Every good trial needs a breakout star, and in the case of the OJ Simpson armed robbery trial we’re pretty sure that star is Bruce Fromong.

Bruce Fromong became the headline attraction of the OJ Simpson trial on Monday, when it looked as if his heart was literally going to explode in his chest during his testimony. But yesterday Bruce Fromong got to do exactly what he came to do – testify against OJ Simpson by contradicting himself as many times as humanly possible.

According to Bruce Fromong, he wasn’t scared when OJ Simpson burst into his hotel room, but he did fear for his life. Also, although he wasn’t trying to profit from his OJ Simpson memorabilia, he did want to make big money from it. Keep this up and Bruce Fromong’s going to end up as the world’s favourite feeble-hearted flip-flopping uncle.

The pressure on everyone involved in the OJ Simpson armed robbery and kidnapping trial must be huge because, literally, the job they do will determine whether or not a man will spend the rest of his life in jail. And that pressure seems to be most evident in Bruce Fromong, one of the key witnesses to the alleged crime.

On Monday, things got to Bruce Fromong so badly that he had to interrupt his testimony to stagger around clutching his chest like Indiana Jones at the end of Temple Of Doom. But yesterday, with his internal organs tickety-boo again, Fromong managed to pull himself together for long enough to tell the court exactly what happened in that Las Vegas hotel room.

Not that we needed telling, of course – ever since OJ Simpson was arrested last year we’ve known that he burst into Fromong’s hotel room with a group of men during a sports memorabilia deal and shouted “You think you can steal my shit?” about a billion times. The important questions are whether any of OJ Simpson’s goons had guns and whether that shit was OJ Simpson’s shit or something he’d already pooped out and legitimately handed to someone else.

Did Bruch Fromong clear those points up? Not really. AP reports:

He acknowledged that he said previously, “I felt my life was being threatened.” But moments later, under inquiry by Stewart’s lawyer Robert Lucherini, Fromong said, “I was not scared.” He insisted the memorabilia Simpson sought was not stolen but said he didn’t know where some of it came from.

Well thanks a bundle Bruce. Really helpful. Almost as helpful as when you said you didn’t want to profit from the merchandise despite saying that you did before putting the merchandise on eBay with the description ‘The same ones stolen by O.J. in Las Vegas’.

So, where has Bruce Fromong’s testimony put the OJ Simpson trial? Exactly where it was before. Let’s hope that some of the witnesses called have at least some clue about what’s going on, otherwise we’re not going to get anywhere at all.

Unless they all have crazy old health scares like Bruce Fromong did. Boy, that was fun. We miss that.

This OJ Simpson trial is boring – no witnesses have even stopped their testimonies to clutch their chest in fear of an impending heart attack yet.

What’s that? They have? In fact, one of the first witnesses in the entire OJ Simpson armed robbery and kidnapping trial clutched his chest in the middle of his testimony thinking he was going to have a heart attack because that’s how scary even the thought of OJ Simpson is to him? Oh, right, sorry.

However, this seems like a massive misstep on the part of the prosecutors. Deploying the witness with the weakest heart at the start of the OJ Simpson trial? The jury’s bound to forget about that when it comes to deliberation time. Either the prosecutors have blown their big chance to convict OJ Simpson or there’s another star witness who’ll come on at the end, spontaneously combust, pop his eyeballs out and poo fire. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Yesterday was the day so many of us had been waiting for. No, not because Britney Spears announced her new poptastic album, but because the long-awaited OJ Simpson armed robbery and kidnapping trial finally got underway in Las Vegas.

It’s been a long hard road to get here – OJ Simpson’s alleged henchmen had to be persuaded to testify against him and the court had to assemble the most mean-spirited Caucasian jury in history before anything exciting could happen – but yesterday things got going with a bang.

OK, not really a bang. To be honest it was more of a minuscule cardiovascular rupture, and it wasn’t even that. But whatever it was, it was all thanks to witness Bruce Fromong.

Bruce Fromong is, of course, the sports memorabilia collector who OJ Simpson allegedly raided with a gang of gun-toting heavies while wailing “You think you can steal my shit?” like the overzealous curator of the world’s biggest Crap Museum.

His testimony would have been one of the most compelling of the trial, since he was the man who OJ Simpson apparently robbed and who owns an audio recording of the raid that seems to back his story up. But no, Bruce Fromong had to go and make it all even more dramatic by almost having a heart attack in front of everyone during his testimony. The New York Daily News reports:

Fromong called for medical help while under a barrage of
questions from Simpson’s attorney. His testimony was suddenly
halted as emergency medical technicians rushed to the courtroom to
bring Fromong’s blood pressure under control. “He has 50% heart capacity,” said Fromong’s lawyer Louis Schneider. “While he was on the stand, he started to feel heated.”

