Embarrassed to admit I got 15/16 -- I put UCLA instead of USC. The murder trial was a really big deal at the time and I remembered way too many details.... Interesting quiz.
It was pretty ubiquitous. I remember there being a full-page story about the trial in our school yearbooks my junior year, and writing "Just Say NO.J." in Sharpie in everyone's books in protest. Even if you tried to actively avoid it it was all but impossible.
just goes to show what an enormous cultural event this was, that simply by virtue of being *one* of OJ's friends and less noteworthy legal advisors, Robert Kardashian became famous enough that when his daughter's sex tape got on the Internet it stirred up enough interest to launch an international business empire.
With Alan Dershowitz now part of Trump's legal team I was surprised not to see his name appear on the quiz. After advising the Dream Team he wrote a book, Reasonable Doubts, in which he said, "The Simpson case will not be remembered in the next century. It will not rank as one of the trials of the century..." He may be right. I had to think long and hard to brush the cobwebs from the answers and some I just couldn't remember. I doubt if people in the next generation - who didn't actually watch the television coverage of the trial or the Bronco on the freeway - will care. (With the exception of the victims' families, of course.)
Well, if you compare it to people's knowledge of most trials (which is probably zero or just above zero), I think this trial still ranks higher than any other civilian trial. For how many other trials can anyone name the judge, lead prosecutor, and lead defense attorney 25 years later? None that I can think of. There isn't much historical or educational value in the trial, but it was certainly the most memorable I can recall in my lifetime.
I always knew them as "The Los Angeles Riots" . . . of course in response to abuse of Rodney King . . . when did they "rebrand" to "Rodney King Riots"?
I was in Los Angeles during those riots, living within a few miles of the looting and burning. They were called the Los Angeles or LA riots, never the Rodney King riots. They weren't the first riots in Los Angeles, but the first riots in the 1960s were referred to as the Watts riots.