Donnie Wahlberg Compares Making A Murderer To O.J. Simpson Trial

Pretty much every card-carrying Netflix subscriber has an opinion about Making a Murderer this month (plenty of celebs included). And after more than 10 hours of intense immersion into the docu-style miniseries, audiences darn well should. But Donnie Wahlberg — less famous brother of Mark, husband to Jenny McCarthy — of all people, wants to direct viewers' attention toward what he thinks is an illuminating comparison. The former New Kids on the Block member penned a lengthy article for the Chicago Sun Times' Splash site this week, drawing parallels between the Steven Avery trial and the People of the State of California v. O.J. Simpson. "In Making a Murderer," Wahlberg writes, "the police are made to look like 'evil' men by the defense. Just like Johnny Cochran argued about the cops in the O.J. case. But did the Manitowoc officers ever show anything in their history that would make us think that they were any more evil than Detective Mark Fuhrman was in the O.J. trial?" He contrasts a number of other semi-spurious points between the two trials and suspects. "Blood was found (planted?) by 'evil' cops in an SUV in both cases," Wahlberg goes on. "Blood that was, of course, very curiously located, and found in conspicuously small amounts, considering the violent nature of both murders. Then there is the EDTA blood testing done by the FBI. A testing method that has been allowed to be used in only two cases in the last 20 years." "Can you guess which two cases?" he asks. "Yup, the O.J. case and the Steven Avery case. There is one last irony that these two controversial, and compelling, cases share: We were allowed to watch both of them play out on TV. And boy, did we! We not only watched them, we obsessed over them. But were we really, actually, ever allowed to watch them? All of them? Actually, we were not." He goes on in this vein for paragraph upon paragraph, waggling a finger at anyone who might be erring on the side of questioning the justice system. But mostly, Whalberg's piece swirls around the idea that anyone who thinks that Steven Avery could be innocent is potentially a hypocrite if, more than 20 years ago, they thought that O.J. Simpson was guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson. There's plenty more theorizing and shade-throwing where that came from. Spoiler alert: Wahlberg likely won't be signing a "Free Steven Avery" petition any time soon. But despite his insistence that it's the rest of the world that isn't seeing the case from all sides, he doesn't appear to be looking at it with any measure of objectivity, either.