former steelers player O. J. Simpson dies at the age of 70 …
Simpson’s family reported he passed away following a fight with cancer. Simpson had a contentious existence and passed away a shamed but free man. According to his family, O.J. Simpson, the former football great who was charged with and finally found not guilty of the gruesome 1994 killings of his ex-wife and her friend, has passed away.
O.J. Simpson, the football star who became a national icon of racial tension and domestic abuse after being found not guilty of killing his ex-wife and her friend in a trial that captured the attention of the country and had long-lasting legal and cultural ramifications, passed away on April 10. He was seventy-six.
His family said on the social media site X that cancer was the reason. More information was not immediately accessible.
Before his release in October 2017, Mr. Simpson had spent nine years of a 33-year sentence for armed robbery and kidnapping unrelated to the killing of his ex-wife from the Lovelock Correctional Center north of Reno.
It was a stunning downfall for a man who had risen from a poor neighborhood in San Francisco to become one of the greatest running backs in football history, an actor in more than 20 Hollywood movies, a corporate pitchman — sprinting through airports for Hertz Rent-a-Car in his most memorable television commercials — and a TV sports commentator. He had good looks, a warm smile and a poised manner that made him a popular sports media personality long after his playing days had ended.
The double-murder charges shattered his reputation as a high-achieving, amiable star.
He was accused of killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in a brutal knife attack on the walkway outside her townhouse in the fashionable Brentwood section of Los Angeles in June 1994. Combining issues of race, sex and celebrity, the murders and their aftermath quickly became what Time magazine called “the Godzilla of tabloid stories.”
Bloodstains and other physical evidence linked him to the crime, but in 1995 a mostly Black jury accepted the defense team’s claim that Mr. Simpson had been framed by racist Los Angeles police. Members of the jury took less than three hours to acquit him following a marathon eight-month trial that was nationally televised and pervaded by a circus atmosphere.
The verdict triggered a public outpouring of emotion and reflected the deep gap in perceptions and experience between many Blacks and Whites when it came to racism and police conduct. Those gaps were still painfully evident decades later during protests and riots over the police killings of unarmed Black males in Missouri, New York, Minnesota and elsewhere, which led to the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Simpson case “showed that when it came to law enforcement and belief in the police and the judicial system, Black people and White people in 1995 lived in different countries, and that was something that the country really didn’t want to be reminded of,” author and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin told “Frontline,” the PBS documentary program. “This case sure brought it home.”
Toobin, who commented on television about the trial and later became a high-profile author and journalist, was one of many figures in law and the media who came to public attention during the Simpson trial. Others included legal analysts Harvey Levin, who later launched the celebrity news website TMZ.com, and Greta Van Susteren, who became a cable-news host.
