Did OJ Simpson murder his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman or didn’t he? There was a time when this was the only question that mattered around the water coolers of corporate America and indeed offices, pubs, mothers’ meetings, college campuses and even churches across the world.
For nine months in 1995 America demanded an answer. The trial that gave it one became a lightning rod for pressing questions of race and to a lesser extent the voyeurism of popular celebrity culture.
At the trial, the first of its kind to be televised and one of the most sensational criminal hearings in US judicial history, the celebrated American football star and comedy actor was controversially acquitted, though the evidence against him was strong.
In terms of entertainment for the masses, the trial did not disappoint. In the climactic moment, Simpson’s chief defence counsel, Johnnie Cochran, cast doubt on the prosecution’s key exhibit — a black glove that had been found at the murder scene. Cochran urged his client to try it on and demonstrated that the glove patently did not fit the substantial hand of Simpson. Cochran then produced the most memorable line of the trial: “If it [the glove] doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
The jury did.
Advertisement
Before the trial Simpson had earned his place in the pantheon of popular African-Americans, along with Sidney Poitier, Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. Personable, good-looking and often funny, he was also an all-American hero who had won over parts of the country that most black people failed to reach as one of the greatest stars in the history of American football. Throughout the Seventies, Simpson earned the nickname “Juice” — also a play on his initials OJ — for his swashbuckling forays up the field, which no amount of converging beefcake could stop, it seemed.
He first came to notice in the late 1960s as a running back for the USC Trojans, representing the University of Southern California, when he set a number of records and won the coveted Heisman Trophy. John McKay, his coach at the time, said of him, “Simpson was not only the greatest player I ever had, he was the greatest player anyone ever had.”
• Victims’ families pursue damages after OJ Simpson dies at 76
Moving up to the National Football League (NFL), Simpson played for the Buffalo Bills, then the San Francisco 49ers, where his achievements included the most “rushing yards” gained in one season, the most rushing yards in a single game and the most touchdowns scored in a season. In 1973, he was voted the game’s most valuable player and on five occasions he took part in the post-season Pro-Bowl, an annual exhibition game between the NFL’s most distinguished players.
When he retired from the game in 1979, he quickly became one of television’s most highly paid sports commentators as well as the “face” of Hertz car rental commercials.
Advertisement
But he also displayed an unexpected talent for comedy, most notably appearing in the Naked Gun trilogy. In these films he played the hapless but amiable Detective Nordberg, partner to Lieutenant Frank Drebin (Leslie Nielsen). The joke was that his character suffered a constant stream of injuries, usually caused by Drebin’s incompetence, but he always managed to survive them. He may have been Nielson’s stooge, but he demonstrated fine comic timing.
Simpson thus developed into a bankable Hollywood star, but his troubled private life had caught up with him on June 13, 1994, when the mutilated body of Brown Simpson and Goldman were found in the garden of her luxury home in an exclusive suburb of west Los Angeles. Both bodies were badly lacerated and lay in pools of blood.
Prior to their 1993 divorce, Simpson had beaten his wife on several occasions, resulting in his being sentenced to two years’ probation and 120 hours of community service. Subsequently, the police were called when Simpson broke into her home in a jealous rage and allegedly “went nuts”. This time, for no obvious reason, the police refused to prosecute.
The murders, clearly carried out in a frenzy, were immediately laid at the door of Simpson, who was known to resent his former wife’s new-found freedom and, in particular, her relationship with Goldman, a fashion model trying hard to break into acting. Simpson, however, was nowhere to be found. Two days after the crime, he and a friend were spotted by officers driving along a highway leading out of Los Angeles.
Simpson refused clearly issued commands to pull over and surrender. In heavy traffic, while being filmed from a police helicopter, as well as by TV cameras along the route, a “slow car chase” developed that continued for nearly an hour with pictures beamed on news channels across the world.
Advertisement
Eventually, Simpson’s white Ford Bronco turned into the driveway of his luxury home. The former football star was confused and reportedly suicidal, but he denied any involvement in the killings. At the trial that followed, the prosecution’s case was simple. Simpson, in a jealous rage, had attacked his former wife and her friend and slashed them to death. But no sooner was Simpson arraigned in court than it became obvious that a great deal more was at issue than crime on the charge sheet.
White America versus black America was the central issue. Against the background of America’s poorest race relations for a generation — not least in Los Angeles where a black man, Rodney King, was the victim of a notorious police beating that sparked race riots in the city in 1992 — Simpson’s defence counsel predicated their case on the claim that the LAPD detectives who had built the prosecution case were racist. The stakes were further raised when it emerged that ten members of the jury were black. Some commentators felt that they were subjected to intolerable pressure to find Hollywood’s most celebrated African-American not guilty.
The proceedings that followed, presided over by the quixotic Judge Lance Ito, proved deeply flawed. Detectives had amassed an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence, but nothing that tied the accused directly to the killings. A key component of the prosecution case centred on blood samples, but the defence, masterfully conducted by Cochran, immediately cast doubt on these, arguing that they could have been, and probably were, planted on his client by “racist” detectives.
Indeed Cochran obtained compromising video evidence suggesting that one of the detectives was racist. In his closing arguments, he compared one of the investigating officers to Adolf Hitler. He urged the jury to “do the right thing” and send the police a message about racism. “Not only did we play the race card,” another of the defence team admitted afterwards, “we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”
After a four-month trial, the ten-woman, two-man jury took just three hours to reach its verdict, which was televised live the following morning. Simpson, they said, was not guilty.
