O. J. Simpson

• 1. Introduction

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  O. J. Simpson sat in the back of a white Ford Bronco on a Los Angeles freeway, and an estimated 95 million people watched it roll along. Commentators called it the most famous ride on American shores since Paul Revere's. The passenger was regarded as one of the greatest running backs of all time. His face had sold rental cars, and audiences thought of him as friendly and safe. Within months he would sit in a courtroom at the center of one of the most widely publicized events in American history. How did a boy from the housing projects of San Francisco become that man? Why did the country feel so certain it knew him? And why did it split so sharply over what he had done? Then came the long years afterward, in civil courts, in a Nevada prison and in a Florida home. What did they settle, and what did they leave open?

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• 2. Potrero Hill to USC

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  Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on the 9th of July 1947. His aunt chose the first name, telling him it belonged to a French or Italian actor she liked. Everyone called him O.J. from the start. He did not learn that Orenthal was his given name until a teacher read it aloud in third grade.

  His mother, Eunice, worked as an orderly on a psychiatric ward. His father, Jimmy Lee Simpson, worked as a custodian and a cook, and was also a well-known drag queen in the Bay Area. Jimmy later came out as gay and died of AIDS in 1986. The couple separated in 1952, when O.J. was four. His mother raised the children in the housing projects of Potrero Hill.

  Rickets forced the boy into leg braces until he was five, and it left him with a bowlegged stance. He earned pocket money by scalping tickets and collecting seat cushions at Kezar Stadium. In his early teens he joined a street gang called the Persian Warriors and spent a short time in the San Francisco Youth Guidance Center. He was arrested three times. Marguerite, the girl he dated in high school, remembered him as "really an awful person then." After the third arrest he happened to meet the baseball star Willie Mays, who urged him to stay out of trouble. Simpson said that conversation helped persuade him to change.

  Sports offered a way out. He first played at the Potrero Hill Recreation Center, which welcomed Black people. At Galileo High School he played tackle and then fullback for the Galileo Lions. He also made extra money by organizing dances and charging admission. He graduated in 1965.

  Mediocre grades kept most college recruiters away, even though he was an All-City player. A friend's injury in the Vietnam War convinced him to avoid military service, so he enrolled at City College of San Francisco. He played running back and defensive back there, earned Junior College All-American honors and ran track. After City College won the Prune Bowl against Long Beach City College, many universities wanted him.

  In 1967 he enrolled at the University of Southern California, a school he had admired as a young fan. He had also considered the University of Utah. Under head coach John McKay, he led the nation in rushing in both of his seasons. He gained 1,543 yards and scored 13 touchdowns in 1967. Then he ran for 1,880 yards on 383 carries in 1968.

  His game against crosstown rival UCLA in 1967 made him a national name. USC trailed by six points with under 11 minutes left. On third and seven from their own 36, backup quarterback Toby Page called an audible. Simpson then raced 64 yards for a touchdown that tied the score. The extra point made it 21-20, and that was the final result. Magazines across the country ran photographs of the play. A second touchdown from the same game inspired an oil painting by Arnold Friberg, titled O.J. Simpson Breaks for Daylight. USC won the national title that year, and Simpson took the Walter Camp Award.

  Yet the Heisman Trophy that season went to UCLA's Gary Beban, and Simpson finished second. He was also a sprinter. On the 17th of June 1967 he ran the third leg of a relay team at the NCAA championships in Provo, Utah. The team broke the world record in the 4 x 110-yard relay with a time of 38.6 seconds. That year he also ran the 100-yard dash in 9.53 seconds. As his fame grew, he kept clear of politics. He did not join the boycott of the 1968 Olympics. People such as Martin Luther King Jr. supported that boycott as a protest against racial injustice.

  As a senior in 1968, he rushed for 1,709 yards and 22 touchdowns in the regular season. That earned him the Heisman, the Maxwell Award and another Walter Camp Award. He beat runner-up Leroy Keyes by 1,750 points, a Heisman margin that stood as the widest for 51 years. In the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, second-ranked USC faced top-ranked Ohio State. Simpson ran for 171 yards, including an 80-yard touchdown, but USC lost 27-16. The school later retired his number 32.

