Nicole Simpson’s ex-boyfriend: ‘I felt guilty, that O.J. Simpson had beaten her, because of me’

Editor's Note: This story originally published in 2017. O.J. Simpson died Wednesday, April 10, of prostate cancer at the age of 76, according to a post on social media attributed to the Simpson family.

When Keith Zlomsowitch saw the blonde across the Aspen ski slopes in the early winter of 1992, “I turned to my friend and said, ‘That’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,’” he remembers.

Before long, he’d made his way over to chat her up, and that night he had dinner with her and her young kids and the friend with whom they were staying.

As he got to know her, he found out that she was in Aspen to get away from her abusive husband, who she’d left the night before, and who was a former football player and an avid golfer around Los Angeles, where Zlomsowitch was also a regular.

“I said ‘Hey, what’s his name?’ Maybe I know him,’” he remembers. “And she says, ‘You know him.’”

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It wasn’t until later, after he was already smitten with this blonde, whose name was Nicole, and become fond of her kids, that Zlomsowitch found out that, yes, he did know who her husband was. And more than 20 years later, long after they dated and thought of a life together, he finds himself still in the orbit of O.J. Simpson.

On Thursday, when Simpson was granted parole after serving nearly nine years on Nevada armed robbery and battery charges, it all comes back.

“He said (during the parole hearing) that he was a conflict-free person. I don’t know. Is beating your wife conflict free? Domestic violence? Becoming the crazy person he turned into, that I witnessed firsthand?” says Zlomsowitch, leaning over the bar of Dorrian’s Red Hand, the West Palm Beach restaurant where he’s a partner. “He has a history of conflict. His whole demeanor is conflict.”

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Zlomsowitch knows, intellectually, that Simpson’s parole was for the 2007 robbery and not connected to the 1994 murder of Nicole and Ron Goldman, Nicole’s friend and an employee of the Brentwood location Mezzaluna, which Zlomsowitch operated at the time.

Still, it’s part of the same hurt, part of the same anger Nicole described to him, that anger Zlomsowitch saw when Simpson, he says, “spied on us through the window while we were having sex, and kicked down the door.”

It’s the anger that translated to the bruises on Nicole’s face and neck, as seen in photos taken years before her death and locked in a safe deposit box as a lasting testimony.

That anger, he says, is the reason Nicole was in Aspen in the first place, and why, two decades later, after trying to put the whole mess behind him, he appeared in a now Oscar-winning documentary about the murder, to bear witness. To Zlomsowitch, the thing that led O.J. Simpson to that prison cell in Nevada is the same thing that killed the woman he loved. And always will be.

“It’s not a different case for me,” he said. “You can’t disentangle them.”

Simpson, who was acquitted of the murders of Brown Simpson and Goldman in 1995, is scheduled to leave the Lovelock Correctional Center this fall.

Zlomsowitch was on top of the world when he met Brown Simpson on the slopes.

Mezzaluna, which was based in Aspen and had two successful California locations, was doing well, and he was in discussions with superstars Jack Nicholson and Don Henley to open L.A. restaurant Monkey Bar, which would eventually become a Hollywood hotspot. He had no idea that he was going to be dragged not only into a violent connection to O.J. Simpson, but into Nicole’s murder.

“I didn’t know who she was, but we hung out the whole weekend, and a friend came over to me and said, ‘What are you doing with Juice’s wife?’” he says. But that fact, and what Nicole had told him about the abuse she suffered, didn’t deter Zlomsowitch from looking her up when he returned to L.A. that spring, and “immediately” starting a relationship that continued for about three months.

Nicole, he says, started checking out schools in Aspen for her children, Sydney and Justin, “because her kids were everything to her.”

That relationship continued, he says, until “O.J. made it impossible.” The breaking point came after Simpson, as Zlomsowitch would later testify in front of a grand jury, stalked them, spied on them and terrorized them. But even after they stopped dating, Zlomsowitch says that he and Nicole remained “best friends. We did everything together.”

