Back then, the O.J. Simpson trial was called the “trial of the century.” Now it’s the twenty-first century, and O.J.’s legacy has been stretched rather thin. His recent misbehaviour—attempting to cash in on a belated confession through a book and television deal, followed by an attempt to rob a sports memorabilia dealer—calls his status as Hollywood’s number one wife killer into question. It’s time we delivered the crown to its rightful owner: Robert Blake.
O.J.’s story may be the stuff of bad TV movies, but Blake’s would make one hell of a lurid feature film. Courtroom theatrics—from Johnnie Cochran’s excessive race-card playing and much-satirized hyperbolizing to Judge Ito’s non-sequitur field trips— helped make O.J.’s case one of the mostly widely reported criminal trials in history, but Blake’s comparatively modest ordeal had substance. He may have shuffled through four different lawyers over the course of his trial, but his backstory is far more compelling than any of his post-arraignment antics.
O.J.’s story—former football hero batters and eventually murders his pretty, blonde wife and her male counterpart— is predictable at best. Aside from a pre-teen stint in a street gang, his history is bland, at least compared to Blake’s. A former child star and born underdog, Blake claims to have suffered appalling abuse at the hands of his alcoholic father. After joining the army, he reportedly fell in love with a 16-year-old girl, an affair which culminated in Blake aiming a gun at her disapproving dad. Blake had a successful career in film and held a starring role on the TV series Baretta, but the role he’s best known for (to university students, at least) is that of the Mystery Man in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. When we heard that the lipsticked gremlin who so eerily informed Bill Pullman that he was “at his house” had been charged with murder, we shuddered with primal fear. The handsome athlete, with his chiselled features and pathetic eyes, is not as disturbing as a villain. Blake, unlike O.J., is infinitely quotable to boot. His profanity-laden, borderline-psychotic rants are an important part of his mystique.
O.J. and Nicole were equally goodlooking, and formed an all-American couple; that is, they had your textbook abusive relationship. Bonny Lee Bakley and Robert Blake were a perfect match as well: she was embedded in a netherworld of scandal and depravity parallel to his own. Nicole had been making an honest living as a waitress when she met O.J. Bakley, by contrast, had been pulling “lonely hearts” schemes, taking out personal ads and sending nude pictures to respondents in exchange for cash. She stalked faded fringe celebrities, and managed to trap Blake in a loveless marriage via a trick pregnancy. Though she didn’t have Nicole’s looks, her rotten character added a philosophical dimension to the Blake trial: if one contemptible human being gets rid of another, is the universal balance of good and evil really offset?
Finally, compared to O.J., Blake’s post-trial conduct has been exemplary. After their respective acquittals, both were slapped with civil suits, and both were ordered to pay damages of over $30 million. O.J. has paid little of the $33.5 million he owes to the Brown and Goldman families, although he enjoys a legally untouchable NFL pension, which reportedly pays him upwards of $20 thousand a month. To supplement this, he had the now-infamous If I Did It ghost-written, and set up a dummy corporation to receive payments from Harper Collins. After his plans were thwarted—the publisher got cold feet, legal troubles erupted, the Goldman family obtained the book rights and published the hypothetical confession without the hypothetical angle—he lost his head, held up a sports memorabilia collector, and got himself arrested yet again.
Robert Blake on the other hand, filed for bankruptcy. Though Bakley’s children claimed he was hiding assets, it’s not hard to believe that Blake is genuinely broke. Now in his mid-70s, he reportedly works as a stable boy. He resides in a small apartment, lives on a Social Security and Screen Actors Guild pension (presumably much smaller than that provided by the NFL), stays out of trouble, and hopes to act again before he dies. No contest.