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• 3. The Electric Company

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  The Buffalo Bills held the first pick of the 1969 draft after a season that ended 1-12-1, and they chose Simpson. He demanded the largest contract in professional sports history, $650,000 over five years. Bills owner Ralph Wilson resisted, and Simpson threatened to become an actor instead. Wilson eventually gave in.

  The payoff took time. In his first three years Simpson averaged only 622 yards a season. Coach John Rauch did not want to build an offense around a single runner, so he used Simpson mostly to block and catch passes. Rauch resigned in 1971. His successor, Harvey Johnson, designed a new offense, but Simpson still struggled. The Bills fired Johnson after the season and hired Lou Saban, who finally made Simpson the center of the offense.

  The result was 1,251 yards in 1972, the first 1,000-yard season of his career and the best total in the league. Then came 1973. In the final game, against the New York Jets, a seven-yard run pushed him past 2,000 yards. He finished with 2,003 yards and 12 touchdowns. That same run broke the single-season record of 1,863 yards held by Jim Brown. Simpson was named the league's Most Valuable Player and won the Bert Bell Award. He also collected the Hickok Belt and was named athlete of the year by both The Sporting News and the Associated Press. His average of 143.1 yards per game remains the league record for a season. Others have since passed 2,000 yards, but only in 16-game seasons, which began in 1978. As of 2013, Simpson was still reported to hold the 14-game mark.

  The nickname "Juice" began as a play on his initials, since O.J. is a common shorthand for orange juice. Juice is also slang for electricity, and the Bills' offensive line at his peak was called "The Electric Company."

  Not every year was triumphant. In 1974 a knee injury did not stop him from passing 1,000 yards. That year he played the only playoff game of his career, against the Pittsburgh Steelers. He gained 49 yards on 15 carries and caught a touchdown pass, but the Bills lost 32-14. It was one of only three winning seasons the Bills had in his nine years there. In 1975 he rushed for 1,817 yards and 16 touchdowns. He also caught passes for a career-high 426 yards and seven touchdowns. That same year he won the television contest Superstars and took home $39,250. Following the previous winner, Kyle Rote Jr., he gave $5,000 to the Special Olympics.

  In 1976 he gained 1,503 yards and scored eight touchdowns. On Thanksgiving, the 25th of November, he ran for a then-record 273 yards on 29 carries against the Detroit Lions and scored twice. The Bills still lost 27-14. A few weeks earlier, a game against the New England Patriots turned ugly. Defensive end Mel Lunsford stopped him for no gain and slammed him to the ground. Simpson got up and punched Lunsford. Bills lineman Reggie McKenzie jumped on Lunsford's back, and Lunsford flung him over his head. Both teams piled in, Lunsford and Simpson were ejected, and the Patriots won 20-10. The Bills finished 2-12. Injury limited Simpson to seven games in 1977.

  On the 28th of March 1978, the Bills traded him to his hometown San Francisco 49ers for five draft picks. Simpson had tried to arrange a move to the Los Angeles Rams before 1976, because he and his wife preferred the West Coast. He ran for 1,053 yards and four touchdowns across two seasons in San Francisco. His knees finally ended his career. The 49ers held an "O.J. Simpson Day" at Candlestick Park for his last home game. His final game came on the 16th of December 1979, a 31-21 loss to the Atlanta Falcons. His last play was a 10-yard run on third and 10 for a first down.

  He retired with 11,236 rushing yards, second on the all-time list at that point. He now ranks 22nd. He was the only player to top 200 rushing yards in six different games. The Pro Football Hall of Fame inducted him in 1985, his first year of eligibility. In 2019 he was named to the league's 100th Anniversary All-Time Team.

