Former football star, actor and acquitted murder defendant O.J. Simpson has died, his family confirmed on his X account Thursday.
According to the post, he was surrounded by his children and grandchildren when he passed in Las Vegas, officials there confirmed.
Sources told Local 10 News in February that Orenthal James Simpson, 76, was diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Simpson’s saga makes him, in the words of one of his Las Vegas trial lawyers, one of the most famous people on the planet.
He grew up in public housing in San Francisco, attended the University of Southern California and won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player in 1968. He became an NFL Hall of Famer and the first running back to gain 2,000 yards in a season with the Buffalo Bills in 1973. He acted in movies and served as a rent-a-car company pitchman and a football commentator.
In what became known as “The Trial of the Century,” he was acquitted in 1995 of the double slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
The trial was the focus of gavel-to-gavel TV coverage, with Simpson represented by a legal “Dream Team” that included the late Johnnie Cochran Jr. and F. Lee Bailey.
In a separate case more than a decade later, Simpson was convicted by a jury in Las Vegas and sentenced to prison for leading five men, including two with guns, in a 2007 confrontation with two sports collectibles dealers in a cramped room at an off-strip Las Vegas casino hotel.
Simpson insisted he only wanted to retrieve personal mementos and items stolen from him following his acquittal in the double killings.
Simpson, who previously lived in South Florida for nearly a decade, bought a place on Killian Drive, but it wasn’t long before he was in the news again.
Simpson was arrested in 2001 after he was accused of being the aggressor in a road rage incident in Kendall, allegedly snatching sunglasses right off a man’s face and scratching him.
It was another crime where he again was acquitted.
Now, 23 years later, Local 10 News tracked down the man who was at the center of that case.
“I’m sorry to hear about his death, I’m sure his family is devastated so our sympathy goes out to them,” said Jeffrey Pattinson.
“Have you harbored any negative feelings from that day?” asked Local 10 News’ Terrell Forney.
“No, none whatsoever,” said Pattinson. “It’s all gone, all done.”
Simpson also often had public ups and downs with then-girlfriend Christie Prody.
Prody told Local 10 News in an exclusive interview Thursday that she received the news several days ago that he was on his deathbed months ago.
“You had your ups and downs with OJ. Did you love him?” Local 10 News reporter Rosh Lowe asked Prody.
“I did love him. He was good to me,” she said. “He was a big part of my life and I wish would have said goodbye.”
David Cook, an attorney who has been seeking since 2008 to collect the civil judgment in the Goldman case, said he’d spoken with Ron’s father, Fred, on Thursday about Simpson’s death. Cook declined to say what Fred Goldman said or where he was.
“He died without penance,” Cook said of Simpson. “We don’t know what he has, where it is or who is in control. We will pick up where we are and keep going with it.”
On the day he accepted the Heisman Trophy, his first child, Arnelle, was born.
He had two sons, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife; one of those boys, Aaren, drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year he and his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, divorced.
Read the reactions to Simpson’s death by clicking here.
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On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer.
— O.J. Simpson (@TheRealOJ32) April 11, 2024
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.
-The Simpson Family