Two rival male news helicopter pilots embroiled in a bitter feud over OJ Simpson’s infamous car chase have bonded 20 years later — over their choice to both become women.
The newsmen — Bob Tur and Dirk Vahle — bitterly clashed in 1994 when they both captured Simpson, suspected of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, on air leading cops on a low-speed chase in his white Bronco, Southern California Public Radio reported. Tur was flying for CBS at the time; Vahle was with rival NBC.
But a year ago, the two put the decades-long beef behind them after learning through a mutual pal, Desiree Horton, that they both were transgender.
“Desiree told me I should get in touch with Dirk Vahle,” said Tur. “I said, ‘Why? Dirk Vahle is an a—hole.’ She said, ‘Because Dirk is now Dana.’”
Vahle was aware of her former enemy’s transformation to Zoey after reading about it.
“You’ve got to be f—ing kidding me!” Vahle thought.
Leaving their grudges in the past, the two women bonded over their difficult sex-change journey, Tur said.
“When you go through something like this, it’s like going to war. It’s very, very rough, and you need people out there who understand. Dana was very understanding,” Tur said.
That’s because Vahle became a woman two years before Tur and was able to guide her new friend through the emotional process.
“I felt that she’s spoke in a lot of absolutes,” Vahle said of Tur. “And there’s not a whole lot of absolutes in this, because it varies a lot by age and how you are in general. There’s a lot of physical aspects of this — the hormones, the surgery — that I wanted to talk to her about, because they weren’t portrayed the way they should be.”
The two had a laugh about the bitter fight over who was first to shoot Simpson driving on the highway with cops trailing behind.
“I looked down between my legs and down below … I could see the freeway. And we saw a white Bronco,” Tur recalled.
“Everybody at my station feels very strongly that we were actually there before Bob Tur was there, which, of course, is something we all wanted to do in that market at that point,” Vahle contended.
Tur and CBS aired the breaking footage immediately, while NBC delayed it.
The two journalists were shocked that the police chase became such huge news, but now rarely think of it.
“I don’t think a lot about it,” Vahle added. “But somebody will be talking to me and I’ll say, ‘I did the OJ chase.’ And that freaks them out.”