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• 4. Go, O.J., Go

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  Beginning in 1975, television viewers watched Simpson sprint through airports while strangers shouted the slogan "Go, O.J., Go!" He was the star of a Hertz rental car campaign. He was also the first Black man hired for a major national corporate advertising campaign. The company, a conservative leader in its field, was trying to fend off its number two rival, Avis.

  The numbers were striking. Simpson estimated that the campaign raised the share of people who recognized him from 30% to 90%. In the first year, Hertz's annual profit rose by 50% to $42.2 million. Brand awareness climbed by more than 40%, and 97% of viewers understood that the commercials were selling Hertz. That avoided the so-called vampire video problem, in which people remember an ad but forget the brand. Hertz chief executive Frank Olson negotiated Simpson's contract personally, and the company kept him far longer than most celebrity endorsers. Simpson appeared less often by the late 1980s, but the relationship continued.

  Hertz was not his only partner. A man named Chuck Barnes helped him form early business ties with Chevrolet and ABC. By 1971, New York magazine said he was rich enough to retire that week if he wished. Advertising Age named him its Star Presenter of the Year in 1977, and by 1984 consumer research ranked him the most popular athlete endorser. He promoted Pioneer Chicken, Honey Baked Ham, TreeSweet orange juice, Napa Naturals soft drinks from Calistoga and Dingo cowboy boots. As head of O. J. Simpson Enterprises, he owned hotels and restaurants. In the 1990s, even his mother appeared in an MCI commercial that gently mocked her son's work.

  His public image mattered as much as the contracts. In 1975, People magazine called him the first Black athlete to become a "bona fide lovable media superstar." Writing in 2002, sportswriter Ralph Wiley said white Americans had seen Simpson as a "unifying symbol of all races." History professor Lou Moore argued this made him the first Black athlete to be "put on." By the time of his divorce in 1992, Simpson held $10 million in assets and earned more than $1 million a year, including $550,000 from Hertz.

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• 5. Screen and Booth

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  Simpson took his first acting job as a USC student, an uncredited part on Dragnet as a possible recruit to the Los Angeles Police Department. He was a working actor before he was a professional football player. While he was negotiating with the Bills, he appeared in the first episode of Medical Center as Cicely Tyson's husband, though he was 23 years younger than she was.

  He steered clear of blaxploitation films and took third or fourth billing, watching veterans such as Lee Marvin and Richard Burton at work. He said he did not seriously consider acting until he saw them while filming The Klansman in California, on a set where chili from Chasen's was ordered in by private jet. He also wanted to break his clean-cut image: "I've got to tear down that picture of O.J. Simpson, the clean-cut athlete, to get believability into whatever part I happen to be playing."

  During his football years he appeared in the miniseries Roots in 1977. His films included The Klansman and The Towering Inferno in 1974, The Cassandra Crossing in 1977 and Capricorn One in 1978. In 1979 he founded Orenthal Productions, which mostly made family television such as the Goldie and the Boxer films with Melissa Michaelsen. In 1980 he said an Oscar or an Emmy would show a certain level of competence, and he would love to have one. He also hosted Saturday Night Live in its third season, only the second professional athlete to do so.

  In 1988 he began playing Detective Nordberg in the Naked Gun films. The trilogy came out in 1988-1991 and 1994, with Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley and George Kennedy. Nordberg was injured in a running series of gags. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said director James Cameron once considered Simpson for the title role in The Terminator. The producers felt he was "too nice" to be seen as a killer.

  In 1994 Warner Bros. Television finished a two-hour pilot called Frogmen, an adventure series in the mold of The A-Team. Simpson played John "Bullfrog" Burke, leader of a group of former Navy SEALs who worked out of a Malibu surf shop. NBC had not yet ordered the series when his arrest ended the project. Network executive Preston Beckman gathered every copy so that none would leak. Police found a videotape of the pilot, along with the script and dailies, in Simpson's home. Prosecutors looked into reports that he had received military-style training, including work with a knife. In the pilot, his character holds a knife to a woman's throat. None of this was introduced at trial. The studio gave up an estimated $14 million. Co-star Evan Handler, who later played Alan Dershowitz in a dramatization of the trial, called the decision proof of some dignity in the television business.

