American football star accused of a double murder
O.J. Simpson, who has died aged 76, overcame a childhood in the projects to become one of America's greatest footballers. A running back universally known as The Juice, he dazzled fans with his speed, agility and determination; he was named as the National Football League's most valuable player in 1973, and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Handsome, charismatic and apparently affable, he later parlayed his success into a career as a sports commentator and actor. He appeared in dozens of movies and commercials – including one for Hertz, which had him sprinting through an airport, hurdling every obstacle. "Running, man, that's what I do," he said in 1975. "All my life I've been a runner."
And yet the race for which he will be remembered was one he did not win, said The Guardian: a slow-moving chase in June 1994, in which he was a passenger in a white Ford Bronco, holding a gun and threatening to kill himself, while being followed by a fleet of police cars and "eye in the sky" news helicopters. Live footage of the 60-mile pursuit along eerily empty highways leading out of LA was watched by an estimated 95 million people, and set the scene for what became known as "the trial of the century".
Finally arrested after turning into his own driveway in Brentwood, Simpson was charged with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman, who had been found stabbed to death a few days earlier outside her home nearby. Simpson had previously been convicted of beating up his wife; and the prosecution, led by Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, had gathered a wealth of evidence against him, said the LA Times, including fibres from the scene that seemed to have come from his home, and DNA tests matching blood found on a sock in his bedroom to Brown, and traces found in the Bronco to Goldman. They presented him as a jealous man, obsessed with his ex-wife, and frustrated that he could no longer control her through a mixture of lavish gifts and savage beatings; Goldman, they said, had just "got in the way".
But as the nine-month-long trial – which the judge had allowed to be televised – unfolded, it became clear that the police inquiry had been deeply flawed. Evidence had been improperly stored; a search had been executed without a warrant; and testimony by a detective that he had never used racist epithets was contradicted by a recording of him using the N-word. Simpson's "dream team" of lawyers argued that police had conspired to frame a prominent Black man, and in this way made the case about a racist criminal justice system. Only a few years after the acquittal of LAPD cops who had been caught on film beating Rodney King resulted in riots, that line of argument resonated. Then, in a "climactic moment", Simpson's lead attorney, Johnnie Cochran, cast doubt on the prosecution's key exhibit, said The Times – blood-soaked gloves found at the scene of the murders that formed a pair with one found at Simpson's property. He urged his client to try the gloves on, to prove that they were too small for him. "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," he told the jury, 10 of whom were Black. They did.
Polls showed that the verdict had divided America along racial lines; but although many Black Americans did cheer Simpson's acquittal, that was not because they revered him, said Joel Anderson on Slate. Unlike many other Black sports stars, Simpson had never attempted to be a role model or activist. On the contrary, he had seemed to want to distance himself from his race. Following his retirement from football, he'd bought homes in prosperous white suburbs, hung out in Hollywood, played golf, "and chased young white women". What they applauded was a Black man getting off. As the sports writer (and long-time Simpson critic) Ralph Wiley wrote, that was something "pretty much beyond the experience of black people in America".
Following his acquittal, Simpson regained custody of his two children by Nicole Brown, but his agent dropped him, friends melted away and his legal troubles continued. In 1997, relatives of Brown and Goldman launched civil proceedings against him. The civil court jury (which was mostly white, and working to a lower burden of proof) held him responsible for their deaths, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages. Having made strenuous efforts to shield his assets, he handed over no more than $400,000. Meanwhile, he did little to appease his detractors. When Ruby Wax interviewed him in 1998, and asked him about the killings, he pretended to stab her with a banana. Yet more bizarrely, in the 2000s he wrote a "fictional memoir" called "If I Did It", in which he described how he might have committed the murders. Owing to his unpaid debt, copyright in the text was assigned to Goldman's father Fred, who published the book in 2007 with the "If" of the title printed in tiny letters, and a new subhead: "Confessions of the Killer". Not long after, Simpson and some of his associates burst into a room in a hotel in Las Vegas, armed with guns, in an effort to seize from dealers some sports memorabilia he said rightfully belonged to him (seemingly he had lost control of these assets as part of his efforts to hide them from the Goldmans). Convicted of armed robbery, he was sentenced to 33 years with parole, and served nine of them. It was arguably a harsh sentence, but to those convinced that he was an unrepentant double murderer, it seemed the least he deserved.
Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco in 1947. He suffered rickets as a child, and wore leg braces until he was five. His parents split up around then, and he was raised by his mother in the Potrero Hill projects, where he joined a gang and spent time in juvenile detention. Football proved his salvation. He played at school, and owing to his talent, won a place at the University of Southern California. Later, he played for the Buffalo Bills in New York, and the San Francisco 49ers. From the 1970s he appeared in films, including "The Towering Inferno" and the "Naked Gun" trilogy, in which he starred as a hapless detective. In 1967 he had married Marguerite Whitley, his high-school sweetheart; they had three children, the youngest of whom drowned aged one in 1979 – the year they divorced. He had met Nicole Brown two years earlier, when she was an 18-year-old waitress. Their relationship was highly volatile: she called the police on him several times, and he once beat her so badly she was hospitalised. Public interest in him remained strong: there have been countless books about the case, as well as TV documentaries and a drama series. But in response to Simpson's death last week from prostate cancer, Fred Goldman issued a statement saying, "It's no great loss".
