No event captured the attention of the American public in 1995 more than the O. J. Simpson trial. Did O. J. murder his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman on the night of June 12, 1994? One of the key prosecution witnesses was Los Angeles police detective Mark Furman, whose testimony that he found the infamous “bloody glove” on the grounds of Simpson's estate was seen as a crucial piece of evidence against Simpson. When Furman first testified in March 1995, defense attorney F. Lee Bailey forcefully questioned him about rumors of past racist statements in the hopes of bolstering the defense's contention of a racially motivated police conspiracy against O. J. Simpson. Furman denied these allegations and specifically responded that he had not used the term nigger during the previous ten years.

But in late summer 1995, O. J. Simpson's lawyers discovered that Furman had previously given a series of extensive interviews to a screenwriter in which he talked about his experiences as a Los Angeles policeman and boasted of fabricating evidence, beating suspects, and singling out minorities for mistreatment. The tapes and transcripts of these interviews revealed that Furman had used the term nigger as many as 30 times. This “bombshell” revelation was a significant boost to the defense's conspiracy theory.