Darden says he continues to pay for being a member of the prosecution team against O.J. Simpson.
A former O.J. Simpson prosecutor said it wasn’t worth it for him to take on the former football star’s infamous murder trial, which he says continues to haunt him.
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“It was not worth it,” he told Inside Edition.
“I think it has affected my legal career. I think that I am still paying for having been a member of the prosecution team,” he said.
Darden is now revealing that he was blindsided when he was fired as a prosecutor following the trial
“I found out I was no longer a member of the DA's office when I read it in the newspaper,” he revealed. “I'm not kidding you.”
“Someone called me and said, ‘Darden, you got fired from the DA’s office?’ And I went, ‘What? No I didn't, no way. After all the blood I've shed? Hell no.’”
From there, Darden said things got worse.
“I lost friends to the point where I hardly have any friends. I could count my friends on four fingers. To this day.”
He says he's often subjected to taunts by total strangers who blame him for blowing the case.
It was Darden who had Simpson try on gloves found at the scene of the murder. “I put the gloves on O.J. Simpson. Thank you very much,” he said.
Simpson struggled to slip the gloves on, resulting in defense attorney Johnny Cochrane's now-famous quip: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."
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Darden said, “I don't mind being responsible for the gloves. I think I created some of the best courtroom drama in the history of American trials."
Darden says there's plenty of blame to go around, claiming the case was lost from the beginning because of the racial composition of the jury.
“I defy anybody to come and tell me, ‘Hey, I have a jury with 9 African-Americans on it out of 12 here in the county of Los Angeles. In 36 years, that was the first time I saw that, hadn't seen it before, haven't seen it since,” he said.
“There was nothing to lose after the first couple of days,” he said.
His 1996 book, In Contempt, has just been re-released following the publicity surrounding the FX miniseries, The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story and the ESPN documentary, O.J.: Made In America.
“I've been through hell and back. I'm still standing,” he said.
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