OJ Simpson, fallen football hero acquitted of murder in ‘trial of the century,’ dies at 76

LAS VEGAS– LAS VEGAS (AP) — OJ Simpson, the decorated superstar and Hollywood actor who was acquitted of charges that he killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend but later found liable in a separate civil lawsuit, has died. He was 76.

Simpson’s attorney confirmed to TMZ that he died Wednesday evening in Las Vegas. A message posted to Simpson’s official X account – formerly Twitter – on Thursday said he died after battling cancer.

“He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren,” the statement said.

Simpson earned fame, fortune and admiration through show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.

Live TV coverage of his arrest after a famous slow chase marked a stunning fall from grace for the sporting hero.

He seemed to transcend racial barriers as the Trojans’ star tailback at the mighty University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental-car advertising pitchman rushing through airports in the late 1970s, and as the husband of a blonde woman with blue eyes. High school homecoming queen in the 1980s.

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

The audience was fascinated by his “trial of the century” on live television. His case sparked debates about race, gender, domestic violence, celebrity justice and police misconduct.

A criminal court jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate jury for a civil trial found him liable for the deaths in 1997 and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to relatives of Brown and Goldman.

Ten years later, still overshadowed by California’s wrongful death verdict, Simpson led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men at Simpson had guns. A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other crimes.

He was imprisoned at age 61 and served nine years in a remote prison in northern Nevada, including a stint as a janitor at a gym. He was unrepentant when he was released on parole in October 2017. The parole board heard him insist 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 lived a conflict-free life, you know,” said Simpson, whose parole ended at the end of 2021.

The public fascination with Simpson has never disappeared. Many debated whether he was punished in Las Vegas before 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 found he did not kill Brown and Goldman. “I have received thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me.”

Twelve years later, after an outpouring of public outrage, Rupert Murdoch canceled a planned book from News Corp-owned HarperCollins in which Simpson gave his hypothetical account of the murders. It would be titled, “If I Did It.”

Goldman’s family, still doggedly pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful death verdict, 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 as an advance for the book, paid through a third party.

“It helped me get out of debt and secure my home,” he said.

Less than two months after losing the rights to the book, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.

Simpson played eleven 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 rushed for 2,003 yards – 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, recalling that season. “If I had done nothing else in my life, I would have made my mark.”

Of course, Simpson moved on to other fame.

One of the artifacts from his murder trial, the carefully tailored brown suit he wore when he was acquitted, was later donated and put on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Simpson had been told that the suit would be in the Las Vegas hotel room lie, but it turned out not to be there.

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

After graduating high school, he enrolled at City College of San Francisco for a year and a half before transferring to the University of Southern California for the spring of 1967.

He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, and moved her to Los Angeles the next day so he could prepare for his freshman season at USC — which, thanks in large part to Simpson, won that year’s national championship.

Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He accepted the statue on the same day his first child, Arnelle, was born.

He had two sons, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife; one of those boys, 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. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.

“We don’t have to go back and relive the worst day of our lives,” he told the AP 25 years after the double slayings. “The subject of this moment is the subject I will never return to. My family and I have transitioned into what we call the “no negative zone.” We focus on the positives.”

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The biographical material in this story was written by former AP Special Correspondent Linda Deutsch.