'I'm gonna OJ you': How the Simpson case changed perceptions -- and the law -- on domestic violence

It wasn't merely that Simpson was a wealthy celebrity, or that he had fled police, or that he was arrested by the same law enforcement agency whose officers had been caught on camera beating Rodney King.

"To a lot of people it was a case about race and mistreatment of Black residents by the LAPD, but to us it was the first time that a huge spotlight was focusing on domestic violence," said Pincus of the Domestic Abuse Center.

By 1994, California was beginning to enforce 1986 changes to its domestic violence laws, which required police to treat family assaults as they would public ones, and to keep records of calls where no arrests were made.

"If you arrived at a scene and there's a battery or attempted murder, you can't just not do anything because it's 'a domestic,'" as police had done previously, Pincus said. "The other part of the law change said that every police department in the state had to have mandatory domestic violence training, and those protocols had to be established and made public."

At the same time, Democrats in Congress were working to pass the landmark Violence Against Women Act, which would bring millions of dollars for hotlines and shelters. It included the first federal law against battery, among other protections for survivors of sexual and domestic violence.

After years of laboring in the shadows, advocates found themselves in the limelight. They were determined not to let the moment pass.

"We would get on these national calls and say, 'We need to push this now,'" Giggans said of VAWA. "We didn't want it to be just a media moment; we wanted some benefit to come from this tragedy."

'People didn't know anything'

The Violence Against Women Act was signed into law on Sept. 13, 1994, almost three months after Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman were found.

But when Simpson's nationally televised trial began in November, it showed just how little the public understood about domestic violence — and how far the law still had to go.

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