Reporter Laments His Own 'Guilt' In Covering O.J. Simpson's Trial

NewsNation host Dan Abrams said Thursday that O.J. Simpson’s death brought up the constant guilt he felt about building his career on the notorious football star’s murder trial, in which Simpson was controversially acquitted. (Watch the video below.)

“O.J. Simpson died today, and for me, it’s actually an incredibly odd day because I covered every day of both his criminal and civil cases from inside the courtroom, and there weren’t many of us,” Abrams said on his show. “The reality is his cases jump-started my career, and yet he was a murderer. It’s sort of a troubling reality I’ve always had to live with.”

Abrams, who’s also a legal analyst at ABC News and founded his own media network that created Mediaite, continued to leak regret as he addressed viewers. He recounted how he was assigned to cover the case for Court TV because two senior reporters were busy on other projects, landing him on “the trial of a generation.”

“Those of us who covered the trial became mini-celebrities too,” he said. “I was a lawyer just out of law school and suddenly I was in People magazine.”

The acquittal of Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, stirred personal feelings that were difficult to “reconcile,” he said.

“The bottom line is that the country, in my view rightly, was convinced that a killer got away with it, and yet on a kind of personal level, his legal issues, more importantly, the deaths of two people, the murders of two people, changed my life. It’s kind of an odd thing to reconcile,” he said.

“I was doing my job, I think I did it well enough,” Abrams continued. “… But at the end of the day, it’s also true the deaths of two totally innocent people helped make my career, and I