Bright star, troubled life
1995 murder trial came to define NFL great who rose from tough childhood
O.J. Simpson, who ran to fame on the football field, made fortunes as an all-American in movies, television and advertising, and was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in a 1995 trial in Los Angeles that mesmerized the nation, died Wednesday at his home in Las Vegas, Nev. He was 76.
The cause was cancer, his family announced on social media.
The jury in the murder trial cleared him, but the case, which had held up a cracked mirror to Black and white America, changed the trajectory of his life. In 1997, a civil suit by the victims’ families found him liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages. He paid little of the debt, moved to Florida and struggled to remake his life, raise his children and stay out of trouble.
In 2006, he sold a book manuscript, titled If I Did It ,anda prospective TV interview, giving a “hypothetical” account of murders he had always denied committing. A public outcry ended both projects, but Goldman’s family secured the book rights, added material imputing guilt to Simpson and had it published.
In 2007, he was arrested after he and other men invaded a Las Vegas hotel room of some sports memorabilia dealers and took a trove of collectibles. He claimed the items had been stolen from him, but a jury in 2008 found him guilty of 12 charges, including armed robbery and kidnapping, after a trial that drew only a smattering of reporters and spectators. He was sentenced to nine to 33 years in a Nevada state prison. He served the minimum term and was released in 2017.
Over the years, the story of O.J. Simpson generated a tide of tell-all books, movies, studies and debate over questions of justice, race relations and celebrity in a nation that adores its heroes, especially those cast in rags-toriches stereotypes, but that has never been comfortable with its deeper contradictions.
There were many in the Simpson saga. Yellowing old newspaper clippings yield the earliest portraits of a postwar child of poverty afflicted with rickets and forced to wear steel braces on his spindly legs, of a hardscrabble life in a bleak housing project and of hanging with teenage gangs in the tough back streets of San Francisco, where he learned to run.
“Running, man, that’s what I do,” he said in 1975, when he was one of America’s best-known and highest-paid football players, the Buffalo Bills’ electrifying, swivel-hipped ball carrier, known universally as The Juice. “All my life I’ve been a runner.”
And so he had — running to daylight on the gridiron of the University of Southern California and in the roaring stadiums of the National Football League for 11 years; running for Hollywood movie moguls, for Madison Avenue image-makers and for television networks; running to pinnacles of success in sports and entertainment.
Along the way, he broke college and professional records, won the Heisman Trophy and was enshrined in pro football’s Hall of Fame. He appeared in dozens of movies and memorable commercials for Hertz and other clients; was a sports analyst for ABC and NBC; acquired homes, cars and a radiant family; and became an American idol — a handsome warrior with gentle eyes and a soft voice.
It was the good life, on the surface. But there was a deeper, more troubled reality — about an infant daughter drowning in the family pool and a divorce from his high school sweetheart, about his stormy marriage to a stunning young server and her frequent calls to the police when he beat her. The abuse left Nicole Simpson bruised and terrified on scores of occasions, but police rarely took substantive action. After one call to police on New Year’s Day 1989, officers found her badly beaten and half-naked, hiding in the bushes outside their home. O.J. Simpson was arrested and convicted of spousal abuse, but he was let off with a fine and probation.
The couple divorced in 1992, but confrontations continued. On Oct. 25, 1993, Nicole Simpson called the police again. “He’s back,” she told a 911 operator, and officers once more intervened.
Then it happened. On June 12, 1994, Nicole Simpson, 35, and Goldman, 25, were attacked outside her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, not far from O.J. Simpson’s estate. She was nearly decapitated, and Goldman was slashed to death.
The knife was never found, but police discovered a bloody glove at the scene and abundant hair, blood and fiber clues. Aware of the earlier abuse and Nicole Simpson’s calls for help, investigators believed from the start O.J. Simpson, then 46, was the killer. They found blood on his car and, in his home, a bloody glove that matched the one picked up near the bodies. There was never any other suspect.
Five days later, after Simpson had attended Nicole’s funeral with their two children, he was charged with the murders but fled in his white Ford Bronco. With his old friend and teammate Al Cowlings at the wheel and the fugitive in the back holding a gun to his head and threatening suicide, the Bronco led a fleet of patrol cars and news helicopters on a 60-mile televised chase over the Southern California freeways.
The ensuing trial lasted nine months, from January to early October 1995, and captivated the nation with its lurid accounts of the murders and the tactics and strategy of prosecutors and of a defense that included the “dream team” of Johnnie Cochran Jr., F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Barry Scheck and Robert Shapiro.
The prosecution, led by Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, had what seemed to be overwhelming evidence: tests showing blood, shoe prints, hair strands, shirt fibers, carpet threads and other items found at the murder scene had come from Simpson or his home, and DNA tests showing the bloody glove found at Simpson’s home matched the one left at the crime scene. Prosecutors also had a list of 62 incidents of abusive behavior by Simpson against his wife.
But as the trial unfolded before Judge Lance Ito and a 12-member jury that included 10 Black people, it became apparent the police inquiry had been flawed. Photo evidence had been lost or mislabeled, DNA had been collected and stored improperly, raising a possibility it was tainted. Detective Mark Fuhrman, a key witness, admitted he had entered the Simpson home and found the matching glove and other crucial evidence without a search warrant.
The defense portrayed Los Angeles police as racist, alleged a Black man was being railroaded and urged the jury to think beyond guilt or innocence and send a message to a racist society.
He was released after 474 days in custody, but his ordeal was hardly over. Much of the case was resurrected for the civil suit by the Goldman and Brown families. A predominantly white jury with a looser standard of proof held Simpson culpable and awarded the families damages of $33.5 million. The civil case, which excluded racial issues as inflammatory and speculative, was a vindication of sorts for the families and a blow to Simpson, who insisted he had no chance of ever paying the damages.
Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947, one of four children of James and Eunice Simpson. As an infant afflicted with the calcium deficiency rickets, he wore leg braces for several years but outgrew his disability. His father, a janitor and cook, left the family when the child was 4, and his mother, a hospital nurse’s aide, raised the children in a housing project in the tough Potrero Hill district.
In 1967, Simpson married his high school sweetheart, Marguerite Whitley. The couple had three children, Arnelle, Jason and Aaren. Shortly after their divorce in 1979, Aaren, 23 months old, fell into a swimming pool at home and died a week later.
Simpson married Nicole Brown in 1985; the couple had a daughter, Sydney, and a son, Justin. He is survived by Arnelle, Jason, Sydney and Justin Simpson and three grandchildren, his lawyer, Malcolm P. LaVergne, said.
Simpson was a congenial celebrity. He talked freely to reporters and fans, signed autographs, posed for pictures with children and was self-effacing in interviews, crediting his teammates and coaches, who clearly liked him. In an era of Black power displays, his only militancy was to crack heads on the gridiron.