Flashback: Ted Rowlands Explains His 30-Year Obsession With the O.J. Simpson Trial

Flashback is a feature series that revisits key moments from TV news history with the Newsers that were part of them.

Like a lot of Gen-X journalists, Ted Rowlands remembers exactly where he was when Judge Lance Ito gaveled in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in the winter of 1995. Just like Keanu Reeves, he was feeling Minnesota as a Duluth-based sports reporter for a local radio station, while working a TV gig on the side.

“Every day, our callers wanted to talk about the Minnesota Twins, but I was obsessed with the trial,” Rowlands remembers now. “I was a football fan, so I loved O.J. back then. He had risen above and beyond athletics into the mainstream. And then to have those accusations against him—you couldn’t wrap your head around it.”

Over the course of eight long months, America watched as Simpson and his legal “dream team” took on the mountain of evidence suggesting that he had killed his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman the year prior. By October, the verdict was in: not guilty on both counts.

Over 100 million people around the world tuned in for Simpson’s acquittal, and the aftershocks were immediate and long-lasting. The trial ended up reshaping Rowlands’ life as well; not long afterwards, he switched to the news beat and left the Midwest for the West Coast. Stints at ABC News and CNN eventually led to his current anchor spot at Court TV, which similarly saw its profile raised by its gavel-to-gavel Simpson coverage.

30 years later, Rowlands is getting a full circle moment as the executive producer of Court TV’s new seven-episode series, Trial & Error: Why Did O.J. Win? Premiering Feb. 16 at 8 p.m. ET the show re-opens the network’s case logs and sits down for new interviews with key players like former LAPD detective Mark Furhman, defense attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz, and relatives of both victims, including Tanya Brown and Fred Goldman.

“Our philosophy was, ‘Let’s go in with a critical eye and show how O.J. won,’” Rowlands says. “It was the perfect storm where, 30 years later, it’s pretty easy to say that the verdict doesn’t hold up.”

In an expansive interview, Rowlands reflects on how the landmark O.J. case reshaped the landscape for trial coverage, and his own experience getting to know Simpson—who died last year—later in his life.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity)

The O.J. Simpson trial is one of the most closely-analyzed legal cases and media events in recent history. When you started in on this series, were you concerned that there was nothing left to say?

No, because I looked at it as being a vehicle for exploring how time has changed peoples’ opinions. I was excited to see what Mark Fuhrman is like now—is he still bitter? And he absolutely is. We also leaned into Court TV’s archive and it’s amazing the gems you find that you didn’t realize you had. Also, the more time that has gone by, the people who that thought the jury got it right at the time have changed their minds. When you look at the evidence they had against O.J., the fact that we was found not guilty is astonishing now. But it made perfect sense then, because there were so many contributing factors.

From the first episode, the series is very critical of the prosecution in particular, pointing out what they did wrong.

If the prosecution could go back and do it again, they would absolutely do a number of things differently. The decision to move the trail from Santa Monica to downtown L.A., the bloody glove, the post-racial tension of the city post-Rodney King—you pull out any of those ingredients and I think you have a different result.

One of our most fascinating interviews was with Lon Cryer, a juror in the case who took notes. You can tell that he was really swayed by Furhman and the idea that someone could have planted evidence. I don’t think that hit home with him until the depth of Fuhrman’s racism came out. Then he was like, “As crazy as it sounds, maybe he did plant that glove.”

You weren’t on the court beat at the time, but were there things about the tenor of the media coverage that jumped out at you as a journalist?

It was really the gavel-to-gavel aspect and the fact that was the country’s first real inside look into a criminal trial. It was a window into a world that you would maybe hear about or see highlights of, but this was the first time that a good chunk of the country sat down and watched the legal system play itself out in a courtroom. It was a slow burn over eight months with tedious moments and dramatic moments. I was fascinated by Judge Ito, by the attorneys, by Kato Kaelin—I was totally hooked.

There’s been a lot of talk in the three decades since about how the heavy media presence impacted how the legal teams behaved in court. Do you think it was a factor?

With every case that we cover at Court TV, everyone acts differently when our cameras are in a courtroom. It’s just human nature to know that you’re being watched and so you act differently. I don’t think the arguments would have lasted as long as they would have if the cameras weren’t there. Judge Ito had this mentality of “I’m going to let the world watch me be fair,” and I think that opened up some problems for the prosecution. It gave Johnnie Cochran and the rest of Simpson’s team a huge leash that they wouldn’t have had in a courtroom with no cameras.

Was there a general theme you discovered in your interviews when you asked the participants to reflect on the case 30 years later?

It’s interesting, we talked to most of the defense team and they were very eager to talk about specifics—how this happened and that happened. But when you start to ask them, “Do you think O.J. did it?” or “Do you think Fuhrman planted the glove?” they don’t seem as convicted. You get the feeling that—while they won’t admit it—they obviously believe that O.J. did it. But when you talk to Tom Lange or [prosecutor] Bill Hodgman they feel the same as they did 30 years ago. They feel like they had the goods and are still frustrated that they were let down by circumstances.

You covered O.J.’s latter-day legal cases and got to know him at that point. How did you find him at that point in his life?

He was very gregarious and would talk about football or anything else. But there was this unspoken feeling that you don’t bring up the murders. I don’t know if, mentally, he had convinced himself that he didn’t do it. I don’t think so—I think he just lived with it. The average person would shrink away if they got away with a double murder; you would never hear from 99% of them again. But O.J. just kept going in this strange tone-deaf manner, putting himself into these strange scenarios post-verdict. He was a very strange, very interesting man, that’s for sure.

The trial launched your news reporting career and launched Court TV as a major courtroom outlet. How has it impacted the way the network covers trials since?

It put Court TV on the map and always comes up whenever you’re at a big trial. Everyone who was at O.J. will say, “It’s almost as big as O.J.” or “This isn’t O.J.” It remains the trial of the century and got viewers invested in the courtroom coverage that Court TV is able to provide. We have our core watchers, but when a big trial comes up, we can feel it—and not just in our ratings. You can sense the core ingredients that make people universally interested in a trial.

That begs the question: 30 years later, are we overdue for another trial on the level of O.J. Simpson?

I’ve covered some big trials—Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, Phil Spector. About every year-and-a-half we’ll get one. There was a lot of interest in Alec Baldwin, although that trial ended early. So we get big ones, but nothing that’s eclipsed O.J. We might be waiting another 50 or 60 years.