Ruby Wax Recalls Bizarre OJ Simpson Interview Where He Pretended to Stab Her with a Banana

TV presenter and comedian Ruby Wax recounted her notorious interview with the late OJ Simpson.

Following Simpson’s death last week, Wax wrote a piece for The Times of London, published on Saturday, April 13, about the 17 hours she spent interviewing the ex-football legend in 1998. The interview took place in Los Angeles almost three years after Simpson was acquitted of double murder.

“After a manic 17 hours’ filming, I asked him for the final time whether he was involved in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman,” she wrote. “I was sure we could get him to confess. But he simply turned to the camera, said ‘no’ and gave a rueful smile.”

Wax recounted another incident in her hotel room later in the day once filming had wrapped. “There was a knock at the door,” she recalled. “It was Simpson, making stabbing motions with a banana held above his head while screeching, in the vein of the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.” (Both Brown and Goldman were brutally stabbed to death.)

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At dinner the night prior, Simpson had even recited his “favorite poem” for Wax about Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of double murder in 1893.

She wrote, “He went into the poem about Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted of killing her father and stepmother in Massachusetts in 1892: ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.’”

As for the banana incident, that would not be the last bizarre “prank” Simpson would play on Wax. “The last time I spoke to him was, I think, on April 1, 1998, shortly after we had finished filming,” she added. “He called me up here in London and said: ‘Hi, it’s OJ. I did it.’ Then he said ‘April fool’s’ and hung up.”

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Though Simpson was acquitted of double murder, he was found liable in a civil lawsuit brought against him by the victims’ families two years later. He was fined $33 million in damages to the family of Ron Goldman, with his debt interest over $100 million at the time of his death, according to Ron’s father, Fred Goldman.

“We’re going to work on that. There might be something out there,” he told The Daily Mail on Thursday, April 11. “We’ve had this problem for a long, long time … It could be in a trust. It could be probate. It could be all gone.”

Simpson died from cancer at the age of 76 on Wednesday, April 10. “On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer,” Simpson’s family wrote in a statement. “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.”