Advertisement
America erupted. It was a fix; it was a scandal; it was an indication that the US remained divided on racial lines. Simpson himself may have been free but so much damage had been done to his reputation that his life and career were in shreds. Friends shied away; invitations to social functions were withdrawn; there would be no more acting roles or lucrative afternoons in NFL commentary boxes. His showbusiness friends turned their backs on him; he became the butt not only of comedians and pundits, but of countless millions of ordinary Americans who had once considered themselves his devoted fans.
He was given custody of his two children with Brown Simpson — with whom he never once discussed the case or its implications — and he retired from public life.
His accusers, however, were not done yet. The families of Brown Simpson and Goldman took the almost unprecedented step of suing him in a California civil court. The court could not rule on the criminal case, which had already been disposed of, but it could, bizarrely, assign “responsibility” for the two deaths and order monetary compensation. Simpson often looked contemptuously unconcerned during the proceedings but he was ordered to pay $33.5 million to the families of Brown Simpson and Goldman after it was held by a jury that he was responsible for the double murder.
Simpson never paid out more than $400,000 of the money he owed. So complex were his financial dealings that it proved impossible to separate him from what was left of his fortune. He claimed that he had nothing more than his home and an NFL pension, yet, as the years went by, it was clear that he was once again living the high life.
Detractors insisted that he had got away, literally, with murder and shown no remorse for his crime. Defenders depicted him as a victim twice over, pilloried by a society which could not accept the verdict of one of its own courts on the grounds that most of the jury were black.
Advertisement
Simpson spent the remainder of his life playing golf and trying to make money in increasingly bizarre ways. The comedian Ruby Wax, who encountered him in Ruby Wax Meets OJ Simpson (1998), was clearly not enamoured with him. When she was blunt with Simpson during the interview, his response (making light of the gruesome crime of which he was accused) was to pretend to stab her repeatedly with a banana. “His presence was very jagged,” she recalled. “I couldn’t look in.” As they walked around Venice Beach in Los Angeles people either shook his hand or harangued him.
He remained a polarising figure and often did not help himself. In 2006 he launched a pay-per-view TV show called Juiced in which he would play pranks on unsuspecting members of the public and then shout his catchphrase, “You’ve been juiced!”. Each episode began with Simpson dressed as a pimp and surrounded by topless dancers while he rapped: “Don’t you know there’s no stopping the Juice/ When I’m on the floor I’m like a lion on the loose”/ Better shoot me with a tranquilliser dart/ Don’t be stupid, I’m not a Simpson named Bart”. He moved from California to Florida, living off his investments while implicitly denying their existence.
Another enterprise of questionable taste was the publication of the book If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer (2007) by Pablo Fenjves and based on extensive interviews with Simpson. The “if” of the title on the book jacket was so small that to all intents and purposes it read like “I did it” in large lettering.
If that was galling to many, Simpson finally got what many regarded to be his just deserts in 2008. The year before, he had been arrested and accused of armed robbery. He was alleged to have entered a room at the Palace-Station hotel casino in Las Vegas and at gunpoint seized a hoard of sports memorabilia that he later claimed belonged to him.
His fellow defendants gave evidence against him as part of plea bargains to reduce their sentences and Simpson was charged with criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, assault and robbery and using a deadly weapon. This time he was found guilty in a criminal court on October 2008 and sentenced to 33 years in prison. In 2017 he was released on parole after nine years behind bars.
Orenthal James Simpson was born into a poor black family in the housing projects of San Francisco in 1947. His mother Eunice (née Durden) was a hospital administrator. His father Jimmy worked in a bank while moonlighting as a renowned drag queen — he died of Aids in 1986.
The child contracted rickets in infancy and for five years wore a leg brace made for him by his mother. In the early 1960s, having recovered his strength, he joined a street gang and ended up serving three months in a youth guidance centre. Destined, it might have been supposed, to a life of crime, he was rescued by his astonishing prowess at American football. A sports scholarship to the University of Southern California changed everything for him.
An early marriage to Marguerite Whitley, out of which came three children, Arnelle, Jason and Aaren, ended when Simpson met Nicole Brown at the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. From his second marriage came two more children, Sydney and Justin. Tragedy struck when his daughter Aaren drowned in a swimming pool at her father’s home. Simpson became morose and violent, a trait that led to his conviction for assault, his second divorce and, some say, the murder of Brown Simpson and her lover.
That he remained a figure of fascination in American culture was attested by the success of an Oscar-winning seven-and-a-half-hour documentary series, OJ: Made in America in 2016. An acclaimed docudrama, The People v OJ Simpson, starring Cuba Gooding Jr as Simpson, with John Travolta and David Schwimmer, was also released that year.
If OJ Simpson was innocent of the crime of murder, he was arguably also a martyr, though to which cause it is difficult to say. If, on the other hand, he was a two-time killer who, together with his lawyers, made a mockery out of the American judicial system, then the shadow that hung over him for the rest of his life was the least he deserved.
OJ Simpson, American football star and convict, was born on July 9, 1947. He died of cancer on April 10, 2024, aged 76
