Fascinating Facts About The Late OJ Simpson
Orenthal James Simpson, best known as O.J., has died at the age of 76. His family announced in a statement that he "succumbed to his battle with cancer" in Las Vegas.
Simpson was one of the biggest newsmakers of the past 50 years - first as a football star and actor, and later on (and perhaps most notably) for being charged and acquitted of a double homicide. Even after his acquittal, Simpson continued to make headlines. Let's take a look back at a complicated celebrity.
Simpson was born and raised in the Bay Area.
The son of Eunice, a hospital administrator, and Jimmy Lee, a bank employee, O.J. received his first name from a French actor who his aunt was a fan of. He was never known as Orenthal, however, and was called "O.J." from his earliest days.
Growing up in San Francisco's Potrero Hill projects, he was briefly involved in gang activity in his early teenage years - but upon attending Galileo High School, it was clear that Simpson was a football prodigy.
He was a star running back.
Simpson created significant buzz with his exploits for the Galileo Lions, but poor grades hindered his ability to be recruited by college teams. After graduating from high school, he played football at the City College of San Francisco.
Following this, his grades were good enough to attract the attention of the University of Southern California Trojans, who he wound up choosing over the University of Utah. He immediately became a star for the Trojans, and a top prospect for the pro draft.
He was selected first overall by the Buffalo Bills.
The Bills, who played in the American Football League at the time, held the first overall selection in the joint 1969 AFL-NFL Common Draft. The woeful Bills took Simpson with the pick, and the two sides promptly got into a contract dispute.
After some negotiations, the Bills agreed to pay Simpson $650,000 over five years, making it the biggest pro sports contract that had ever been signed to that point. His early years with the Bills were underwhelming, but he soon found his groove.
He became one of the greatest running backs in NFL history.
The Bills, who were now part of the NFL, were not a great team in the 1970s. But O.J. Simpson carried them on his back, in 1973 becoming the first player to ever rush for over 2,000 yards in a single season.
In the years to come, Simpson would reliably beat the 1,000-yard mark year after year. Towards the end of the decade, he was traded to the San Francisco 49ers - his hometown team. He wound down his career in the Bay Area before retiring after the 1979 season.
His football career speaks for itself.
While his 11,236 career rushing yards puts him at 21st all-time, at the time of his retirement, he was the second-leading rusher in history. He played in six Pro Bowls and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
The only marker of success that eluded Simpson during his career was playoff success. Playing for weak teams in Buffalo and San Francisco, he never made it to a Super Bowl and only played one career playoff game.
O.J. quickly transitioned into his next chapter.
Simpson had dabbled in acting as far back as his time at USC, and appeared in several productions during his playing days. Most notably, he was the pitchman for a series of Hertz car rental commercials, becoming one of the first black spokespeople for a national advertising campaign.
After hanging his cleats up, he jumped into acting full-time in the 1980s. As a charismatic and well-known celebrity, he had no problem finding various roles in Hollywood during the decade.
His most notable role came in the Naked Gun series.
The three Naked Gun films were spinoffs of the Police Squad TV series, and spoofed police procedurals. The movies, starring Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley and George Kennedy, were big hits, aided by Simpson's portrayal of the hapless Detective Nordberg.
During this era, he did double duty as both an actor and a commentator for NFL games, first on Monday Night Football and later on The NFL on NBC. His success on the big and small screens came to a screeching halt in 1994.
He married Nicole Brown Simpson in 1985.
O.J.'s first wife was Marguerite Whitley, with whom he had three children. In 1977, while still married to Whitley, he met waitress Nicole Brown. After divorcing Whitley, Simpson began dating Brown, later marrying her in 1985.
The couple had two children and were married until 1992, a period marked by frequent issues. Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse in 1989, and despite attempts to reconcile, the couple never got back together following their divorce.
On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered.
Police were shocked to find Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman, viciously stabbed to death outside Nicole's home in Brentwood, Los Angeles. Because of O.J. Simpson's history with his ex-wife, he was immediately named as a person of interest in the case.
Simpson and his attorneys agreed to surrender to police five days later, on the morning of June 17th. But this didn't wind up happening - and instead, the stage was set for one of the most surreal events of the decade.
O.J. didn't turn himself in as planned.
Simpson, along with his friend Al Cowlings, led police on a bizarre, low-speed police chase along L.A.'s freeway system. Throughout the ordeal, Simpson and Cowlings were in communication with authorities, and it appeared at times as if Simpson was going to take his own life.
The event was heavily covered by media, and some TV stations even interrupted coverage of the 1994 NBA Finals to cover the chase. An estimated 95 million people tuned in to watch the chase.
Eventually, he was arrested.
O.J. evidently thought better of things and following the chase, returned to his home in Brentwood. It was at this time that police were able to take him into custody and formally charge him with the double murder.
What was already a high profile event was just getting started, though. Simpson, a wealthy man, hired a high-priced legal team including his friend Robert Kardashian, along with Johnnie Cochrane, Robert Shapiro, and F. Lee Bailey, to defend him in court.
It truly was the trial of the century.
To the general public, it appeared as if O.J. Simpson was clearly guilty. There were no other credible suspects, and Simpson's history of spousal abuse - and apparent jealousy at his ex's new flame - made him the most likely perpetrator.
After a marathon trial that ran for 11 months, the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty." Reactions were split: while most African Americans believed that Simpson was in fact innocent, most whites and Latinos surveyed said they believed Simpson was guilty.
