NFL STAR FOCUS OF `TRIAL OF CENTURY'
Family confirms Simpson died of prostate cancer
• O.J. Simpson, the football star and Hollywood actor who was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in a trial that mesmerized the world but was found liable in a separate civil case, has died. He was 76.
The family announced on Simpson's official X account that he died Wednesday of prostate cancer. Simpson's lawyer confirmed to TMZ on Thursday that he died in Las Vegas.
Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.
Live TV coverage of his arrest after a famous slowspeed chase marked a stunning fall from grace.
He had seemed to transcend racial barriers as the star Trojans tailback for college football's powerful University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental car ad pitchman rushing through airports in the late 1970s, and as the husband of a blond and blueeyed high school homecoming queen in the 1980s.
“I'm not Black, I'm O.J.,” he liked to tell friends.
His “trial of the century” captured the world's attention on live TV. The case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice and police misconduct.
Evidence found at the scene seemed overwhelmingly against Simpson. Blood drops, bloody footprints and a glove were there. Another glove, smeared with blood, was found at his home.
Simpson didn't testify, but the prosecution asked him to try on the gloves in court. He struggled to squeeze them onto his hands and spoke his only three words of the trial: “They're too small.”
His attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. told the jurors, “If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.”
The jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to family members of Brown and Goldman.
A decade later, still shadowed by the California wrongful death judgment, Simpson led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns.
A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other felonies.
I DON'T THINK MOST OF AMERICA BELIEVES I DID IT.
Imprisoned at age 61, he served nine years in a remote Nevada prison, including a stint as a gym janitor. He was not contrite when he was released on parole in 2017.
The parole board heard him insist yet again that he was only trying to retrieve sports memorabilia and family heirlooms stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.
“I've basically spent a conflict-free life, you know,” said Simpson, whose parole ended in late 2021.
Public fascination with Simpson never faded. Many debated whether he had been punished in Las Vegas for his acquittal in Los Angeles.
In 2016, he was the subject of both an FX miniseries and five-part ESPN documentary.
“I don't think most of America believes I did it,” Simpson told The New York Times in 1995, a week after a jury acquitted him. “I've gotten thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me.”
Twelve years later, following an outpouring of public outrage, Rupert Murdoch cancelled a planned book by the News Corp.-owned HarperCollins in which Simpson offered his hypothetical account of the killings.
The book was to be titled “If I Did It.”
Goldman's family, still doggedly pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment, won control of the manuscript. They retitled the book “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.”
“It's all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,” Simpson told The Associated Press at the time. He collected $880,000 in advance money for the book, paid through a third party.
“It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead,” he said.
Less than two months after losing the rights to the book, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.
David Cook, an attorney who has been seeking since 2008 to collect the civil judgment in the Goldman case, said he'd spoken with Ron's father, Fred, on Thursday about Simpson's death.
Cook declined to say what Fred Goldman said or where he was.
“He died without penance,” Cook said of Simpson. “We don't know what he has, where it is or who is in control. We will pick up where we are and keep going with it.”