Now, there are three ways to look at this. Firstly, it could all be true. Bruce Fromong could have an especially weak heart and the intensity of a court environment coupled with the fact that he could effectively jail OJ Simpson for life got to him. We don’t believe a word of this.

Secondly, Bruce Fromong could have faked a heart attack to either prevent him from answering some tricky questions from the defence or exaggerate the level of fear that he feels in the presence of OJ Simpson. Again, we don’t believe this either, despite the tactic’s obvious success rate.

And that leaves option three – that OJ Simpson is a Magneto-like supervillian who can destroy the bodies of his enemies with the vindictive power of his mind alone. This, we’d argue, is absolutely the cause of Fromong’s heart attack scare and OJ Simpson should instantly go to a specially-built electro-magnetic detention centre four miles under the North Pole where he’ll never be able to harm anyone ever again.

The trial continues today. Unless OJ Simpson manages to implode everyones’ ribcages with his brain-rays and make his escape on the back of a jet rocket, of course. Could happen.

To the uninitiated, OJ Simpson's current legal woe might seem inordinately complex – he stole some shit from some men, but only because he said the men had stolen shit from him, meaning that OJ Simpson was merely recovering shit.

Oh, it's so confusing that we think we need a lie down. Luckily it's not for us to make sense of OJ Simpson's alleged shit-stealing escapades, because that's for courts and lawyers and judges and whatnot to decide. Which is more or less what's happening now – a hearing began yesterday to decide whether there's enough evidence to take OJ Simpson to trial on all 12 of his charges. And if a trial does go ahead it's expected to be the biggest shit-based trial starring an unconvincingly innocent murder-suspect the world has ever seen.

Probably. It's not like we've researched it or anything.

It's honestly hard to know how OJ Simpson's brain works sometimes – there can't be many people who, after being cleared of murdering their ex-wife and her friend, would think "Maybe the best way to get the public to like me would be to write a book where I graphically detail the murders as if it was me doing them."

Similarly – if the current allegations against OJ Simpson are true – there can't be many people who'd see some sports memorabilia dealers selling things they assume to be under their ownership and, instead of hiring a lawyer to pursue the matter officially, decide to burst into the dealers' hotel room with a gang of armed men screaming about shit like an angry poo-fixated toddler. 

But trying to work out how OJ Simpson's brain works is now the job of a Las Vegas court which – for the duration of yesterday and today – is holding a hearing to decide whether there's enough evidence to take OJ Simpson to a full trial, which could end up with him spending the rest of his life behind bars on 12 charges including kidnap, assault and robbery with a deadly weapon.

And that means that we're getting to see a bigger picture of the alleged armed robbery than ever before. For instance, we now know that the 'meeting' between OJ Simpson and the memorabilia dealers Bruce Fromong and Alfred Beardsley was set up by auctioneer Thomas Riccio, the man who made the infamous "you think you can steal my shit?" recording; that Riccio had informed the FBI of OJ Simpson's plans weeks in advance and that – at one befuddling point – OJ Simpson wanted to make a reality TV show out of the raid.

But the real star testimony yesterday came from Bruce Fromong – a man who freely admits that he wants to write a book about the incident and then turn the book into a movie starring Jack Nicholson as himself – who got to recount the details of the so-called robbery. In court Bruce Fromong claimed that OJ Simpson and his goons burst into the hotel room and stuffed several hundred items of memorabilia into pillowcases – some of which had nothing to do with him at all – while one man held a gun to his face and threatened to shoot him in the 'ass'. Fromong said:

"I wasn't cowering in a corner, but having a gun pointed at me is an uncomfortable feeling."

Today's part of the hearing is expected to be as information-heavy as yesterday's was, and when it's done the judge will be able to decide whether OJ Simpson should be taken to a full criminal trial, which is both a good and a bad thing.

For example, a full, long court case would give the world more time to get a handle on what apparently transpired in the days up to and including OJ Simpson's raid and digest the claims in easier to manage chunks – but on the downside it sounds like Bruce Fromong is so hungry for fame that a book entitled If I Did It, I'd Have Been Basically Robbing Myself And Holding A Gun To My Own Head Which Doesn't Make Very Much Sense But Buy My Book Anyway is depressingly inevitable.