OJ Simpson, the decorated football superstar and Hollywood actor who was acquitted of charges he killed his ex-wife and her friend but later was found liable in a separate civil trial, has died. He was 76.
Simpson’s attorney confirmed he died Wednesday night in Las Vegas. A message posted Thursday on Simpson’s official X account, formerly Twitter, said he died after battling cancer.
“He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren,” the statement said.
Simpson gained fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever altered by the fatal stabbings in June 1994 of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.
Live television coverage of his arrest after a famous low-speed chase marked a stunning fall from grace for the sports hero.
He seemed to transcend racial barriers as the star running back for the USC Trojans on the powerful University of Southern California college football team in the late 1960s, as a car rental ad pitchman sprinting through airports in the late 1970s, and as the husband of a blonde, blue-eyed high school homecoming queen in the 1980s.
“I’m not Black, I’m OJ,” he liked to tell his friends.
The public was mesmerized by his “trial of the century” broadcast live on television. His case sparked debates about race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice and police misconduct.
A criminal court jury acquitted him of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable for the deaths in 1997 and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the families of Brown and Goldman.
A decade later, still overshadowed 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.
Jailed at 61, he served nine years in a remote northern Nevada prison, including a stint as a gym janitor. He showed no remorse when he was paroled in October 2017. The parole board heard him insist once again that he was only trying to retrieve sports memorabilia and family keepsakes that were stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.
“I’ve basically spent a conflict-free life, you know?” Simpson said, whose parole ended in late 2021.
The public’s fascination with Simpson never faded. Many debated whether he would have 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.
“I don’t think most of America believes I did it,” Simpson told the New York Times in 1995, a week after a jury determined he did not kill Brown and Goldman. “I’ve received thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me.”
Twelve years later, after widespread public outrage, Rupert Murdoch canceled a planned book by HarperCollins, a News Corp property, in which Simpson offered his hypothetical account of the murders. It was to be titled “If I Did It.”
The Goldman family, which was still doggedly pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment, gained 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 for the book, paid through a third party.
“It helped me get out of debt and secure my property,” he said.
Less than two months after losing the book rights, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.
Simpson played 11 seasons in the NFL, nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, where he became known as “The Juice” on an offensive line dubbed “The Electric Company.” He won four NFL rushing titles, ran 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 runner to break the 2,000-yard rushing mark.
“I was part of the game’s history,” he said years later, recalling that season. “If I hadn’t done anything else in my life, I would have left my mark.”
Of course, Simpson went on to other fame.
One artifact from his murder trial, the carefully tailored tan suit he wore when he was acquitted, was later donated and displayed at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Simpson had been told the suit would be in the Las Vegas hotel room, but it turned out it wasn’t there.
Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidized housing projects.
After graduating from 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 semester of 1967.
He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, and moved in with her in Los Angeles the next day so he could begin preparing for his first season with USC, which, largely thanks to Simpson, won that year’s national championship.
Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He accepted the statue the same day his first child, Arnelle, was born.
He had two children, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife; one of those children, Aaren, drowned as a toddler in a pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.
Simpson and Brown married in 1985. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.
“We don’t need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives,” he told the AP 25 years after the double murder. “The subject of the moment is a subject I’ll never address again. My family and I have moved on to what we call the ‘no-negative zone.’ We focus on the positive.”
Image: Wflx
