Later that day, Hollidays went to their boyfriend’s race and then to a wedding. It wasn’t until the next morning, March 4th, that they called the Los Angeles police to find out what had happened to Mr. King. The operator had hung up, said Holliday.
Then he called a local television station, KTLA, which sent a reporter to interview him. The reporter borrowed the tape. A report of the incident was on the news that evening, and the broadcaster sent a clip of Hollidays video to CNN, with which KTLA had an agreement to exchange footage.
The next day Holliday went to the train station to get his tape. Knowing that he had something sensational, he demanded payment. The broadcaster gave him $ 500, but he later said he didn’t say the tape had already been copied and passed on.
Image from a video showing police officers beating a man who was later identified as Rodney King, 1991. Credit:AP
At the end of the day, the story was international news, with a clip of Hollidays Video being played around the world. Law enforcement agencies were called in. The police arrived at his home with a summons for his tape and recorder. The FBI opened an investigation.
Though millions of Americans owned VCRs at the time, their use by so-called citizen journalists to record things like police abuse was new. Holliday inadvertently showed the way and announced a day when cell phone recordings of police violence would be the order of the day.
Holliday became a reluctant little celebrity in one of the biggest stories of the 1990s. At one point he was getting 100 calls from reporters a day, he said. He changed his phone number three times.
But when he was disinterested in media appearances, he became eager to reap any profit from his 15 minutes of fame and was angry when his fame didn’t turn into fortune. He hired an agent, a lawyer, and a publicist, all of whom worked on broadcasts. He released a $ 39.95 videotape aimed at teaching others how to make money from citizen journalism.
There was talk of a biopic, a TV show, a George Holliday crime-fighting toy and, that was in the early 1990s, a 1900 number where callers would pay $ 1.95 a minute to get his Hearing advice and thoughts and leaving your own tips. None of that led to anything.
He made some money on his clip. He licensed it to a female rap duo called BWP (Bytches with Problems); he did the same after litigating Spike Lee for his film Malcolm X. But he made less than $ 10,000, he said, and that made him bitter. He sued KTLA and other broadcasters for $ 100 million, saying they didn’t tell him the video would be shared. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 1993.
However, he was able to achieve one achievement: his video was included in the Whitney Biennale in New York in 1993 and ran there in an endless loop.
Holliday’s video played a pivotal role in the attack process against four officials involved in the king’s beating. In April 1992, a jury found three of them not guilty and found the fourth officer to be wrong.
The video also came into play in a 1993 federal civil rights case against the officers that resulted in the conviction of two of them, and in a 1994 civil lawsuit brought by Mr. King against the City of Los Angeles for which he was 3.8 million US dollars were awarded.
Mr. King later said that he lost most of that money to bad investments. He drowned in his backyard swimming pool in 2012 at the age of 47.
Holliday said he was glad he did what he did but regretted the impact on Los Angeles police.
“I’m sorry for the police,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “I think spanking wasn’t okay, but I’ve never had a bad experience with you.”
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Holliday and Mr. King happened to meet only once. Shortly after the first acquittal, Holliday was filling his car at a gas station when someone called his name.
“I looked over and didn’t recognize him because the only pictures I had seen of him were of his puffy and beaten face, but now he was recovered,” Holliday said in an interview with The Sun. “He could tell that I didn’t know who he was and he said, ‘You don’t know who I am, do you?’ I said no.’
“He said, ‘Well, you saved my life.'”
Holliday was born in Canada in June 1960. Thanks to his father’s hiking career as a manager at the Shell oil company, the family later lived in Indonesia and Argentina. His father was British, his mother German. His paternal grandfather had been a police officer in London, a fact Holliday would cite to explain his ambivalence about what his video had done.
In 1980 he moved to Los Angeles and looked for a new life away from the dictatorship that was ruling Argentina at the time. He became a plumber and ran a plumbing services company in the late 1980s.
Holliday’s two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his son George Jr.; his brother Peter; and his sister Ricarda Ana Holliday.
In 2020, he tried to sell his camera at auction and told the New York Times that he needed the money. The camera is listed at a starting price of $ 225,000 and has not placed any bids. It’s unclear if he ever sold it.
The New York Times
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