  In 2006 Simpson starred in Juiced, a hidden-camera prank special. In one sketch he tried to sell a white Ford Bronco with a circled bullet hole, boasting that it had "escapability."

  The broadcast booth was another second career. Simpson worked as an NFL analyst for NBC from 1978 to 1982. In 1983 he joined ABC's Monday Night Football crew, becoming the first Black announcer on the network's top NFL broadcast team. During the 1984 season, ABC moved him to the pregame show for Super Bowl XIX, and active player Joe Theismann took his place in the booth. ABC dropped him after the 1985 season. In 1989 he rejoined NBC to replace Ahmad Rashad on the pregame show NFL Live. In 1994, after he was accused of killing his ex-wife, Rashad took the job back.

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• 6. Marriages and Murders

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  On the 24th of June 1967, Simpson married Marguerite L. Whitley. They had three children: Arnelle, born in 1968, Jason, born in 1970, and Aaren, born in 1977. Aaren drowned in the family swimming pool in August 1979. Marguerite later declined to testify on his behalf at his murder trial.

  Two LAPD officers, Terry Schauer and Richard Deandra, said Marguerite once called to report that Simpson had been violent toward her, and that she refused to press charges. In a 1995 interview with Barbara Walters, Marguerite denied that any such call or report existed. She said she had only just heard of it, after 21 years. Addressing rumors that she had been battered, she said, "If he did, he would have got a frying pan upside his head."

  Simpson met Nicole Brown in 1977, when she was a waitress at a Beverly Hills nightclub called The Daisy. He was still married when they began dating. He and Marguerite divorced in March 1979. During the 1984 Summer Olympics torch relay, Simpson carried the torch along the California Incline in Santa Monica, running behind Brown. They married on the 2nd of February 1985, five years after he left football. Their children were Sydney Brooke, born in 1985, and Justin Ryan, born in 1988. The marriage lasted seven years. Author Sheila Weller described the pair as "a dramatic, fractious, mutually obsessed couple."

  The record of violence began early. Brown's sister Denise told People in 2024 that Simpson "flipped out" in 1977 after seeing Nicole kiss a male friend on the cheek. Brown later claimed that by the end of 1989, police had come to the house eight times for domestic violence calls and had not helped her. On the 31st of December she phoned police and said she thought he was going to kill her. Officers found her hiding in the bushes outside the home, "badly beaten and half-naked." Authorities said Simpson had "punched, slapped, and kicked" her. He sped away from the officers in his car. He eventually pleaded no contest to spousal abuse and received two years of probation, 120 hours of community service and an order to donate $500 to a battered women's shelter.

  Brown filed for divorce on the 25th of February 1992, citing irreconcilable differences. She had learned of an alleged year-long affair between Simpson and the model Tawny Kitaen. Reports suggest the couple tried to reconcile in 1993. That October, Brown called police and reported violence after Simpson allegedly found a photo of a man she had dated while they were apart. A family friend claimed Simpson had told Brown's friends that if he ever "caught her with anyone, he would kill her." Her friend Kris Jenner said Brown once told her, "Things are really bad between O.J. and I, and he's going to kill me, and he's going to get away with it." They broke up again in May 1994, apparently for good. According to Brown's sister Tanya, Nicole told their mother at dinner at the Mezzaluna restaurant on the night of her death that Simpson would always be her soulmate.

  Prosecutors later counted 62 incidents of abusive behavior by Simpson toward Brown. News coverage of them led California to enforce its 1986 domestic violence protections more strictly. Hertz kept running its commercials with Simpson. Others told a different story. A former maid, Bethy Vaquerano, alleged in a 1996 book that Brown was racist and had been physically abusive toward Simpson. In a 1997 book, his niece Terri Baker said she saw Brown insult and slap him.

