Meet Tracy Hampton

Even now, five months after the verdict was announced, everything about the O.J. Simpson murder trial remains controversial. Publishers have spent more than $14 million for books to be written by trial participants, and Simpson himself has attempted to make numerous deals. While the trial was still under way, O.J. collaborated on a book entitled I Want to Tell You, in which he answered letters from well-wishers and tried to (concluded on page 133)Tracy Hampton(continued from page 65) generate support for his case. Before the trial went to the jury, his book collaborator approached playboy and offered us an exclusive interview with O.J., but there were conditions. The interview would have to be conducted by O.J.'s own representative and O.J. wanted $500,000.

We told the representative that we would welcome the opportunity to interview Simpson, but not on those terms. We told him that a poll of our editors reflected an overwhelming belief in Simpson's guilt, but also that the first interview with him would be a journalistic coup comparable to the preelection "lust in my heart" interview with presidential candidate Jimmy Carter.

Had the interview progressed, we would have insisted that it be conducted by an independent representative, and we said the payment of such a sum to the subject of a Playboy Interview is against our policy.

O.J. continued to pursue other deals, attempting to put together a pay-per-view special and trying to negotiate appearances with overseas media willing to meet his terms.

When the pay-per-view TV interview fell through, Simpson agreed to do an interview on NBC. On the morning that the NBC-TV interview was scheduled to occur, O.J.'s representative called us again. O.J. would cancel the television interview, he said, if we were still interested in a playboy exclusive on the original terms. We declined. (Unbeknownst to us, O.J. had already decided to cancel the NBC interview after a conversation with Johnnie Cochran the night before.)

A different offer related to the trial--one we couldn't refuse--came from one of the original jurors immediately after the trial ended. Flight attendant Tracy Hampton, an aspiring actress, wanted to pose for playboy. She also had some things she wanted to get off her chest about the trial, her release from the jury, her fellow jurors and the verdict itself.

"I was very unhappy with how the verdict was reached," says Tracy. "Four hours? What was that? The trial went on for nine months and you're reaching a decision in four hours? If I had to make a decision based on the part of the trial I observed firsthand, I would probably have to say O.J. was guilty. But that's not the way the system works. If I had stayed for the remainder of the trial and heard the jury instructions, I might have decided differently. One thing you can certainly infer from the evidence is that O.J. was at that crime scene. Why was his blood found on the walkway and in the Bronco? Where are the clothes he was wearing that night? What happened to the missing luggage? There are so many inconsistencies. At the very least, you have to be able to answer those questions before you reach a verdict."

As the not-guilty verdict shows, the remaining jurors didn't share Tracy's point of view. And Tracy thinks she understands why. For one tiling, it was often the most independent-minded jurors, the ones who were uncomfortable with endless sequestration, jurors like Tracy, who ended up being released by Judge Lance Ito. As a result, those who remained were mostly followers, "people who would pretty much go with the flow," she says. "Many of those jurors who lasted the entire time were fairly docile individuals. They willingly did what the court told them to do and they were susceptible to the stronger-willed jurors who wanted O.J. acquitted." The other problem was the length of the trial and the toll taken by living like a prisoner. The jurors suffered a deep fatigue and resentment. "They just wanted to get out of there and put that trial behind them," Tracy says.

That's a feeling she understands. Her own experience of being isolated for months and feeling the pressures of a celebrated case, one charged with racial tensions, affected her deeply. By the time Judge Ito agreed to release Tracy, she had been victimized both by her fellow jurors and by a sheriff's department that seemed insensitive at best. Once she was released, the media hounded her from the moment she was dismissed until she checked herself into a hospital to recuperate. The press increased the pressure by reporting rumors about her: She was pregnant by another juror. She'd been rushed to the hospital after chewing a lightbulb and biting her arm until it bled. She'd attempted suicide on the day of her release.

None of it was true, of course, though her nerves were shattered by the ordeal. Once she was away from the jury, Tracy returned to her normal life, to her family, her friends and her job as a flight attendant. And she kept quiet, neither refuting the rumors nor criticizing her former partners on the jury.

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Had the Simpson trial followed a more conventional course, Tracy would have been the ideal juror. The fourth child of parents who work as real estate investors, Tracy grew up in Los Angeles and attended integrated public schools, where she channeled her energy into sports, cheerleading and amateur theater.

The jury summons that would lead her to the O.J. Simpson trial arrived in the mail at the Hampton house, where Tracy lives with her parents and a sister. Diane, her sister, had recently served as a juror on a criminal case and told her, "It will be good experience for you to learn a little about the law and see how the system works."

