O.J. Simpson, the decorated football superstar and Hollywood actor who was acquitted of charges he killed his former wife and her friend but later was found liable in a separate civil trial, has died. He was 76.
Simpson’s attorney confirmed to TMZ that he died Wednesday night in Las Vegas. A message posted Thursday on Simpson’s official X account — formerly Twitter — said he died after battling cancer.
“He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren,” the statement said.
Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.
Live TV coverage of his arrest after a famous slow-speed chase marked a stunning fall from grace for the sports hero.
He had seemed to transcend racial barriers as the star Trojans tailback for college football’s powerful University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental car ad pitchman rushing through airports in the late 1970s, and as the husband of a blonde and blue-eyed high school homecoming queen in the 1980s.
“I’m not Black, I’m O.J.,” he liked to tell friends.
The public was mesmerized by his “trial of the century” on live TV. His case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice and police misconduct.
A criminal court jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to family members of Brown and Goldman.
A decade later, still shadowed by the California wrongful death judgment, Simpson led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns. A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other felonies.
Imprisoned at age 61, he served nine years in a remote northern Nevada prison, including a stint as a gym janitor. He was…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/o-j-simpson-dead-at-76-following-battle-with-cancer
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Publish date : 2024-04-11 15:21:45
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