How Kato Kaelin Feels About The Media Today

A minor actor and celebrity, Brian "Kato" Kaelin became a household name in the mid-1990s after testifying in the high-profile trial of O.J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Kaelin — who would go on to star in such films as "Baseketball" and "Pauly Shore Is Dead," according to IMDb — was a friend of the Simpsons and a guest on their estate at the time of the murder. Even though O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of the crime, Kaelin's testimony helped establish a timeline of the evening's events, like sharing a takeout meal with the disgraced football star on the evening the killings took place, and a mysterious backpack that Simpson urged Kaelin not to touch, which was never seen again. 

Although the not guilty verdict in the highly-publicized trial remains up for debate, in 1997 Simpson was found liable in a wrongful death suit, according to ABC News. In a 2015 interview with Barbara Walters, Kaelin revealed that he believes O.J. to be guilty of crime (also posted at ABC News). Around that same time, Kaelin also expressed his feelings about the media following experiences he had living in the eye of the storm surrounding what many considered to be the trial of the century.

As a close personal friend of the Simpsons and a primary witness in the trial, the media spun many stories about Kaelin at the height of the controversy surrounding the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. In a 2014 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Kaelin expressed his disappointment with how fast and loose some corners of the media played with the truth, calling out some publications that went so far as to implicate him in the crime.

Kaelin wrote, "The National Examiner published a cover story declaring, 'Cops Think Kato Did It.' You probably remember the headline and maybe even believed it. What you might not know is I took them to court, and a federal appeals court found that headlines can be considered libel even if the story itself is not defamatory. But in the court of public opinion, I had already lost."

Kaelin even mentioned an article from those days that included full quotes from him, from an interview he claims never even took place. "At the grocery store checkout line you're bombarded with magazine covers shouting, 'He cheated with her' and 'She slept with him' or 'He slept with them,'" he wrote, adding, "Maybe people feel better about their own lives when they can relish someone else's pain."