From January 11 of last year to May 1, when Ito released her, Tracy saw things that bewildered, shocked and ultimately appalled her. "I thought all of the jurors were going to get together and be like a family, because we were all put in this situation," she says. "But it wasn't like that at all." As a flight attendant, Tracy had traveled the world and always found it easy to strike up friendships in new situations, regardless of the circumstances. Jury duty, however, was different. Isolated by the rigid rules of sequestration, jurors quickly formed groups based on race.

"The first time we went to have a meal, the white people and the Hispanics were at the front of the line, and then they went straight to one table and all sat together. All the black people went to another table. I remember that one of us, Willie Cravin, asked, 'Why are we separated?' So he went to the white table and sat down. The next day the white jurors started putting their bags and stuff, a purse or a jacket, on the seats so nobody else could sit down." But the black jurors also formed groups that were no less hostile.

She describes one group, her own, as mostly reserved and essentially serious. The other group, she says, was loud and obnoxious.

"They joked around and acted like this was a party, or like they were kids at summer camp. I took this whole thing very seriously from the beginning because I always thought, Wow, two people were murdered. It was a terrible thing to see other people involved who were laughing inappropriately. I thought it was horrible."

When the jury was seated during court sessions, Tracy's life was transformed. Day after day, she listened to witnesses being questioned by opposing lawyers. She gave high marks to Cochran: "He knew exactly what kind of jury he was dealing with and how to handle it. He made the jury members feel intelligent and knew exactly how to get us on his side."

She was impressed by prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, but thinks she knows why the jury did not respond well to them. "Marcia would say things in an extremely condescending manner, as if we wouldn't understand her. She acted as if we were a bunch of children."

Chris Darden was an appealing figure, but Tracy thinks that he confused the jury. "If the facts were the way Darden said they were, why did he need to display so much emotion? That was puzzling to the jury."

She saw how poorly the jury reacted to Detective Mark Fuhrman's testimony. His insistence that he hadn't made a racial slur in the past ten years simply didn't ring true. "When he was up there I just thought, Oh, that liar. Everyone uses racial epithets sometimes."

Sequestration took its heaviest toll when court wasn't in session. Tracy felt terribly alone. She was one of the youngest jurors, had traveled the most and was perhaps the most sophisticated. She had little in common with the others. "My parents would come on visiting days, but on the conjugal-visit nights I didn't have anyone. I wasn't in a relationship at the time and I didn't have anyone on the jury I was close to."

Spending four months away from family and friends, deprived of freedom and privacy, is an experience most of us would find troubling. Under those circumstances, small problems become big ones, and when control of your life is taken over by an institution such as the court, the little things you can control take on added significance. One of Tracy's main complaints was that she was disturbed when she was trying to sleep. Her room in the Hotel Inter-Continental was next to one assigned to the sheriff's deputies as an informal office. Telephones rang in the deputies' room all through the night, disrupting Tracy's sleep. Conversations between the deputies carried from the corridor or through the thin walls; on at least one occasion she heard them discussing her.

Other events were more unsettling. One morning, when court was in session without the jury present, Tracy was in her room taking a nap. About 11:30 A.M. she awoke to find a female deputy standing in her room. Tracy sat up and screamed. The deputy left her room without a word.

In a subsequent investigation, the deputy insisted she had opened the door--sheriff's deputies had a passkey to all the jurors' rooms--to say that a maid was outside waiting to clean the room. But Tracy had seen no sign of a maid when she followed the deputy into the corridor. She requested a room change and her request was granted.

Michael Knox was a juror whose company she initially enjoyed. But as weeks grew into months, his friendliness became invasive and intruded on Tracy's privacy. "He would constantly talk about how we could all profit from our service as jurors. I would change the subject, telling him I didn't want to be part of his scheming."

Finally, Knox was dismissed for failing to reveal on his jury questionnaire that he had once been arrested after his girlfriend accused him of kidnapping. (No charges were filed.) According to one wild rumor, it was Knox who had impregnated her. "I was throwing up one morning because I wasn't eating and I was stressed out," Tracy recalls. "Juror Willie Cravin asked me, 'Oh, are you pregnant?' I said, 'No, that's impossible, because I haven't had sex in who knows how long.' But I think that's how the whole pregnancy thing came out."

Tracy also felt besieged by the behavior of three of the white deputies. Some of it involved unnecessary monitoring. "Can you imagine a situation in which everywhere you go there's someone looking at you or watching you or behind you listening to your conversations?" Her complaints, though, went further. The deputies controlled everyday life in a way that took on exaggerated importance during sequestration. They assigned phones to white jurors, even though Tracy had gotten to the telephone room first. They insisted that she and another juror move from one TV room to another so the first room could be closed down, then allowed white jurors to use the room anyway.

