Apologia is a rhetorical genre of self-defense. As such, apologetic discourse involves a response to an attack upon an individual's character or worth as a human being. Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman encountered such a attack during the 0.J. Simpson murder trial. The purpose of this analysis is to determine whether the rhetorical strategies indicative of apologia are used to perform masculine facework in Mark Fuhrman's Murder In Brentwood. By means of critical analysis, apologia can be established as a masculine face-saving strategy. The analysis takes place in two stages. First, the connection between facework and apologia is established. The four strategies of Hodgins, Liebeskind, and Schwartz (1996), Sandra Petronio's examples of defensive strategies, and three strategies in William L. Benoit's (1995) typology of image restoration strategies provide the first two units of analyses. Second, questions gleaned from the research of Noreen Kruse (1977) determined the topics to which Fuhrman devotes the most time in his discourse and the motivational drives that shape that discourse. By integrating the findings of both analyses, the masculine face Fuhrman endeavors to save emerges. / Graduation date: 1999