The celebrity athlete who was acquitted in the Trial of the Century
No American celebrity has ever fallen from grace as fast and hard as O.J. Simpson. “The Juice” was launched to stardom in the 1970s through his astounding speed and grace as a running back, first at the University of Southern California and then over a record-setting 11-year NFL career. He leveraged his football success, charisma, and good looks into roles as an actor, TV commentator, and pitchman, most notably in a series of Hertz ads where he sprinted through airports. All that changed in June 1994, when his exwife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found brutally murdered outside her Los Angeles home. Extensive forensic evidence—and a history of battering Nicole—implicated O.J. But after an eight-month televised trial that riveted the nation, lead attorney Johnnie Cochran’s insistence that Simpson was framed by racist LAPD officers led to a stunning acquittal by a mostly Black jury. Found liable for the deaths in a 1997 civil trial, Simpson forever denied culpability; with his death from cancer, “the hope for true accountability has ended,” said Goldman’s father, Fred.
Orenthal James Simpson was raised in a San Francisco housing project by his mother, a nurse’s aide, after his custodian father left the family, said CNN.com. A case of rickets put him in leg braces until he was 5, but his “athletic skill was apparent early.” So was a penchant for trouble: He joined a gang and was arrested for theft and fighting. At City College of San Francisco his stand-out play led to recruitment by USC, where he set rushing records and won the Heisman Trophy. Drafted in the first round by the Buffalo Bills, “Simpson was soon setting records again,” becoming in 1973 the first back to rush for over 2,000 yards in a single season.
As he dazzled on the field, Simpson’s “genial public manner made him one of the country’s best-liked media personalities,” said The Washington Post. He did color commentary for ABC and racked up TV and movie credits, including The Towering
Inferno (1974), and Roots (1977). “But the affable public persona concealed a turbulent private life.” Even before divorcing his high school sweetheart, he took up with Brown, then an 18-year-old waitress, and the two married and had two children. But the “serial womanizer” was prone to “jealous rages,” and Nicole called 911 at least nine times. After one call police found her bruised and half-naked, crying, “He’s going to kill me!” Simpson pleaded guilty to spousal battery but was only fined; the pair divorced in 1992.
“Then it happened,” said The New York Times. When the bodies were found, Nicole “was nearly decapitated” and Goldman had 22 stab wounds. The sole suspect, Simpson was set to turn himself in to police. Instead, he fled in his white Ford Bronco. With a friend driving, he waved a gun and threatened suicide as the Bronco led police on a slow freeway chase watched live on TV by 95 million people before he finally surrendered. In the ensuing “Trial of the Century,” prosecutors presented “overwhelming” evidence, including Simpson’s blood and hair strands pulled from the murder scene. But Simpson’s lawyers “cast the LAPD as racist and corrupt,” said NPR.com, and the jury acquitted him.
After the shocking verdict, a “long legal saga” still lay ahead, said the Los Angeles Times. Simpson was ordered to pay the victims’ families $33.5 million in the civil judgment, but he moved to
Florida to “shield his assets” and paid little. In 2008, he was convicted of armed robbery after he and “a rogue’s gallery of ex-cons” confronted two memorabilia dealers in a cheap Las Vegas hotel room and took Simpson-related items he claimed were rightly his. He served nine years, getting out in 2017, by which time his trial had inspired numerous books, films, and TV specials. He lived quietly, playing golf and readily signing autographs in malls and restaurants, and refrained from discussing the murders. “My family and I have moved on to what we call the ‘no negative zone,’” he said. “We focus on the positives.”