Football legend and Hollywood actor O.J. Simpson, renowned for his illustrious career and notorious legal battles, has passed away at the age of 76.
His family announced his death from prostate cancer on his official X account, with his attorney confirming that he died in Las Vegas.
Simpson’s life, marked by fame and fortune, underwent a significant shift after the tragic 1994 killings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, permanently altering his legacy.
He appeared to transcend racial barriers as the star Trojans tailback for college football’s dominant University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental car ad pitchman darting through airports in the late 1970s, and as the husband of a blonde and blue-eyed high school homecoming queen in the 1980s.
“I’m not Black, I’m O.J.,” he would tell friends.
The public was captivated by his “trial of the century” on live TV, sparking debates on 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 in 1997 for the deaths, ordering 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 were armed. A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other felonies.
Imprisoned at age 61, he served nine years in a remote northern Nevada prison, including a stint as a gym janitor. He was unapologetic upon his parole release in October 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 interest in Simpson never waned. 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 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 gotten thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me.”
Twelve years later, following public outrage, Rupert Murdoch canceled a planned book by the News Corp.-owned HarperCollins in which Simpson offered his hypothetical account of the killings. It was to be titled “If I Did It.”
Goldman’s family, still relentlessly 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 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 book rights, 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.”
Simpson played 11 NFL seasons, nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, where he became known as “The Juice” on an offensive line known as “The Electric Company.” 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, becoming the first running back to break the 2,000-yard rushing mark.
“I was part of the history of the game,” he said years later. “If I did nothing else in my life, I’d made my mark.”
Simpson’s murder trial suit, a significant artifact, was later donated and displayed at the Newseum in Washington. Simpson had been told the suit would be in the Las Vegas hotel room, but it wasn’t there.
Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, growing up in government-subsidized housing projects.
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 in spring 1967.
He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day to prepare for his first season with USC, which, largely due to Simpson, won that year’s national championship.
Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968, accepting the statue the same day his first child, Arnelle, was born.
He had two sons, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife. Aaren drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.
Simpson and Brown married in 1985, 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 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.”