  Shortly after midnight on the 13th of June 1994, Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman were found stabbed to death in the courtyard outside her condo in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Police concluded the killings took place on the night of the 12th. Goldman had come to return a pair of glasses that Brown's mother had lost that day. The knife was never found. Simpson was an immediate person of interest, and police never identified another suspect. He said he had been at home that night, waiting for a limousine to take him to the airport for a flight to Chicago, where he was to meet Hertz executives and clients.

  Charges were filed and an arrest warrant was signed. Simpson, working with his attorneys, was due to surrender at about 11:00 a.m. on the 17th at the Parker Center police headquarters. He never arrived. Instead he rode as a passenger in a white 1993 Ford Bronco owned and driven by his longtime friend and former teammate Al Cowlings. According to Cowlings, Simpson sat in the back holding a pistol to his own head, threatening to shoot himself unless he was taken to his Brentwood estate. California Highway Patrol officers followed the slow-moving Bronco on the 405 Freeway with extreme caution, and police closed nearby highways.

  At one point Simpson tried to phone sportscaster Bob Costas, with whom he had a good relationship, but could not reach him. Meanwhile his lawyer Robert Kardashian read a letter from Simpson to the public: "Don't feel sorry for me... I've had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person." The ride lasted more than two hours. At about 8 pm the Bronco reached the Brentwood home, and surrender talks began. He was arrested shortly before 9 pm.

  Nearly every live television station carried the chase, and some interrupted coverage of the 1994 NBA Finals to do so. Tens of thousands of people gathered along Los Angeles streets and highways to watch it pass. The incident probably lifted Ford Bronco sales by an additional 7,000 purchases in 1994 compared with 1993. Many advocates for victims of domestic violence see Brown's death as a driving force behind Congress prioritizing the Violence Against Women Act, passed in September 1994. The act created the National Domestic Violence Hotline. As for Kardashian, the man who read that letter would soon join Simpson's defense team.

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• 7. The Trial of the Century

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  The trial ran from January to October 1995, making it the longest in California history. The jury was sequestered for 266 days, also a state record. Ten of its twelve members were Black. Newspapers likened the case to Sacco and Vanzetti and the Lindbergh kidnapping and called it the trial of the century. A remote-control camera above the jury box carried it to television audiences. The case raised public interest in reality television and in DNA evidence.

  Simpson's integrated defense team, nicknamed the "Dream Team," included Robert Kardashian, Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz. Marcia Clark and Christopher A. Darden led the prosecution for the State of California. Lance Ito was the judge. Minor figures became celebrities, among them Kato Kaelin, who lived in Simpson's guesthouse at the time of the murders. While waiting to appear before the jury, Simpson also published a book with Lawrence Schiller called I Want to Tell You. It included letters he had received while in jail.

  The prosecution's case had a flaw before it began. The police investigation had gone badly. Photo evidence had been lost or mislabeled, and DNA had been collected and stored improperly, raising the possibility that it was tainted. Even so, prosecutors presented blood from both victims in Simpson's car and Brown's blood on his socks. A black leather glove recovered from his home carried hair and fibers consistent with Simpson, Brown and Goldman, as well as fibers from a 1993-94 Ford Bronco and from Brown's dog. The matching glove had been found at Brown's condo.

  The defense claimed the glove did not fit Simpson's hand. Prosecutors theorized that he had stopped taking his arthritis medication, which would make his hand swell in court. Cochran told Judge Ito that the jail doctor confirmed Simpson took the medication every day, and that medical records backed this up. Prosecutors also worried that blood and repeated freezing and thawing had shrunk the glove, which Cochran denied. When Simpson tried it on in court, he struggled. People magazine wrote that this moment was crucial to his eventual acquittal. Richard Rubin, vice president of the glove maker Aris Isotoner, testified that a new pair of that model would have fit. In closing, Cochran told the jury, "If the glove don't fit, you must acquit." The line became famous.

  The trial also took place in the shadow of earlier events in Los Angeles. In 1991, a store owner named Soon Ja Du shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in the head, accusing her of stealing a bottle of orange juice. A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter, but the judge sentenced her only to probation. Also in 1991, four police officers allegedly beat Rodney King. All were acquitted in 1992, and riots followed.

