The Forgotten Briefcase is not about a trial. It is not about a verdict. It is not about the most publicized criminal case in American history.

It is about Nicole. And it is about what rediscovering her led me to — self renewal and redemption.

The woman I knew bore almost no resemblance to the woman the media defined and the defense team buried. By the time we met — introduced by Kris Jenner on a pre-arranged date — Nicole had transformed herself.

She was a serious runner. Six, seven miles along San Vicente Boulevard, pushing herself with the same quiet determination she brought to everything. She wasn’t running away from anything. She was running toward herself.

She was deeply spiritual. On an inner journey that went far beyond surface level searching. When I gave her Siddhartha — a book about exactly that kind of journey — she told me it changed her life forever. That didn’t surprise me. I had seen what she was looking for in her eyes before she ever opened the first page.

She was a foodie. We shared meals that I still remember in detail — a spicy tuna handroll at Hide Sushi in West LA, the kind of ordinary perfect moment you don’t know you’re memorizing until thirty years later when you can still taste it.

And she was brave.

One evening Nicole told me — in graphic detail — what she had endured in her marriage. She didn’t tell me as a victim. She told me as a woman who had survived it, who was reclaiming herself, who was finally living on her own terms.

That is the woman who breathes life into every page of this book.

Not a headline. Not a case number. Not a footnote in someone else’s story.

Nicole Brown Simpson was vibrant, complex, spiritual, strong and in the process of becoming fully herself when her life was taken. Rediscovering her — through journals, letters, and memories locked away for thirty-three years — led me back to myself.

She deserves to be seen that way. And I finally had the courage to show her.

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It was the late ‘80s, early ‘90s — before phones kept your calendar, before apps tracked your thoughts. A Filofax was how you organized your life. Mine went everywhere with me.

My doctor had suggested journaling as a way to process emotions. I took his advice, though not in the way he probably intended. I wasn’t writing to heal anything in particular. I was simply recording my life — day to day musings, observations, the texture of ordinary moments.

But then Nicole came into it.

And ordinary went out the window.

I was so taken with her that the journaling changed. The day to day entries gave way to something else — prose, poems, pages written by a man who couldn’t quite believe what he was feeling. I wasn’t documenting events anymore. I was trying to capture something I didn’t want to lose.

I didn’t know then that I was building an archive.

I didn’t know that thirty-three years later I would unzip a briefcase, pull out those journals, and remember exactly how it felt to be that man — sitting somewhere in 1992 Los Angeles, writing about a woman who made him want to put everything into words.

What struck me when I reread them wasn’t the details. It was the emotion. Raw, unguarded, completely alive.

I had buried all of it. The journals, the feelings, the version of myself who wrote poems for someone he loved. I had closed the briefcase and convinced myself it was gone.

It wasn’t gone. It was waiting.

The Forgotten Briefcase publishes June 16th. Pre-sale begins June 1st. Subscribe to read what didn’t make it into the book.

Siddhartha.

I had given her that book. I gave it to her because she was searching — for herself, for peace, for something she couldn’t quite name but I recognized in her. Hermann Hesse wrote it for people exactly like Nicole. People who needed to find their own way back to themselves.

It had a profound effect on her.

After we broke up in June of 1992, we met for lunch that December, just before the holidays. That was when she gave me back my copy of Siddhartha.

A few days later, a letter arrived in the mail.

She wrote that she was perplexed that she still had such a love for me.

I tucked her letter inside the pages of the book she had returned. And I put it all in the briefcase. Then I closed the briefcase and hid it in a closet to keep it out of sight.

I don’t know exactly what I was thinking in that moment. Maybe I was protecting myself. Maybe I wasn’t thinking at all. But for thirty-three years, that letter stayed exactly where I had placed it — inside the pages of that copy of Siddhartha.

33 years later, when I was sitting on the stairs holding the briefcase, I reached in and saw the worn cover of Siddhartha, held it in my hands, and it all came back. Not slowly. All at once.

She had loved me. She had written it down. And I had buried it.

Next: another object from the briefcase. Another memory unlocked.

The Forgotten Briefcase publishes June 16th. Pre-sale begins June 1st. Subscribe to stay close to this story.

I knew what was in it.

That’s the part I never told anyone. When I found the briefcase that winter morning, I wasn’t surprised. I knew exactly what was inside — cards, letters, photographs, journals, thirty-three years of a love story I had put away and refused to acknowledge.

My first instinct was to hide it again.

I was already thinking about where to put it when something stopped me. I can’t explain it except to call it what it was — a calling. I sat down on the stairs, and I opened it.

The past came flooding back.

Everything inside was frozen in time, exactly as I had left it. A photo album. Handwritten journals. One of her favorite novels with a letter from her still tucked inside the pages. It felt like I had slipped through a wormhole. Each memento I uncovered pulled me deeper in.

What I didn’t expect — what I couldn’t have prepared for — was the grief.

I hadn’t grieved Nicole’s death. Not really. The world grieved loudly, publicly, endlessly, while the media and the defense team maligned her character — through courtrooms and cameras and verdicts. I had grieved by locking everything away. I thought that was enough.

It wasn’t.

Sitting on those stairs, I felt something I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in over three decades. Not anger. Not bitterness. Something quieter and more unexpected.

Relief. And then the overwhelming sense that this story wasn’t mine alone to keep.

I didn’t know yet what I was going to do with it. That answer came later, after my own brush with death. But in that moment on the stairs, one thing was clear:

This wasn’t meant to stay locked away.

The Forgotten Briefcase publishes June 16th. Pre-sale begins June 1st. Subscribe to read what didn’t make it into the book.