OJ Simpson, fallen NFL hero acquitted of murder, dies at 76

OJ Simpson, the football star and Hollywood actor acquitted of charges he killed his former wife and her friend in a trial that mesmerised the public and exposed divisions on race and policing in America, has died. He was 76.

The family announced on Simpson’s official X account that he died on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) of prostate cancer. He died in Las Vegas, officials there said.

Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. He was later found liable for the deaths in a separate civil case, and then served nine years in prison on unrelated charges.

Live TV coverage of his arrest after a famous slow-speed chase marked a stunning fall from grace.

He had seemed to transcend racial barriers as the star Trojans tailback for college football’s powerful University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental car ad pitchman rushing through airports in the late 1970s, and as the husband of a blonde homecoming queen in the 1980s.

“I’m not black, I’m OJ,” he liked to tell friends.

OJ Simpson was acquitted of charges he killed Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, but was later found liable in a separate civil trial.Credit: AP

His “trial of the century” captured America’s attention on live TV. The case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice and police misconduct.

Evidence found at the scene seemed overwhelmingly against Simpson. Blood drops, bloody footprints and a glove were there. Another glove, smeared with blood, was found at his home.

Simpson didn’t testify, but the prosecution asked him to try on the gloves in court. He struggled to squeeze them onto his hands and spoke his only three words of the trial: “They’re too small.”

His lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran jnr told the jurors, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

Simpson, the fallen NFL hero who was acquitted of murder in the “trial of the century”, has died at the age of 76.Credit: AP

The jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $US33.5 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 had guns. 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 not contrite when he was released on parole in October 2017. The parole board heard him insist yet again that he was only trying to retrieve sports memorabilia and 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 fascination with Simpson never faded. 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 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 an outpouring of public outrage, Rupert Murdoch cancelled 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 doggedly pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment, won control of the manuscript. They retitled the book If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.

Simpson grimaces as he tries on one of the leather gloves prosecutors say he wore the night his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered.Credit: AP

“It’s all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,” Simpson told The Associated Press at the time. He collected $US880,000 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 rights to the book, 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 to Ron’s father, Fred, about Simpson’s death. Cook declined to say what Fred Goldman said or where he was.

Golding’s view.Credit: Matt Golding

“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” and ran behind 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 2003 yards – the first running back to break the 2000-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 rise in football happened simultaneously with a career in television. He signed a contract with ABC Sports the night he won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. That same year, he appeared on the NBC series Dragnet and Ironside. During his pro career, Simpson was a colour commentator for a decade on ABC followed by a stint on NBC. In 1983, he joined ABC’s Monday Night Football.

Then Buffalo Bills running back Simpson leaves the New York Jets defence behind as he breaks loose for a touchdown.Credit: AP

Simpson quickly became a charismatic pitchman. In 1975, Hertz made him the first black man hired for a corporate national ad campaign. The commercials, featuring Simpson running through airports toward the Hertz desk and young girls chanting “Go, OJ, go!” were ubiquitous for years.

Simpson made his big-screen debut in 1974 in The Klansman, an exploitation film in which he starred alongside Lee Marvin and Richard Burton. The film was a flop, but Simpson would go on to appear in several dozen films and TV series, including The Towering Inferno in 1974, The Cassandra Crossing in 1976, Roots and Capricorn One in 1977.

Most notable, perhaps, was his performance in 1988’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad and its two sequels. Simpson played Detective Nordberg in the slapstick films opposite Leslie Nielsen.

Of course, Simpson went on to other fame.

One of the artefacts of his murder trial, the carefully tailored tan suit he wore when acquitted, was later donated and placed on display at the Newseum in Washington. Simpson had been told the suit would be in the hotel room in Las Vegas, but it turned out it wasn’t there.

Simpson was sentenced to at least 15 years in prison for a hotel armed robbery in 2008.Credit: AP

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidised housing projects.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled in City College of San Francisco for 1 ½ years before transferring to the University of Southern California (USC) for the spring 1967 semester.

He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day so he could begin preparing for his first season with USC – which, in large part because of Simpson, won that year’s national championship.

On the day he accepted the Heisman Trophy, his first child, Arnelle, was born.

He had two more children with his first wife; son Jason and daughter Aaren, who drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.

Simpson and Brown were married in 1985. They 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.”

AP

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.