ALL INNOCENT OF THEIR FATE

O.J. Simpson is a free man. William Cash

meets his young children, who may now be returned to their father

Los Angeles At the end of his trial, Orenthal James Simpson appealed, successfully, as it turned out, to the court, 'I have four kids; two kids I haven't seen for a year. They asked me every week, "Dad, how much longer?"

The answer is — a little while longer. For although Mr Simpson has been found 'not guilty' of murder of his wife, Nicole, and her friend, he now faces another costly and protracted public legal battle to regain custody of his young children, whom he spoke to regularly on the telephone from prison, but whom he had refused to allow to visit him in jail. Upon his release, Simp- son immediately let it be known that his overriding priority was to bring them up `in the way Nicole would have wanted'.

Simpson's two young children, Sydney, aged nine, and Justin, aged seven, live with their grandparents, Juditha (Dita) and Louis Brown, in an affluent ocean-front community in Point Dune, an hour and a half's drive south of Los Angeles. Also liv- ing in the house are their mother's sister, Denise, and her nine-year-old son, Sean; another Brown sister, Dominique, and her six-year-old son, Aaron; and their mother's beloved dog, Kato, the dog that barked plaintively as she was being butchered. The children's maternal grandparents have employed an admired Los Angeles attorney, Gloria Allred, in an attempt to ensure that their daughter's young children are never returned to O.J. Simpson, whom they publicly accused of being Nicole's killer. But now that Simpson has been acquitted, most lawyers believe that the Browns will probably lose the children. Although an Orange County Superior Court handed over custody of the children to the Brown grandparents after Nicole's murder, Simpson is understood to have already instructed his lawyers to start the legal process to get them back.

As a free man Simpson will still not automatically be entitled to his children. To get custody, he will need to petition Orange County Superior Court and demonstrate that he is the most suitable guardian for them. That will raise the addi- tional question of whether Simpson's two young children will be comfortable going back to a man they know has been charged with killing their mother. Simpson, it has been reported, has recently accused the Browns of trying to turn his children against him. The Brown family deny this, saying that they never tarnish his image and never criticise him in front of them.

After Simpson was charged with the double murder, his two young children were told that their father 'was on the road', helping the police try to find who killed their mother. Nicole's mother finally told Sydney that her father was actually in jail; she reportedly replied, `I know.' The last time Sydney and Justin met their father was at their mother's funeral.

When I asked Gloria Allred how trauma- tised she thought the children were and what they knew about why their father was in jail, she replied, 'I don't have the right to com- ment on what their private thoughts are.'

To date, the media's sole contact with the Simpson children was a Life magazine story back in June, which followed them on a day's outing to see their mother's grave 20 minutes' drive along the freeway, in For- est Lake. Although the photographs showed their sad, confused faces staring from the backyard of their grandparents' house, the feature had the look of careful stage management. Simpson was apparent- ly furious that his children were pho- tographed beside Nicole's grave on the cover of the magazine.

While their father was languishing in an lift by 7ft jail cell, his children have been living in a high security gilded beachfront play-cage. There is only one way for an outsider to get inside the gated, luxury Monarch Bay 'community' in Point Dune, whose entrance is guarded by barbed wire, along with a 24-hour sentry and armed patrol vehicles, and that is to park your car at the neighbouring ocean-front Ritz-Carl- ton Hotel, take off your shoes and socks and walk for almost a mile along the pri- vate beach.

Last Saturday morning, the day after the trial was finally given to the jury to decide, the empty white sand beach was dotted with only a few surfers and some over-grilled end-of-season sunbathers. By the Monarch Bay beach club — where waiters in white jackets topped by golden surfers' hair were setting the tables for lunch — a large whale had been washed up on the sand.

The concrete steps of the beach club — with various signs up saying 'members only' — led up to a labyrinth of expensive subur- ban bungalows, invariably with a car 'combo' of BMW and Jeep in the garage. After about half an hour of clambering up sloping residential driveways, past posted-up signs advertising a party last Sunday to welcome some new 'neighbours', I finally emerged at the Browns' grandparents' house.

I arrived to see Justin, decked out in a number '10' American football shirt, and Sydney, wearing a number '16' football shirt, fooling around on bikes by the drive- way to their house. The family Cherokee Jeep, very similar to the white Ford Bron- co in which Simpson attempted to flee the arresting police, was parked in a driveway adorned with a mounted basketball hoop.

When I told seven-year-old Justin — whose chunky little muscular body already shows signs of his father's powerful athleti- cism — about the whale on the beach, he jumped off his purple 'Magnum' bike and rushed inside to get 'permission' from his grandmother for them to go and see it. As he did so, I glanced inside the garage. It was adorned with a large picture of Nicole Brown Simpson.

Sydney is a very pretty young girl who looks very like her late mother. As she waited for her brother, she played around with a dangerous-looking giant rubber sling-shot that she held in one hand. When I said that I recognised her from the cover of Life, she looked down shyly and said, 'I don't know.'

'We can go. We can go!' Justin burst in as he rushed out of the house. `Dita says helmets.'

For the next 20 minutes or so, I strolled down the quiet road beside Justin, Sydney and friend, as they wobbled and pedalled slowly along the winding road to the beach. We talked about whales. The impression was one of absolute normality, if on a Californian scale.

Yet the Simpson children were hardly raised in the happiest of family atmo- spheres. Even before his mother's mur- der, according to members of the family, Justin had experienced 'school problems and was under psychiatric care'. Although neither he nor his sister actual- ly witnessed the murder of their mother and Ron Goldman, they almost certainly knew about the beatings Simpson gave to Nicole. Before she moved to Bundy Drive in Brentwood, where she was mur- dered, Nicole had a smaller house on Gretna Green. 'How could they not know?' said a friend of the Brown family to me. 'It was the kind of house where you heard everything.'

The crucial factor in the legal custody battle will be his children's psychiatric health. Denise Brown, Nicole's sister, has accused O.J. of 'mentally abusing' his chil- dren with promises like seeing them for birthdays which are hopelessly unrealistic. Simpson can make almost unlimited tele- phone calls from prison. According to a magazine interview with Nicole's sister, Dominique, the phone calls to his children tended to be brief. A typical conversation revolved around, say, Justin getting a new soccer uniform. 'They talk about light stuff like trips to Sea World or karate lessons. Then they tell O.J. that they love him and get off the phone. That's it.'

Gloria Allred, the attorney employed by the children's maternal grandparents, told me, 'The Browns have always acted in the best interests of the children, and they provide a very loving and supportive and caring home. There's a lot of affection. I've been in the room when the children have come in and jumped up on their laps, kissed them, hugged them, got kisses and hugs in return. I think they were fortunate to be in such a loving place during this crit- ical year in their lives.'

In fact, after trying out a series of local private schools, at all of which they were teased about their father, the Simpson chil- dren now get their schooling at home, with a series of personal tutors paid for by their father out of the $10,900 per month alimo- ny that he used to pay to Nicole.

Money, as ever, is not the problem. Dur- ing the trial, an ex-police officer friend of Simpson's, who used to come over to use the Jacuzzi at the family's Rockingham mansion, testified that he once arrived to see Jason wielding a baseball bat and beat- ing the hell out of a life-size statue of 0.J., which stood in the garden. The thought that young Jason will soon have the real to deal with is more than some sensi- tive stomachs can endure.