An attorney representing OJ Simpson said there were no plans to donate the former NFL player’s brain to science and that his body would be cremated.
Simpson, who became the subject of an intense national debate in America after he was accused – and acquitted – of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, died last week at the age of 76. He was later found liable for the two murders in a civil case.
In recent days, rumors have swirled that Simpson’s brain would be used to study CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease sometimes diagnosed in former NFL players and believed to result from repeated impacts on the field.
Attorney Malcolm LaVergne, now serves as executor of Simpson’s estate, told NBC News that donating Simpson’s brain to the CTE study was a “hard no”, adding: “His entire body, including his brain, will be cremated.”
LaVergne said preliminary plans are for a “celebration of life” limited to close friends and family, including his five children.
LaVergne also clarified the comments he made to the Las Vegas Review-Journal in which he said he wanted Ron Goldman’s family to get “zero, nothing” from Simpson’s estate regarding a $33 million civil judgment in 1997 that Simpson “willfully and wrongfully” caused the deaths of Goldman and Brown had caused.
LaVergne said he was referring to a debt collection agency that worked for the Goldman family who, he said, “were announcing Simpson’s death within an hour, bashing Simpson and all that kind of stuff… ‘We’re going to do this and that.’ “
He acknowledged that his comment had been “pretty harsh,” and that as executor of the will and representative of the Simpson family, “it is time to tone down the rhetoric.”
But LaVergne warned that Simpson owed money to the IRS and that many of his belongings, including footballs, jerseys and other sports memorabilia, had long since been seized heading into the 1997 judgment.