Prostate cancer just claimed the life of the likely murderer of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It definitely claimed the life of Nevada’s most notorious sports memorabilia thief and parolee.
There’s a saying that, if you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning. Throughout his lifetime, O.J. Simpson demonstrated a seemingly bottomless capacity for being both.
On the positive side, he was arguably the first modern football player.
When he was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in 1968, the National Football League Players Association, the union responsible for representing NFL players, was still in its infancy. The “Rozelle Rule,” which discouraged teams from recruiting free agents from other teams, wouldn’t be overturned in court for nearly another decade. Despite the relative dearth of labor protections and despite never having played a down of professional football in his life, Simpson negotiated for and received what was then the largest NFL salary in history.
Then there were the endorsements. He lent his face and name to sports drinks, razors, athletic gear, shoes — and, most notoriously, Hertz. For nearly 20 years, Simpson in a suit running through an airport symbolized the speed and efficiency one might experience by renting a car. That endorsement deal still provided roughly half of his $1 million annual income in 1992, 13 years after his final NFL game.
There was also the acting. Simpson first started developing his professional thespian skills while he was in college at USC in an uncredited role on Dragnet. As his athletic and commercial careers developed, so did his acting career, which blossomed into a series of movie roles in the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s.
Simpson, in short, was a consummate professional who always looked good on a screen — so people kept paying him to appear on one.
Outside of work, however, things were considerably less rosy.
By the time Simpson finished his professional football career, his first marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Marguerite Whitley, had ended in mutual acrimony. Months after their divorce was finalized, their youngest daughter drowned in a swimming pool.
Two years before the divorce was finalized, meanwhile, Simpson swept an 18-year-old waitress he met off her feet. Within months, Nicole Brown moved in with him, at which point the two began what was frequently described as a “tempestuous” relationship. Later, they got married and had a couple of children themselves.
“Tempestuous,” to be clear, was the euphemism used to describe a textbook abusive relationship that featured regular beatings. Even after they divorced, Simpson continued to stalk Brown and threatened to cut off the heads of her boyfriends. Consequently, when Brown, along with her friend Ronald Goldman, were murdered in 1994, Simpson was the Los Angeles Police Department’s first and only suspect.
The Los Angeles Police Department, however, had something of a mixed reputation. It still does.
One event that helped feed the department’s negative reputation was the beating of Rodney King.
One evening in 1991, the California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles Police Department attempted to pull Rodney King over on a San Fernando Valley freeway. After a high speed chase, King was stopped in a residential neighborhood, his car surrounded. King’s two passengers were arrested without incident by the Highway Patrol. A nearby resident discreetly pointed a camcorder at the developing scene from their apartment and started to record events as they developed.
The video showed that King was left to the Los Angeles Police Department to arrest. He didn’t, however, go willingly. In response, five police officers — three Caucasian, two Hispanic — spent several minutes tasing, beating and kicking King, who was Black.
The video, for lack of a better word, went viral. The police department made things worse by trying to respond.
To highlight the danger of King’s actions before his beating and subsequent arrest, they claimed the high-speed chase reached estimated speeds of 115 miles per hour. There was, however, just one problem with that claim — there was absolutely no way a Hyundai Excel, especially while carrying three adults, could go anywhere near that fast.
Then the officers claimed King was on PCP. According to ’80s cultural lore, PCP simultaneously filled users with uncontrollable rage and immunized them completely from pain. If King was intoxicated with the stuff, the police might be within their rights to act like they’re facing an unstoppable, unyielding zombie. One more problem — King tested negative for the drug.
A year later, four of the officers involved in the beating were formally charged with assault and use of excessive force. Instead of trying them in Los Angeles where they worked and where the beating occurred, the trial was instead inexplicably conducted in Simi Valley, a suburb in neighboring Ventura County best known nowadays for hosting the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
According to the 1990 census, almost 90 percent of Simi Valley’s residents were white. The jury selected for the trial, then, was comparatively diverse — there was, it turned out with the benefit of hindsight, a single biracial juror.
Black people in Southern California already thought the judicial system was stacked against them. Reports surrounding the activities of the Lynwood Vikings, one of the more notoriously racist deputy gangs in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, were increasingly commonplace. When the jury acquitted the officers involved in the King beating, it simply confirmed what they already knew. Even when faced with openly racist police officers, even when evidence of misconduct is on video and as plain as the day is long, there was no way a Black person would find justice in the judicial system.
Six days of violent rioting commenced. The National Guard was called. Schools were closed. Neighborhoods burned.
The murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman took place only two years after the Rodney King riots. In those years, steps had been taken to improve the Los Angeles Police Department’s reputation — the chief of police was forced to resign, the officers who beat King were charged with federal civil rights violations (two of them were convicted) and multiple reports were drafted suggesting various reforms. There was, however, still much more work that needed to be done before anything approaching a positive relationship existed between the police department and the communities it was tasked to protect and serve.
The Simpson murder trial didn’t help.
The police department quickly ran into two problems with the case — the murder weapon was missing and there were no eyewitnesses. Instead, they built the case on physical and DNA evidence collected at the scene.
Trouble was, using DNA as evidence was a relatively recent development — for juries and police detectives. Consequently, the deputies made mistakes in the collecting and handling of the evidence.
Then the Fuhrman Tapes, a series of interviews with one of the detectives responsible for collecting the evidence, were released. In the interviews, Mark Fuhrman bragged about chasing and beating suspects. He laughed at the idea that he needed probable cause before arresting Black suspects. He was recorded using racial epithets on several occasions — after he pledged under oath that he didn’t use that kind of language.
Lying under oath is perjury. That’s a crime. Fuhrman’s attorney knew that, so he was instructed to start asserting his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Simpson’s attorneys took advantage of that by asking him a simple yes or no question:
“Did you plant or manufacture any evidence in this case?”
Instead of giving a straight answer, Fuhrman pled the Fifth in response to that question, too.
Just like that, Simpson’s defense had a story — an incompetent, racist cop who got caught lying under oath is trying to frame a successful Black man for murder. Unlike Rodney King, Simpson had a majority Black jury (which included a former Black Panther) and the best legal representation money could buy.
On live television, a nation watched a Black person successfully defend himself against obvious police misconduct — on the first try, no less.
With the benefit of hindsight, Simpson’s legal victory proved to be completely pyrrhic. The murder case was the last time anyone was willing to pay to see Simpson on a screen — and he had to pay handsomely to get himself there. By the time the trial was over, his endorsement deals were canceled and he was up to his neck in legal fees. The $33.5 million verdict secured against him by the families of the victims in civil court applied the finishing blow against his already shaky finances.
To attempt to meet the verdict, he had to sell everything of value he had, including his Heisman Trophy and every other piece of sports memorabilia he could find. What he couldn’t sell he defaulted on, including his mortgage and back taxes.
That fire sale, in turn, led directly to the series of events that finally landed him in prison. Simpson had a bad case of seller’s remorse — or he just hoped to steal some of his memorabilia back so he could resell it again. Whatever the cause, on the night of Sept. 13, 2007, Simpson led a group of men into room 1203 at Palace Station in Las Vegas. There they robbed a sports memorabilia dealer at gunpoint, all while a witness recorded the robbery on his digital voice recorder.
As in the murder trial, attempts were made to discredit the evidence. This time, however, nobody really cared. Even if Simpson wasn’t guilty of this, he was definitely guilty of something. On the day of the robbery, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer — Simpson’s detailed and “hypothetical” account of how he “would have” murdered his ex-wife and her friend — was released. Originally written by Simpson and a ghostwriter to put some cash in his pocket, the rights had been legally transferred to the families of the victims.
The jury agreed. Simpson consequently spent nine years as Lovelock, Nevada’s most famous prisoner, before he was paroled — in no small part due to the support and testimony of the man he attempted to rob. After he was released, he settled down in Las Vegas and lived out the remainder of his days.
Our editor-in-chief likes to point out from time to time that, in Nevada, #WeMatter. Usually he’s referring to Nevada’s increasingly tenuous status as an electoral swing state, but in the case of O.J. Simpson, it’s necessary to broaden the applicability of that statement a bit.
Say what you or anyone else might say about O.J. Simpson — he mattered.
His negotiations as a rookie permanently shifted pay scales upwards for professional football players. Many of the statistical records he set while he played still stand. He was arguably the first consistently marketable Black athlete in American history and demonstrated an ability to live off of endorsements, sponsorships and media appearances that professional athletes have tried to emulate ever since.
Simpson was also an adulterer, a domestic abuser and likely a murderer. He avoided going to prison for murder by showing a jury and a live television audience exactly how dishonest and corrupt police officers can be when they deal with Black people (and yes, sometimes still are) — and by exploiting it to the hilt.
Finally, Simpson was a sad, pathetic old man who tried far too hard to recapture the glory of his youth. He lost that glory, including the money and memorabilia that came with it, fair and square. He earned every inch of his fall from grace, plus many more besides, then spent years in prison for his hubris.
But, for all his faults — arguably because of his faults — he mattered. In some of the best and many of the worst ways, he mattered.
Just like Nevada. Just like us.
David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].
