2024-04-13 15:09:36
Former American football player OJ Simpson, whose double murder trial in 1995 shocked the United States of America, has died at the age of 76, a victim of cancer, his family announced this Thursday.
“On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to the effects of his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren,” the family wrote on X.
OJ Simpson – or Orenthal James Simpson, his full name – was an unavoidable figure in American culture and society, especially for his controversial acquittal, in 1995, of the case in which he was accused of murdering his ex-wife and the man who accompanied her.
Despite this surprising acquittal, his story is one of inexorable decline for a man who came to be regarded as America’s first black superstar.
Born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947, he was raised by a single mother, abandoned by his father when he was five years old.
Despite having suffered from rickets as a child, he later became an excellent athlete and had a brilliant career in the National Football League (NFL).
He was crowned player of the year in 1973, when he played for the Buffalo Bills (northeast).
Attractive and charismatic, he enjoyed immense popularity, which he maintained long after the end of his professional career, at the end of the 1970s.
Even before hanging up his boots, he was sought after to appear in cinema and television, particularly in the series “Racines” (1977), and enchanted advertisers with his charm and slightly deep voice.
His natural screen presence would later lead him to a career as a sports commentator.
In 1985, he married a second time with a blonde beauty, Nicole Brown, who bore him two children, and led an opulent life. They divorced in 1992.
As he faded from the spotlight, OJ Simpson returned to the spotlight as the protagonist of one of the most fascinating legal cases of the 20th century in the United States.
Tried for double homicide
On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown was found dead in Los Angeles, in a pool of blood, next to the body of her friend Ronald Goldman, who had also been brutally murdered.
After a several-hour chase on Los Angeles freeways, followed live by television cameras filming from helicopters, Simpson was detained by police.
DNA tests identified Simpson’s blood at the crime scene and that of the victims in his car and home. “OJ” maintained his innocence, but was accused of double murder.
A year later, at the end of a trial that was also broadcast live on television, a Los Angeles jury acquitted him. This decision provoked a wave of indignation in the United States and divided opinions between whites and blacks, three years after bloody race riots in the Californian city.
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The former player was then found responsible for the deaths of the two victims in a civil trial in 1997 and ordered to pay more than 33 million dollars in compensation to their families, which he never did.
He moved to Florida, where his assets were protected from seizure.
He continued to make public appearances, including at a conference for serial killer enthusiasts.
Arrest for robbery
Although he continued to owe tens of millions of dollars to the families of his ex-wife and her partner, the law allowed him to keep his professional footballer’s retirement pension: $25,000 per month.
But in 2007 he made news again when he was arrested in Las Vegas for stealing sporting goods at gunpoint with five henchmen from a Las Vegas hotel-casino.
In early October 2008, he was found guilty of 12 charges and sentenced to prison terms of between 9 and 33 years. He was paroled in 2017.
2024-04-13 15:09:36