“The Juice” OJ Simpson Dies After Long Battle with Cancer

OJ Simpson, the American football star nicknamed “The Juice” who was acquitted of murdering his former wife in a famous 1995 trial but was later judged responsible for her death in a civil lawsuit and imprisoned for armed robbery and abduction, died at the age of 76.

Simpson died on Wednesday, accompanied by his children and grandchildren, according to his family, after being cleared by a Los Angeles jury in what the US media dubbed “the trial of the century”.

“On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer,” said a message signed by Simpson’s family and put on his X account.

On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer.

He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren.

During this time of transition, his family asks that you please respect their wishes for privacy and grace.

-The Simpson Family

— O.J. Simpson (@TheRealOJ32) April 11, 2024

Simpson avoided prison after being found not guilty in the 1994 stabbing killings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. However, he eventually served nine years in a Nevada prison after being found guilty in 2008 on 12 charges of armed robbery and kidnapping two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel.

Simpson, nicknamed “The Juice,” was one of the best and most well-known athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s. He overcame a childhood injury to become an outstanding running back at the University of Southern California, winning the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player.

OJ Simpson Football Star to Sportscaster

He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after a record-breaking NFL career with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers. Simpson turned his football success into a career as a sportscaster, advertising pitchman, and Hollywood actor in films such as the Naked Gun trilogy.

All of that changed on June 12, 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman were found fatally cut outside their Los Angeles home.

Simpson suddenly became a suspect. He was ordered to surrender to authorities, but five days after the killings, he fled in his white Ford Bronco with a former teammate, carrying just his passport and disguise.

A slow-speed chase through the Los Angeles area, shown live on cable news networks and viewed by millions, ended at Simpson’s estate, and he was eventually charged with the murders.

The result was one of America’s most notorious trials of the twentieth century, as well as a media circus. It had everything: a wealthy celebrity defendant; a Black guy accused of murdering his white ex-wife out of envy; a woman killed after divorcing a man who had assaulted her; a “dream team” of expensive and charismatic defense lawyers; and a catastrophic blunder by prosecutors.

Simpson, who declared himself “absolutely 100 percent not guilty” at the start of the trial, nodded at the jurors and mouthed the words “thank you” when the mainly Black panel of ten women and two men acquitted him on October 3, 1995.

Black Americans hailed Simpson’s acquittal

Prosecutors said Simpson murdered Nicole in a jealous rage, and they produced significant blood, hair, and fiber evidence linking Simpson to the crimes. The defense claimed that racist white police framed the famous defendant.

The trial captivated America. In the White House, President Bill Clinton exited the Oval Office to watch the verdict on his secretary’s television. Many Black Americans hailed Simpson’s acquittal, viewing him as a victim of discriminatory cops. His exoneration shocked many white Americans.

Simpson’s legal team included renowned criminal defense attorneys Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz, and F Lee Bailey, who frequently outmaneuvered the prosecution. Prosecutors made a famous mistake when they told Simpson to try on a pair of bloodstained gloves discovered at the crime scene, believing they would fit perfectly and prove he was the murderer.

Simpson tried to put on the gloves and told the jurors they didn’t fit.

In closing arguments to jurors, Cochran delivered the trial’s most famous remarks, referring to the gloves with a rhyme: “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Dershowitz later described the prosecution’s choice to urge Simpson to try on the gloves as “the greatest legal blunder of the twentieth century.”

“What this verdict demonstrates is how fame and money can buy the best defense, can transform a case of overwhelming incriminating physical evidence into a case riddled with reasonable doubt,” Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor, told the New York Times following the verdict.

“A predominantly African-American jury was more susceptible to claims of police incompetence and corruption and more willing to impose a higher burden of proof than normally required for proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Arenella stated in a press release.

Goldman and Brown families Sued

Following his acquittal, Simpson stated, “My primary goal in life is to find the killer or killers who murdered Nicole and Mr Goldman.” They are out there somewhere. “I would not, could not, or did not kill anyone.”

The Goldman and Brown families then filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Simpson in civil court. In 1997, a predominantly white jury in Santa Monica, California, judged Simpson responsible for the two fatalities and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages.

“We finally have justice for Ron and Nicole,” Ron Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman, stated following the judgment.

Simpson’s “dream team” did not represent him in the civil trial, where the bar of proof was lower than in a criminal prosecution—a “preponderance of the evidence” rather than “beyond a reasonable doubt.” New evidence also harmed Simpson, including images of him wearing the same shoes that produced bloody tracks at the murder scene.

Following the civil action, some of Simpson’s items, including football memorabilia, were seized and auctioned off to assist pay the damages owed.

Kidnapping and robbery conviction

On October 3, 2008, exactly 13 years after his acquittal in the murder trial, a Las Vegas jury found him guilty of kidnapping and armed robbery. These resulted from a 2007 incident at a casino hotel in which Simpson and five men, at least two of whom possessed firearms, stole sports memorabilia worth thousands of dollars from two dealers.

Simpson said he was only trying to regain his own property, but he was sentenced to up to 33 years in prison.

“I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” Simpson, dressed in a blue prison jumpsuit with shackles on his legs and wrists, said at his sentencing. “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.”

Simpson was freed from parole in 2017 and relocated to a gated neighborhood in Las Vegas. He was granted early parole in 2021 for good behavior at the age of 74.

His life story was told in the Oscar-winning 2016 documentary OJ: Made in America, as well as other television dramatisations.

Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947. He contracted rickets at the age of two and had to wear leg braces until he was five, but he healed so well that he became one of the most recognized football players of all time.

OJ Simpson established himself as one of the best ball carriers in NFL history while playing nine seasons for the Buffalo Bills and two for the San Francisco 49ers. In 1973, he was the first NFL player to rush for over 2,000 yards in a season. He retired in 1979.

Simpson also became an advertising pitchman, well recognized for his years of television commercials for Hertz rental cars. As an actor, he participated in films such as The Towering Inferno (1974), Capricorn One (1977), and the 1988, 1991, and 1994 Naked Gun cop spoof flicks, in which he played a bumbling detective.

Simpson married his first wife, Marguerite, in 1967, and they had three children, one of whom drowned in the home swimming pool at the age of two in 1979, the year the couple split.

Simpson met his future wife Nicole Brown while she was a 17-year-old waitress, and he was still married to Marguerite. Simpson and Brown married in 1985 and have two children. She later contacted police when he struck her. Simpson pled no guilty to spousal abuse charges in 1989.