute. Clark's office had treated Kato in every way as a suspect and defendant, falling just short of charging him in the case. Clark told the judge that since Kato had been taken into custody that morning, he was in fact a defendant. And therefore the sixth amendment and possibly the fifth, no longer applied.
Mike: What?
Sarah: She's just flailing. He's like, no, he is a defendant. Fuck it. Yeah.
Mike: I don't think that's how rights work, but okay.
Sarah: The judge replied that no warrant had been issued for Kato's arrest. And that according to the records, he hadn't been handcuffed when taken to the station. So technically speaking, he wasn't a defendant. At best, the judge said, and this might be stretching it, he was a suspect in a murder case.
Mike: And even that's a stretch.
Sarah: Yeah. And so he says, you know, let's be real, he's a witness. He's not a suspect. He's not a defendant.
Mike: And then Marcia is like, look, I just got off the phone with fucking John Travolta and this guy’s being a dick.
Sarah: John Travolta's being a fucking dick to me. I don't know what to tell you.
Mike: Meet me halfway here, Doctor Chulager.
Sarah: And so the judge says to Marcia, you know, really like what is the downside of giving Kato the weekend to consult with his lawyer and prepare to give testimony. Putting aside, he may flee the country and be in Brazil by morning. And according to Kato's book, everybody in the courtroom laughed, like ha ha what a crazy thought. Someone who's involved in this trial, fleeing and disappearing and driving away toward the horizon. That's silly.
Mike It's not as if the defendant in this case is going to be any protracted, low speed chase from one graveyard to another in one hour's time. So everything's going to be exactly the same on Monday.
Sarah: And ultimately, Marcia can't really argue with that. She has to concede and be like, okay, fine. We will do it on Monday.
Mike: But then does that give Kato immunity? Or that was a separate issue.
Sarah: I think they just dropped that. I think that they, yeah, they were like, well, this is an option, right, and ultimately settled on, let's give him the week to talk to his lawyer and bring him in on Monday. And so they go back before the grand jury and Marsha apologizes to everybody assembled for having brought them in for testimony that they're not going to be able to hear. And she says, I silently prayed that they wouldn't hold it against me. Even worse, would they reject any of Kato's future testimony because he had taken the fifth? Great. What a way to start.
Mike: That's you Marcia, that's on you.
Sarah: As soon as the judge hit the gavel, he was handed a piece of paper by the bailiff. He paused and then announced to everyone in the courtroom that OJ Simpson was now officially a fugitive from justice. No one had known during the hearing that the infamous Bronco chase was in full progress and being televised live across the nation and around the world.
Mike: Because we didn't have cell phones then, otherwise when people would've gotten texted.
Sarah: We did have cell phones. There just weren't that many of them. Yeah. And I don't, I don't think text messages existed. People had beepers, so you could text like, OJ, Loose, I guess.
Mike: That sounds like he's a slut. I don't think that's…
Sarah: Well he was. Yeah. And so the grand jury is released and Kato heads out and goes back to Alan's house and turns on the TV and watches his friend in a low speed pursuit.
Mike: So him and Paula and Marcia and everybody are united by watching this weird, slow motion whatchamacallit, happening.
Sarah: Interestingly, Marcia doesn't describe learning that OJ is on the loose in the grand jury room, she describes getting a call from Phil Vannatter back at her office and learning it that way. “As I drove home that night, I was too bummed to listen to the nonstop reports on drive time radio.” Which like, I love that she's one of the principals in this whole story. She's like, I'm too depressed to listen to the Bronco chase.
Mike: She's like, I need some Allman Brothers. I'm not listening to this shit.
Sarah: I hope she listened to some Allman Brothers
Sarah: So yeah, that's the story of when Kato met Marcia. And our next episode, our 10th episode, is going to be all about the Bronco chase. Because that's all anyone has been asking for, for 200 years.
Mike: It's like Radiohead playing and everybody wants to hear Creep. That's like all anybody requests from us, they're like, do the Bronco chase! That’s our Free Bird. So what are we left with in this episode?
Sarah: We are left with our first experience of our subjects entering the legal system. We've seen the first chapter of this as a courtroom story. So yeah. What kind of a start are we off to?
Mike: And so next time things are going to get even worse.
Sarah: Yeah. And we will talk about the case. I am interested in why everyone else thinks it's so interesting. I don't think it will be that interesting. I'll do my best.
Mike: Wait really?
Sarah: No, it's a chase. It's not a person. It's the story of like a car driving really slow in one direction and then driving back real slow in the other direction. I know that something will appear and that there'll be human elements of it that I'm really compelled by, but I don't know what they'll be yet. So we'll find out.
Mike: And if our listeners get bored, I have a French kickboxing movie that I can recommend.