  Against that background, the defense alleged that the crime scene had been compromised. It presented audiotapes of Mark Fuhrman, an officer who collected evidence at the scene, using a racial slur repeatedly in an interview with an aspiring screenwriter. Fuhrman was later charged with perjury for lying about it, and pleaded no contest. Many people believed Simpson was being set up, given the LAPD's history of corruption, the King acquittals and the fact that Fuhrman entered Simpson's home without a search warrant. The defense argued that Fuhrman planted the glove. Bailey and Cochran's cross-examination turned the trial into a public discussion of race. Los Angeles Times writer Jim Newton said the effect of this focus on the jury was "inescapable." Fuhrman also pleaded the Fifth when asked if he had planted or manufactured evidence.

  Jurors described their thinking in later interviews. David Aldana said the police had made the evidence unreliable: "Did he do it? Maybe, maybe not." Sheila Woods said she did not know whether Simpson was framed, but she did not think he did it. Yolanda Adams, speaking to CNN after his death, denied that the verdict was payback for Rodney King. She pointed to reasonable doubt and to the conduct of officers such as Fuhrman. MSNBC's Charles F. Coleman Jr. wrote in 2024 that "Black people didn't love O.J. Simpson, they hated the LAPD."

  On the 3rd of October 1995, after eleven months, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty on both murders. Deliberations had lasted three hours. The trial produced 126 witnesses, 1,105 items of evidence and 45,000 pages of transcripts. Between 100 and 150 million people watched or listened to the announcement. Simpson walked free after 474 days in custody.

  The reaction split along racial lines. A poll of Los Angeles County residents found that most African Americans thought justice had been served, while most whites and Latinos disagreed. NBC News wrote that Black residents in parts of Los Angeles spilled into the streets, cheering and passing around celebratory drinks. In 1994-22% of Black respondents to a poll thought Simpson was guilty, compared with 63% of white respondents. By 2016 those figures were 57% and 83%, a shift partly caused by the later civil verdict.

  The trial left a mark on the law. It influenced the creation of the LAPD's DNA crime lab, and California added Section 1109 to its Evidence Code, which lets jurors hear evidence of prior abuse in similar cases. No one else was ever arrested or convicted for the murders, and Simpson maintained his innocence in later interviews. In San Francisco, the Potrero Hill mural that showed him in his 49ers uniform was splashed with red paint and fitted with devil horns. Eventually he was painted out of it.

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• 8. Judgments and Aftermath

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  On the 5th of February 1997, a civil jury in Santa Monica, California, unanimously found Simpson liable for the wrongful death of Ron Goldman and for battery against him and against Nicole Brown. The Brown family had not filed a wrongful death claim. Daniel Petrocelli represented Goldman's father, Fred, and Robert Baker represented Simpson. Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki barred television cameras, still cameras and courtroom sketch artists. He also kept racial issues out of the trial as inflammatory and speculative.

  The jury ordered Simpson to pay $33,500,000. That included $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the Goldman family and $12.5 million in punitive damages to each family. His net worth at the time was $11 million. In 1997 he defaulted on the mortgage of the home at 360 North Rockingham Avenue, where he had lived for 20 years, and the lender foreclosed. In July 1998 the next owner, Kenneth Abdalla, an investment banker, demolished the house. A February 1999 auction of the Heisman Trophy and other belongings raised almost $500,000 for the Goldman family. The family also tried to collect Simpson's $28,000 yearly NFL pension and failed. Simpson moved to Florida, one of the few states where pensions and residences generally cannot be seized to pay debts. In 2000 he bought a home in Miami-Dade County.

