© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Former American football star and actor Orenthal James Simpson passed away on Thursday at the age of 76 after a battle with cancer
“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,” his family wrote in a post on X.
O J Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947. He contracted rickets when he was two years old, but recovered at the age of five. Nicknamed “The Juice,” Simpson went on to be considered one of the best and most popular athletes of the late 1960s and 1970s.
Simpson shot to global limelight for a sensational double-murder trial which the US media called “the trial of the century.” He was acquitted in the 1995 trial of murdering his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. However, he was found responsible for his ex-wife’s death in a civil lawsuit.
He served nine years in a Nevada prison after being convicted in 2008 on 12 counts of armed robbery and kidnapping two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel.
Simpson became a running back at the University of Southern California and went on to win the Heisman Trophy as the college football’s top player.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame after an exceptional career in the NFL with the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers.
He retired in 1979.
His football stardom helped him ease into a career as a sportscaster, advertising pitchman and Hollywood actor. As an actor, he appeared in movies including “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Capricorn One” (1977) and the “The Naked Gun” cop spoof films in 1988, 1991 and 1994, playing a witless police detective.
In the double-murder case, Simpson quickly emerged as a suspect. He declared himself “absolutely 100 percent not guilty” at the outset of the trial. Him waving at the jurors and mouthing the words “thank you” after the predominately Black panel of 10 women and two men acquitted him on October 3, 1995 is said to be etched in public memory.
After his acquittal, Simpson said that “I will pursue as my primary goal in life the killer or killers who slayed Nicole and Mr. Goldman… They are out there somewhere… I would not, could not and did not kill anyone.”
Later on October 3, 2008, exactly 13 years after his acquittal in the murder trial, he was convicted by a Las Vegas jury on charges including kidnapping and armed robbery.
Simpson was released on parole in 2017 and moved into a gated community in Las Vegas. He was granted early release from parole in 2021 due to good behavior at age 74.
He married his first wife, Marguerite, in 1967 and they had three children. One of the children reportedly drowned in the family’s swimming pool at age 2 in 1979, the year the couple divorced.
Simpson met future wife Nicole Brown when she was a 17-year-old waitress and he was still married to Marguerite.
Simpson and Brown married in 1985 and had two children. Reports suggest that Brown called police after incidents of domestic abuse, but Simpson pleaded no contest to these charges in 1989.
Among other TV dramatisations, his life saga is recounted in the Oscar-winning 2016 documentary “O.J.: Made in America”.
(With inputs from Reuters)