The courtroom proceedings didn't end there.
While Simpson avoided conviction in the criminal trial, it was still possible to try him in a civil trial - one where the threshold for determining guilt is lower. The families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson promptly filed a wrongful death lawsuit after O.J.'s acquittal.
Following a shorter, and less publicized civil trial, he was found liable for wrongful death and slapped with more than $33,500,000 in damages. To sum it all up, he was not guilty in a criminal sense, but liable in a civil sense.
After this came some lean years for O.J.
Following his trials, Simpson was no longer a beloved celebrity. To most of the general public, he was seen as a punchline at best and a multiple murderer at worst.
While he'd accumulated a lot of money during his football and acting days, the massive penalty from the civil trial hit Simpson hard. He defaulted on his mortgage and was forced to auction off much of his football memorabilia in order to pay his significant bills.
He published a controversial book in 2007.
The book, co-authored by Pablo Fenjves, was titled If I Did It, and was framed as a hypothetical - in essence, that O.J. didn't do it...but if he had, this is how it would have happened.
The word 'If' in the title was deliberately downplayed to make it appear as if the book was called I Did It. The rights to the book and its proceeds were promptly awarded to the Goldman family, as they were still owed a large sum of money from the civil judgment.
He couldn't avoid jail time.
In 2008, Simpson was sentenced to 33 years in prison - but it had nothing to do with the double murder. Instead, the charges stemmed from a bizarre 2007 robbery case in Las Vegas, in which Simpson held several men at gunpoint.
Simpson defended himself by arguing that he had never brandished a weapon, and that the men had stolen his sports memorabilia. The judge wasn't having it, and following a series of appeals, he was handed his lengthy prison sentence, with a possibility of parole after nine years.
He was paroled in 2017.
After a series of false starts in which he was granted parole, but had his status rescinded, he was eventually granted parole in 2017 with several conditions attached. He was released from prison on October 1, 2017 after almost nine year in prison.
Following four years of following parole conditions, including travel restrictions and non-contact orders with people involved in the case, Simpson was granted full parole in December of 2021. At this point, he was a free man.
His final years were quiet.
Following these years of legal woes and imprisonment, Simpson's image was irreversibly tainted. His football and movie careers were largely forgotten, and his name would forever be associated with the Brown-Goldman murders in 1994.
A prime example of this is his appearance in Sacha Baron Cohen's satirical 2018 show, Who is America?. Cohen, appearing in character as a murderous playboy, attempted to get Simpson to admit his culpability in the double homicide. While Simpson came close, he didn't quite admit it.
Simpson announced in 2023 that he had cancer.
In May of 2023, Simpson announced that he had cancer and would undergo chemo, adding, "It looks like I beat it." In early 2024, it was reported that the 76-year-old Simpson was battling prostate cancer.
On April 10, 2024, Simpson lost his battle with cancer. "During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace," his family announced in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter.
He leaves behind a complicated legacy.
It's easy to forget that, until 1994, Simpson was almost universally beloved. Aside from his spousal abuse no contest plea in 1989, his image was squeaky clean, and he was a familiar face on TV and in movies.
Today, it's impossible to separate "The Juice" from the Brown-Goldman murders, which make up the bulk of his legacy. The book is now closed on O.J. Simpson, one of the biggest newsmakers of the past half century.
For better or for worse, O.J. was a major pop cultural force.
Looking back at O.J. Simpson's life, it's easy to divide it into two chapters. In the first part, he was a beloved celebrity, beginning with his days at USC, continuing through his football career and into retirement.
In the second chapter, of course, he may have been even more famous than he was before - but for all the wrong reasons. Even though he was acquitted of the double homicide, public opinion essentially concluded that he was guilty.
He was featured on SNL a few times.
Back before he was a controversial figure, Simpson appeared in the audience of Saturday Night Live in its second season. The next season, he hosted an episode and appeared in a few skits, most notably a Coneheads sketch.
Years later, of course, O.J. would become part of SNL once more - but not as an actor. His acquittal made for years of jokes among late night comedians and the SNL cast. Norm MacDonald constantly lampooned him on Weekend Update segments.
The Bronco chase made for big business.
While it seems absurd that the NBA Finals would be pre-empted for the O.J. chase, TV executives knew what they were doing. The chase was watched by millions of people, and was a bigger draw than basketball's biggest stage.
The chase even had a knock-on effect for Ford, the manufacturer of O.J.'s famous white Bronco. Purchases of new Broncos skyrocketed after the chase, with Ford reporting 7,000 more sales in 1994 versus the previous year.
The public was always fascinated by him.
After the Brown-Goldman murders, Simpson was essentially persona non grata in Hollywood, and his once-burgeoning career as an actor was stopped dead in its tracks. But just because O.J. wasn't himself acting didn't mean that he wasn't a box office draw.
In 2016, more than 20 years after the homicides, two separate productions about Simpson - O.J.: Made in America, an ESPN documentary series, and The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, a dramatization of events, were released to critical acclaim.
He never paid off his debts.
Following his judgment in the Brown-Goldman civil trial, Simpson struggled for the rest of his life to make money, as all of his prior revenue streams were no longer available to him.
In 2022, less than two years before his death, Ron Goldman's father reported that Simpson owed $96 million at that point - an increase over the original penalty, owing largely to the interest accrued over time.