  In 2006, the publisher ReganBooks planned to release If I Did It, billed as Simpson's hypothetical account of how he might have killed Brown and Goldman. His daughter Arnelle testified that she and a business associate named Van Exel came up with the idea and pitched it to her father to make money. Simpson said, "I have nothing to confess," and called the project "blood money" meant to give his children a financial legacy. In the story, an unwilling accomplice named Charlie warns him off. Simpson writes, "Then something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can't tell you how." Screenwriter Pablo Fenjves, who had testified for the prosecution at the 1995 trial, ghostwrote it. Publisher Judith Regan said the word "If" gave Simpson plausible deniability in front of his children. Public outcry led to the cancellation of the book, set for November 2006, and a planned Fox interview.

  Goldman's father went to court to claim control of Simpson's right to publicity, saying the book and interview deals were made to cheat the family of what it was owed. He said Simpson had received a $1 million advance. In 2007, judges restricted Simpson's spending and barred further payments. A Florida bankruptcy court then awarded the book rights to the Goldman family. They published it that year as If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer. They shrank the word "If" until it sat inside the large red "I" of the title, so the cover appears to read I Did It. Fenjves and the journalist Dominick Dunne added new material.

  Other troubles followed. In the late 1990s, Simpson tried to register "O. J. Simpson," "O. J." and "The Juice" as trademarks for goods such as figurines and trading cards, and a citizen sued to oppose it as immoral and scandalous. In 2001 he was arrested in Miami-Dade County after pulling the glasses off another driver during a traffic dispute, and he was acquitted that October. In December 2001 the FBI searched his Florida home on a tip about drug trafficking. It found no illegal drugs, and he was not charged. Agents did find equipment for pirating satellite signals, and in 2005 DirecTV won a $25,000 judgment against him. In 2007, California said he owed $1.44 million in back taxes.

  One claim about the criminal trial surfaced in 2008. Simpson's associate Mike Gilbert said in 2008, and again in a 2025 docuseries, that Simpson had admitted his role. Gilbert quoted Simpson as saying, "If Nicole wouldn't have opened the door with a knife, she would still be alive." Simpson's lawyer Yale L. Galanter said none of it was true and called Gilbert "a delusional drug addict who needs money."

  On the night of the 13th of September 2007, a group of men led by Simpson entered a room at the Palace Station hotel-casino in Las Vegas and took sports memorabilia at gunpoint. Simpson admitted taking the items, which he said had been stolen from him. He denied breaking into the room and denied that anyone carried a gun. He was arrested two days later. Bail was set at $125,000. In January 2008 he was jailed for trying to contact a co-defendant, C. J. Stewart. His bail was raised to $250,000, and he posted it that evening. Three co-defendants plea-bargained and agreed to testify, saying guns were used.

  The trial began on the 8th of September 2008 before Judge Jackie Glass and an all-white jury, in stark contrast to his murder trial. On the 3rd of October 2008, exactly thirteen years after his acquittal, Simpson was found guilty of every charge. On the 5th of December 2008 he was sentenced to 33 years in prison, with parole possible after nine. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed his convictions in October 2010. He served his time at Lovelock Correctional Center as inmate 1027820 and worked as a gym janitor. In November 2013, Judge Linda Bell rejected his bid for a new trial. The parole board granted him parole on some convictions on the 31st of July 2013. It granted full parole at a hearing on the 20th of July 2017, and he was released on the 1st of October 2017 after almost nine years. In December 2021 he received an early discharge from parole.

  His private life drew scrutiny too. In 1995, after his acquittal, he began a relationship with Christie Prody, then 19 and a cocktail waitress. It lasted 13 years, and Prody later said she often feared for her life. After his release from prison, Simpson joined Twitter and had 800,000 followers by the time of his death. He played golf, a constant in his life before and after the acquittal. He died of cancer on the 10th of April 2024.

  The civil judgment outlived him. In July 2017, as Simpson won parole, Fred Goldman asked about real estate bought by Simpson's children with Brown, Sydney and Justin. His lawyer David Cook said Fred's loss should be no greater than theirs. In June 2022, Fred argued in court papers that Simpson owed $96 million because of interest. On the 17th of November 2025, it was reported that Simpson's estate had agreed to pay nearly $58 million to Goldman's father, rejecting a claim of $117 million.

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