O.J. Simpson Biography

Football Player / Murder Suspect / Convict

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Name at birth: Orenthal James Simpson

Former football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder after a sensational 1995 trial, then convicted of armed robbery in a separate incident 13 years later. Nicknamed "The Juice" during his playing years, Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968 as a running back for USC. Simpson starred professionally for the Buffalo Bills and then the San Francisco 49ers until his retirement in 1979. Handsome and charismatic, Simpson then found work as a sports announcer and sometime actor, and he was a familiar face on television as the spokesman for Hertz rental cars. On 12 June 1994, Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson was found brutally murdered at her home along with an acquaintance, Ronald Goldman. Suspicion immediately fell on Simpson, and he was arrested a few days later after fleeing his house in a car driven by his friend Al Cowlings. (His capture came after a strange low-speed chase by police on LA freeways, broadcast on live TV from helicopter cameras, with Simpson and Cowlings in a white Ford Bronco.) The resulting murder trial, also televised live, lasted nine months and made household names of peripheral characters like Simpson houseguest Kato Kaelin, defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran, and Judge Lance Ito. Simpson was acquitted of two counts of murder on 3 October 1995. (However, in 1997 he was held liable in civil court for both deaths.) No one else has ever been charged with the deaths of Nicole Simpson or Ron Goldman.

The publisher ReganBooks announced in 2006 that it would publish a book by Simpson titled If I Did It, "hypothetically describ[ing] how the murders would have been committed." Public outcry caused the book and a related TV show to be canceled. The next year, in an unrelated incident, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas after he and other men entered a room at the Palace Station Hotel and attempted to seize Simpson-related sports memorabilia. Simpson was found guilty on 12 counts including conspiracy, kidnapping and armed robbery, and was sentenced in December 2008 to at least nine years in prison.

Extra credit: Simpson and Nicole Brown were married in 1985; she filed for divorce 1992... O.J. Simpson played hapless Detective Nordberg in the cop movie spoof The Naked Gun (1988) and two sequels... Simpsons's case has often been compared to that of former Baretta star Robert Blake, who was charged but later cleared in the killing of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley... The Simpson trial spawned the phrase "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" -- the statement made by Johnny Cochran to the jury after Simpson struggled in court to put on a bloody glove left at the murder scene... A court ruling awarded the rights to If I Did It to the Goldman family, and they published it in 2007 with the title If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer... Simpson's nickname of "The Juice" was a play on the initials O.J.

Simpson's trial wasn't the only "trial of the century" in the 20th century. Others include the 1935 trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's child, and the 1954 trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard.

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