“One of the challenges early on for us,” Baker told me, “was trying to navigate this world of what is a conspiracy theory and what might be rooted in fact and what are people’s just general theories that they’ve come up with over the years.”
“There was initially a big instinct,” he added, “for people to say, ‘No, I’ve heard this all before. It’s not true.’”
There was a parallel path from these celebrity backwaters to Peacock’s OJ’s Accomplice. “Once I heard the term ‘OJ having an accomplice,’” the film’s codirector Ari Mark told me, “I’m not going to lie, I thought it was really, really juicy and something that I really wanted to serve up to people because I like being part of that energy. But at the same time, it gets you into this weird underbelly of people where you’re not really sure who to believe, what to believe.” For his own dive into the Simpson-adjacent underworld, Mark enlisted Alex Tomé as a consulting producer: a food truck owner from North Carolina and “self-proclaimed O.J. Simpson expert” who had never worked on a documentary before.
“My goal is not to solve the case,” Mark said. “My goal is to say, ‘Can I get underneath this subculture and can I get people to tell me their point of view in a way that feels authentic?’”
I took my own brief dip into the subculture to get a sense of what I’d missed out on by neglecting Guzze’s outreach. Iroc Avelli, a former bodyguard for Simpson, has claimed to have had thumb drives with audio recordings in which Simpson confesses to the murders and says he had help. (Police only found recordings of Avelli talking to himself.) Mark told me that, as he conducted his reporting, Avelli pelted him with antisemitic remarks. When I called Avelli this week, he was less incendiary but just as bombastic, immediately launching into an account of how he first connected with Simpson while he was dealing cocaine.
