Background and career
Brian Gerard "Kato" Kaelin (born March 9, 1959) is an American actor and radio and television personality. A friend of Nicole Brown Simpson, Kaelin is best known for serving as a witness in the O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1995, receiving considerable media attention during the trial.
Brian Gerard Kaelin was born on March 9, 1959, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Kaelin was nicknamed "Kato" as a child after the Japanese character played by Bruce Lee on the television series The Green Hornet. He graduated from Nicolet High School in Glendale, Wisconsin, in 1977. He attended, but never graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He pledged the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity in the fall of 1980 and was accepted at the end of the term at California State University, Fullerton. During his time at Eau Claire he created his own talk show, Kato and Friends, and hosted The Gameshow on the campus television station, TV10. He eventually moved to Hollywood.
Kaelin met and became friends with Nicole Brown Simpson, the ex-wife of former NFL player and actor O.J. Simpson (O.J.), on a skiing trip in Aspen, Colorado, in December 1992. He later moved into the guesthouse on Brown's property on Gretna Green Way and lived there for a year. He paid rent and helped take care of Sydney and Justin, who were O.J. and Nicole's children, as part of the living arrangement. After Nicole moved to the home on Bundy Drive, Kaelin opted not to live with her, as the residence did not have a guesthouse and Kaelin felt uncomfortable renting a room inside the home. He then moved into a guesthouse on O.J. Simpson's Rockingham Avenue property. Kaelin ate takeout food from McDonald's with Simpson on June 12, 1994, the night Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death outside Brown's condominium.
Kaelin was a minor witness for the prosecution in the 1995 O. J. Simpson murder trial. In 1994, he was staying in a guest house on Simpson's Rockingham estate and was present at the compound on the night of the two murders on June 12. He witnessed some of Simpson's movements before and after the time of the murders. His story seemed to contradict Simpson's version of the events on some key points, as he testified that he could not account for Simpson's whereabouts between 9:36 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. on the evening the murders took place, which the prosecution alleged occurred between 10:00 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. In spite of "valuable evidence" provided by Kaelin in his testimony, prosecutor Marcia Clark took the unusual step of having him declared a hostile witness, "allowing her to attack her own prosecution witness without repeated objections from Simpson's defense team." He received considerable media attention during the trial; one survey found that 74 percent of Americans could identify him.
After Simpson was acquitted, the cover of an issue of the tabloid newspaper National Examiner featured a photo of Kaelin without his shirt on, with the headline "Cops think Kato did it!" The article within the issue alleged that police suspected Kaelin of perjury. Kaelin sued the publisher, Globe Communications, for libel, alleging that the cover headline implied he was suspected of the murders. The federal District Court for Central California dismissed the case, saying the story was not libelous or malicious. This was reversed by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled:
We hold that reasonable jurors could find that clear and convincing evidence established: (1) the front page headline falsely insinuated that the police believed that Kaelin committed the murders; and (2) the false insinuation was not necessarily cured by ... subheading or by the non-defamatory story about Kaelin that appeared 17 pages away. We also hold that Kaelin produced sufficiently clear and convincing evidence of the newspaper's knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth of its headline to defeat a motion for summary judgment. The decision was a landmark case in libel law, finding that a headline could be considered libel. Kaelin later settled the US$15 million lawsuit with Globe Communications out of court for an undisclosed amount.
