Murder trial toppled football legend
Simpson soared as athlete, actor before wife, her friend died
LAS VEGAS — O.J. Simpson, the football star and Hollywood actor acquitted of charges that he killed his former wife and her friend in a trial that mesmerized the public and exposed divisions on race and policing in America, has died. He was 76.
The family announced on Simpson’s official X account that he died Wednesday of prostate cancer. He died in Las Vegas, officials there said Thursday.
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. He was later found liable for the deaths in a separate civil case, and then served nine years in prison on unrelated charges.
Goldman’s father, Fred, and his sister, Kim, released a statement acknowledging that “the hope for true accountability has ended.”
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 captured America’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 Cochran told the jurors: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
The jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to relatives 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.
Imprisoned at 61, he served nine years in a remote Nevada prison, including a stint as a gym janitor. He wasn’t contrite when he was released on parole in October 2017. The parole board heard him insist yet again that he was only trying to retrieve memorabilia and heirlooms stolen from him after his criminal trial. His 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 an FX miniseries and a five-part ESPN documentary.
Simpson played 11 NFL seasons, nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, where he became known as “the Juice.” He won four NFL rushing titles, rushed for 11,236 yards in his career, scored 76 touchdowns and played in five Pro Bowls. His best season was 1973, when he ran for 2,003 yards — the first running back to break the 2,000-yard rushing mark.
Simpson’s football rise happened simultaneously with a television career. He signed a contract with ABC Sports the night he won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. That same year, he appeared on the NBC series “Dragnet” and “Ironside.” During his pro career, Simpson was a color commentator for a decade on ABC, followed by a stint on NBC. In 1983, he joined ABC’s “Monday Night Football.”
Simpson became a charismatic pitchman. In 1975, Hertz made him the first Black man hired for a corporate national ad campaign. The commercials, featuring Simpson running through airports toward the Hertz desk and young girls chanting “Go, O.J., go!” were ubiquitous.
Simpson made his big-screen debut in 1974’s “The Klansman,” an exploitation film with Lee Marvin and Richard Burton. The film flopped, but Simpson would go on to appear in several dozen films and TV series, including 1974’s “The Towering Inferno,” 1976’s “The Cassandra Crossing,” 1977’s “Roots” and 1977’s “Capricorn One.”
Most notable, perhaps, was 1988’s “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad” and two sequels. Simpson played Detective Nordberg in the films opposite Leslie Nielsen.
Orenthal James Simpson was born July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidized housing.
After high school, he enrolled at City College of San Francisco for a year and a half before transferring to the University of Southern California for the spring 1967 semester.
He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, on the eve of his first season with USC — which, in large part because of Simpson, won that year’s national championship.
On the day he accepted the Heisman Trophy, his first child, Arnelle, was born.
The couple also had two sons, Jason and Aaren. Aaren drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.
Simpson and Nicole Brown were married in 1985. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found dead.
“We don’t need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives,” he told the AP 25 years after the double slayings. “The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again. My family and I have moved on to what we call the ‘no negative zone.’ We focus on the positives.”