What next for OJ Simpson now he’s free?
The former American footballer turned actor, cleared of his wife’s murder, has been released after serving nine years for robbery
AFTER serving just nine years of a 33year jail term for armed robbery and kidnap, the former American football hero OJ Simpson walked free from prison yesterday.
He was imprisoned in 2008, a year after storming a Las Vegas hotel room with five other men in an attempt to seize items from two sports memorabilia dealers which Simpson said belonged to him.
Now 70, the former Buffalo Bills running back sensation was granted parole in July, successfully making his case for freedom in a nationally televised hearing, and was told that October was the earliest he would be released from the Lovelock Correctional Institute in Nevada.
According to his lawyer, Malcolm LaVergne, Simpson, known as “The Juice” by his fans, was “bored to tears” in prison.
“He wants to hug his family,” he told reporters. “He wants to eat seafood, he wants to eat steak and enjoy the very simple pleasures that he hasn’t enjoyed in nine years.”
Born Orenthal James Simpson in California in 1947, Simpson retired from the National Football League in 1979 and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985, the year he married Nicole Brown.
They had two children, daughter Sydney and son Justin, but after seven years of marriage, during which Simpson was investigated by police for domestic violence, Brown filed for divorce in February 1992, citing irreconcilable differences.
Meanwhile Simpson had begun carving out a new career as an actor and million dollar spokesperson for various US companies, appearing in numerous TV advertising campaigns.
He appeared in various movies between 1974 and 1994, including The Towering Inferno, with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and starred in three Naked Gun comedies with Leslie Nielsen.
But two years after his divorce, his life unravelled spectacularly.
In June 1994, Simpson’s exwife and her friend Ron Goldman were found stabbed to death outside her Los Angeles home. Brown had multiple wounds in the head and neck with defensive wounds on her hands.
A single bloody glove was discovered at the scene. When detectives went to Simpson’s home to tell him of Brown’s death, they discovered that he’d flown to Chicago late the night before.
While there, they found a white Ford Bronco with blood on it and a second bloody glove – later linked to that found at the murder scene – bearing blood from both victims. Four days after Brown and Goldman’s bodies had been found, police ordered Simpson, whom they had charged with their murders, to surrender. Instead, Simpson fled in another White Bronco, wielding a gun on the back seat while his friend Al Cowlings drove.
A two-hour slow-motion police car chase followed across the Los Angeles freeways, watched live on TV by 95 million Americans, before Simpson finally gave himself up.
For a year the legal case, dubbed “trial of the century” by the American media, gripped a global audience of millions, with scenes from the Los Angeles courtroom beamed around the world. Simpson’s alleged history of domestic violence came up, with police records revealing Brown needed hospital treatment after being beaten by her then husband in 1989, although she decided not to press charges.
When asked how he would plead to the two murder charges, he broke courtroom practice and said: “Absolutely, one hundred per cent not guilty.”
America was divided but he was acquitted of both murders in October 1995.
Though he has always maintained he was innocent, Simpson was later found liable for the deaths in a civil trial brought by the Brown and Goldman families and ordered to pay them $33.5million (£25million) in damages, mostly still outstanding.
He then retreated to a relatively quiet life, playing golf and focusing on his four children – two from his first marriage to a childhood sweetheart in the 1960s.
BUT a decade later in September 2007, came the incident in room 1203 of the Palace Station Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas that propelled Simpson back into the headlines. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody and I didn’t mean to steal from anybody,” he told the court.
He was convicted in October 2008 on a litany of charges, including armed robbery, assault and kidnapping and sentenced to 33 years in prison with a minimum of nine years.
Now he is free, he will be supervised by the state parole division until September 29, 2022. Simpson reassured the board he would be successful in meeting his parole conditions before it was granted, saying, perhaps rather ironically, “I’m not a guy who lived a criminal life.”
As to what the fallen star will do next, one of his closest friends, Tom Scotto, recently said: “All he wants to do is spend time with his family and friends and his kids, and play a little golf.”
Yet while Simpson tucks into steak at the 19th hole, the 1994 murders remain unsolved.
Last week, Ron Goldman’s father and sister said that they will continue pursuing him for the damages awarded to them in the civil trial – an amount they say has now soared to $60million (£44.7million). Simpson’s dramatic story is likely to play on.