He lived in her guest room for a while as work was being done on his restaurant, and even flew to Mexico to celebrate her divorce from Simpson later in 1992. He describes her as a good, generous person and a great mom, whom he never stopped loving.

But there came a time in 1993, when she hadn’t returned his calls over a weekend, that Nicole admitted she was attempting to reconcile with her ex-husband, who had shown up at Nicole’s parents’ home for one of the kids’ birthdays “and was sweet, and seemed like a different guy.”

“I told her ‘Just be careful,’” he remembers, his voice lowering. “I said that several times.”

But all the carefulness in the world could not avoid an incident which Zlomsowitch blamed himself for, even indirectly.

On a 911 tape released during the 1995 murder trial, Simpson was angrily shouting the name of someone named Keith as a frightened Nicole called for help. Those tapes were horrifying for most people listening to them during the trial, but for Zlomsowitch, they were a nightmare. Even though it had been months since he and Nicole had seen each other, Zlomsowitch says that a woman he’d been seeing had been on a movie set with Simpson, and blabbed about his connection to Nicole.

He found out about it when O.J. left him a menacing answering machine message, “from your old pal O.J..”

“All I could think was ‘oh, my God, Nicole,” Zlomsowitch says.

Later that evening, Simpson’s enraged reaction would be recorded for everyone eventually to hear. Zlomsowitch says he called her for three days straight until he reached her, and she told him “‘It was bad. And then she said, ‘It breaks my heart that I can’t talk to you anymore. He made me destroy all the pictures, all relics of you.’”

He pauses.

“I felt so guilty, that he had beaten her, because of me … I said ‘I love you, and always will.’ Then we hung up the phone. That was the last time I talked to her. He took away my chance to say goodbye.”

Zlomsowitch kept the secret of that confrontation with Simpson to himself until the day of Nicole’s funeral, at which he was a pallbearer and “stood shoulder-to-shoulder with O.J. for three hours, all the while knowing he did it. I knew he did it the minute I heard about it.”

After talking to the Brown family and hearing their suspicions, he pulled them aside, told them what happened, and then called the police.

The next day, he testified in front of the grand jury with the understanding that the testimony would be sealed. But in the overwhelming media frenzy, Zlomsowitch became another fixation for reporters. So he fled to New York, where he was during Simpson’s 1995 murder trial. He’d expected to testify as the first witness and actually was flown to L.A. to do so, but his appearance was delayed so that Denise Brown, Nicole’s sister, could go first.

They never called him to the stand, but the time that he put his life on hold waiting for the trial eroded the Monkey Bar deal.

Eventually he was hired at Dorrian’s Red Hand in New York, where he would work for the next two decades until, burned out, “I sailed around the world on a sailboat for a year.”

When he got back, he called the Dorrian family, who asked him to be involved in the restaurant they were opening in West Palm Beach. And he’s been here ever since.

Zlomsowitch initially declined to be involved in “O.J.: Made In America,” since he’d spent the better part of 20 years trying not to vulture on a tragedy. But he changed his mind because the documentary was a part of ESPN’s celebrated “30 For 30” series, and he thought that director Ezra Edelman, who is biracial, would be uniquely equipped to navigate the racial aspects of the story.

“They wanted me because I’m the only one involved who never tried to cash in. They didn’t want the Kato Kaelins and the Faye Resnicks,” says Zlomsowitch, who was offered a book deal at one point but declined because he wouldn’t have been able to testify and be a reliable witness.

As he considers the speculation that Simpson may return to South Florida this fall, he says he doesn’t worry about the man, with whom he’s had no contact since that voicemail message all those years ago.

“I’m almost numb to it, at this point,” he says.

Still, he doubts the rage he witnessed from Simpson has subsided.

“It’s never going to change in him,” he says. “He doesn’t have the ability to change.”

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Nicole Simpson ex-boyfriend: I felt guilty O.J. Simpson beat her