O.J. Simpson, Football Star Acquitted of Murder of Ex-Wife and Friend in Trial of the Century, Dies at 76

Hilary Lewis and Etan Vlessing
·5 min read
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O.J. Simpson, the football star who later became an actor and then better known for being accused of killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman amid a high-profile televised car chase and trial in which he was ultimately acquitted of murder charges, has died. He was 76.

In a post on Simpson’s official X (formerly known as Twitter) account, the Simpson family shared the following statement: “On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace.”

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Simpson’s death follows a life marked by success in sports and Hollywood that morphed into the athlete becoming a suspected murderer and convicted armed robber. Born Orenthal James Simpson on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, Simpson’s Heisman Trophy-winning days at USC and later with the Buffalo Bills — where he had a record-breaking run for 2,000 yards in the 1973 season — were followed by playing the lovable dunce in the Naked Gun movies and becoming a rental car ad pitchman as the college and National Football League hero became a celebrity-for-hire.

With a membership to the exclusive Riviera Country Club, a 6,200-square-foot mansion in Brentwood and a coterie of rich and famous white friends, Simpson once famously told the media: “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” That fame included Hertz car commercials in which Simpson sprinted to catch a rent-a-car, broadly smiling as he leapt over an airport guardrail and brushed past a cheering old lady. But the celebrity life of a football Hall of Famer turned Hollywood star imploded in the face of what became known as the “trial of the century.”

That began on June 12, 1994, when Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, was found murdered outside her Brentwood condominium along with a young man later identified as Goldman. Simpson was immediately identified as a potential suspect in the murder of the mother of his two young children, Sydney and Justin. And the police chase of the fallen football hero in a white Bronco driven by a friend, Al Cowlings, on June 17, 1994, was captured by a helicopter shot and aired live on primetime TV in the U.S., leaving audiences riveted.

What followed was a murder trial — with intersecting themes of gender, race, sex and violence and big ratings for cable news channels that transmitted a shared pool feed — where Simpson was ultimately found not guilty of the double murder outside a Brentwood home. An estimated 150 million people tuned in to see Simpson walk free when the verdict was announced on Oct. 3, 1995. He always maintained his innocence, and the double murder of Goldman and Brown Simpson remains unsolved.

The trial itself, made famous by courtroom evidence of Bruno Magli shoe prints, an Isotoner glove and drops of blood in the infamous white Bronco, left prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden and Simpson’s “Dream Team” defense led by Johnnie Cochran as celebrities. Also becoming well-known during the trial were Simpson guest-house occupant Brian “Kato” Kaelin and former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman, both of whom testified on the witness stand.

The O.J. Simpson trial also taught Hollywood that cheap programming could deliver huge ratings and profitability, both for cable and broadcast networks, and gave rise to an explosion in reality TV that followed that relied far less on actors, writers, costly sets and other production elements.

But the double murder trial lasting eight months also left Simpson ostracized and facing big hurdles to get his life back on track. The disgraced football star had become a cultural Rorschach, with a Washington Post poll taken at the time of the verdict finding 72 percent of whites thought Simpson was guilty, while 71 percent of African Americans believed him innocent.

With questions of his guilt or innocence very much unanswered, interest in Simpson in future years was seemingly evergreen. And he remained no stranger to courtrooms. A civil ruling followed that ordered Simpson to pay $33.5 million to the Goldman family. Simpson returned to court to stand trial for a 2007 Las Vegas incident in which he and gun-toting friends attempted to recover sports memorabilia that Simpson felt was his. Simpson went to jail after being found guilty of the gunpoint robbery. He was released in 2017, having served nine years.

The original People v. Orenthal James Simpson murder trial that was exhaustively covered by CNN, Court TV and other cable networks also laid the seeds for an era of saturation news coverage and tabloid TV to follow. Simpson’s murder trial reached a new, younger audience as the subject of the first installment of FX’s American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as Simpson, Sarah Paulson as Clark, Sterling K. Brown as Darden and Courtney B. Vance as Cochran. The 2016 hit series, from prolific producer Ryan Murphy, went on to win eight Emmys, including best limited series and acting awards for Paulson and Vance.

American Crime Story was Fox’s second attempt at tackling the Simpson drama. In 2006, then-parent company News Corporation famously spiked Simpson’s bombshell book, If I Did It, and a pretaped TV interview on Fox in which the fallen star recounted, hypothetically, how he might have murdered his ex-wife, after a backlash from the Goldman and Nicole Simpson Brown families. That fiasco prompted Fox boss Rupert Murdoch to issue an apology.

Simpson was also the subject of Ezra Edelman’s five-part miniseries and documentary film O.J.: Made in America, which debuted to rave reviews in 2016 and won numerous awards, including the Oscar for best documentary feature. The project still has a 100 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

And for a true-crime TV audience seemingly obsessed with retrying the past, Martin Sheen produced for Investigation Discovery Hard Evidence: O.J. Is Innocent, a true-crime docuseries that attempted to show Simpson was innocent as it reinvestigated the murder case from beginning to end.

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