The tension increased. The stress caused her appetite to suffer. She began skipping meals, but the deputies would hover over her table to make sure she was getting some nourishment. Finally, on April 20, Tracy went to Ito. "I said I wanted to be released. There'd been a combination of things that had happened during the last three months, and I told him what the deputies were doing. He said, 'Well, whatever you want, we'll do it, because we want you here. Do you want me to change all the deputies?' I said, 'No, just the three who give me the most problems.' And he said, 'Well, we'll release those three.' And they did."

Transcripts that were subsequently made public show that Ito, along with attorneys for both the defense and the prosecution, were eager to do almost anything to keep Tracy on the jury. Reading between the lines of their conversations in chambers, it's clear that they were impressed with her education, earnestness and soft-spoken manner. Ito was sure that her experience as a flight attendant would serve her well during sequestration. Ironically, the normality they liked in Tracy also proved to be her undoing. Her reaction to being held prisoner by the court for four months was an appropriate one for an energetic 25-year-old used to running her own life: It made her unhappy. And the fact that she was surrounded by people who seemed alien and unfriendly, whether deputies or other jurors, only added to her distress.

"We want you to be happy," Ito told her. "We want you to stay on the jury."

Far from making Tracy's life more tolerable, however, the removal of the three deputies made her a target for the remaining deputies and for other jurors who supported them. The jury was made up of encampments separated along racial lines and then further splintered by temperament. The small group of serious black jurors that Tracy belonged to seemed to suffer most at the hands of the sheriffs. Perhaps because her group was so quiet and intense, Tracy felt the deputies were watching them all the more closely, to make sure they weren't discussing the case. The other jurors--white and black--were granted more freedom and therefore liked the deputies who had been dismissed. The following day those jurors staged a revolt: Thirteen of the 18 panelists refused to hear testimony, and several wore black in protest. For ten days after the protest, Tracy's life turned into a living hell, with enmity heaped on her from both sides. White deputies refused to talk to her, while black deputies were far from cordial. White jurors and alternates snubbed her. (How those jurors had learned of Tracy's role in the deputies' transfers is an unanswered question. Word could have come from deputies still in attendance, but Tracy suspects--as do many others--that news was filtering in to jurors from family and friends who were allowed to visit.) Her every movement was observed. "When other people would go into the exercise room as a group they weren't monitored. When I would go in there with another juror there'd be a deputy sitting right there watching us."

Tracy's parents started bringing her food, because she wasn't eating the food she was being served. When her parents came to visit her on Wednesday, April 26, they looked at her and said: "You look horrible." Tracy knew it. "I said, 'I've got to leave here. I've got to go to the doctor. I've got to get out of this situation.' " She went on a shopping trip that weekend, supervised by sheriff's deputies, as always. The following Monday morning, though, she felt so sick she was afraid she would faint in the jury box. Once again she went to Judge Ito. "At that point I said, 'I can't be here with these people. They all hate me. I can't stay in a situation like this.' " Seeing that she was becoming physically ill from the ordeal, the judge granted her request. He also advised her not to go directly home, because "there might be a couple of cameras in the yard."

Tracy said that going home was the only thing she wanted to do. "And I thought, Who's going to be in my yard? Nobody knows who I am." She believed that, until she drove to the foot of the hill leading to her house. "I saw a news van up there with the thing on top of it and I said, 'Uh-oh.' Then I saw all these news-people in my yard. All my stuff was in the car and in the trunk but I just grabbed my purse and made for the door. I remember hitting my head on the car door when I got out--they have that on tape somewhere--and these guys with the cameras were hitting me on the head as well. They were trying to get a good picture, but they kept hitting me on the head, and I said, 'Move out of my fucking way!' They have that on tape, and they've shown it too."

After a brief hospital stay, she regained her health and equilibrium and returned to work. Still, Tracy often finds herself treated as somebody else, a semi-public figure who is somehow larger than life by virtue of having played a role in the O.J. Simpson trial. On the streets, in banks, in stores where she shops, people keep recognizing her. On airplanes, other flight attendants say, "You're the O.J. Simpson juror," and ask to have their pictures taken with her. She got so many stares from passengers that she stopped wearing her name on her smock. And ever since her appearance in Playboy was announced, people want to talk about that, too. "In the past," Tracy says, "people would often say, 'Oh, you're cute, you're pretty.' But now I have men on my flights telling me, 'Oh, you're so beautiful, you look like a model.' It's so funny because they had never said that before."

That's a price she's happy to pay, especially if her Playboy photo shoot will advance her acting career. As for her recent role in the courtroom, though, Tracy is eager to move on. "I hope I'll be known some day soon as Tracy Hampton the actress, or just Tracy Hampton, not Tracy Hampton the ex-juror. My story is simple: I was on a jury once and I asked to be released."

"I was very unhappy with how the verdict was reached. Four hours? What was that?"