OJ Simpson, former American football player, then television personality and actor in successful films, died on Wednesday at the age of 76. The news was confirmed on Thursday by his family, who attributed his death to the cancer he was suffering from.
In 1994 he was at the center of a huge court case, remembered as the “trial of the century”, in which he was accused of the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. Despite the various trials against him, Simpson has always declared himself innocent: he won the criminal trial but lost the civil one.
OJ Simpson, short name of Orenthal James Simpson, had played for a long time in the Buffalo Bills, and then, once he retired, he had also acted in some films, among which the most famous were the comedic ones of the series A blunt bullet. On June 13, his ex-wife, thirty-five-year-old Nicole Brown, from whom he had divorced in 1992, was found murdered together with twenty-five-year-old Ronald Goldman, her friend: they had been repeatedly stabbed with a knife in the garden of the Simpsons’ home in Brentwood , an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles, while Simpson and Brown’s two children slept in the house.
Although OJ Simpson was among the main suspects, also due to previous complaints of domestic violence by his wife, he was initially not formally charged for that murder. A few days later, when following developments in the investigation the police showed up at Simpson’s to arrest him, he escaped in a Ford Bronco. The ensuing chase became one of the most famous and followed media cases in the history of American television, filmed live from about twenty helicopters. Simpson made it all the way to his Brentwood home, where he surrendered after an hour.
– Read also: The chase of OJ Simpson, twenty years ago
The “OJ Simpson” court case began in January 1995 and was one of the most followed judicial news events ever in the United States. It was talked about for a long time not only because of the gravity of the crime of which Simpson was accused but also because of how it ended: quickly and with an acquittal. Then, in 1997, Simpson was ordered in civil court to pay $33 million for those crimes. Simpson’s trial was recently told in the popular TV series The OJ Simpson caseavailable on the Disney+ streaming platform.
In 2007 he was arrested in Las Vegas for armed robbery and kidnapping: Simpson had entered armed, together with accomplices, into a hotel room in Las Vegas to recover two sports memorabilia that he claimed as his. In 2008 he was sentenced to 33 years in prison, but was released on parole in 2017. He was freed in 2021.
