O.J. Simpson Is Dead. His Victims Still Deserve Justice.

He lived a full life, as many terrible people tend to do.

I’m sure there were some unfortunate exceptions, but I didn’t notice many normal people publicly mourning O.J. Simpson when the news broke Thursday that he’d died from cancer at 76. No one posted tributes to his slapstick comedy work in The Naked Gun films. A few people lamented that “pulling an O.J.” no longer meant successfully racing through an airport to the Hertz rental car center — although one media outlet curiously suggested this was Simpson’s primary claim to fame.

That’s the downside of brutally murdering two people in cold blood (hey, who’s gonna sue me now?). Simpson didn’t just live long enough for the world to see him as the villain he’d always been. He lingered on for another 30 years, nine of which he served in prison for armed robbery. He became a symbol of American corruption, misogyny, and racism.

A Reuters headline described Simpson as a “football star turned celebrity murder defendant,” which reinforces the problem. Simpson’s legitimate celebrity ended on June 12, 1994, and after that absurd slow-motion freeway chase, he dominated the news cycle for a full year. Perversely, he was more famous than ever, but his notoriety was in no way positive.

NPR described Simpson as a “football great” in its headline while not mentioning his homicides, although that’s the only reason his death is breaking news.

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Yes, O.J. got away with murder. He wasn’t the first.

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were viciously slaughtered outside her home, and their killer was never seriously brought to justice. Someone once wrote that O.J. Simpson’s acquittal was the moment they lost faith in the American justice system. This person was obviously white. What about the Scottsboro Boys? Or Emmett Till? Or Booker T. Spicely? I’ll save you the trouble of googling the last one: Spicely was an Army private stationed at Camp Butner, North Carolina. He was riding the bus to a nearby city in 1944 when the driver ordered him to surrender his seat in the back for some white soldiers. He complied but nonetheless complained about the unfair treatment. He was ordered to leave the bus, and the driver followed him off and fatally shot him point blank in the chest. It took an all-white jury just 28 minutes to acquit him. It was hardly the trial of the century. Not even Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the NAACP, could alter the outcome. The bus driver wasn’t wealthy or famous. He was white, and that was enough.

Simpson had never previously embraced his blackness, but he used his wealth to purchase the same “justice” that Spicely’s killer enjoyed as his birthright. A lot of white people assume that the mostly Black jury denied Brown Simpson and Goldman justice out of a racist desire to “stick it” to the man. It was revenge for Rodney King and a lot of other things. This ignores that the prosecutors were more Washington Generals than Jack McCoy. Letting Simpson try on those damn gloves will forever rank as one of the single greatest examples of legal malpractice. It also didn’t help that a key witness for the prosecution — Detective Mark Fuhrman — was a racist.

This doesn’t mean I think Simpson should have walked. However, it does bother me that the people who complain that Johnnie Cochran played the “race card” and suggest the jury was filled with members of the Nation of Islam are often the same folks who claim the juries had no choice but to acquit George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, neither of whom ever worked with Leslie Nielsen. Simpson didn’t break the American justice system. He took advantage of a system already designed to deny justice to the powerless while protecting the powerful.

But let’s not ignore the misogyny

O.J. Simpson abused and tormented Nicole Brown Simpson until he finally killed her. During their seven-year marriage, she called the police on him multiple times. He was arrested on New Year’s Day 1989 and police reported that Brown Simpson had a black eye, split lip, and Simpson’s handprint on her neck. Simpson pleaded “no contest” to spousal battery. Brown Simpson told police at the time that she feared Simpson would kill her. Months later, Simpson would appear on Late Night with David Letterman, where he demonstrated how charming abusers can appear in a controlled setting. It’s perhaps their greatest weapon.

In 1991, a terrified Brown Simpson called 911 and told the dispatcher, “Could you get someone over here now? Please … He’s back! … He’s O.J. Simpson. I think you know his record. Could you just get somebody over here please?”

Simpson broke down the back door of her house and chased her into the bedroom where their kids were sleeping. You can hear him raving like a lunatic on the 9/11 tape. It’s heartbreaking when the woman dispatcher asks, “Is he upset with something that you did?” Brown Simpson never did anything wrong. This was all O.J.

Brown Simpson filed for divorce in 1992 when she discovered Simpson had cheated on her with model Tawny Kitaen. She did go back to him in 1993, a tragic symptom of battered woman syndrome. On October 25, 1993, she called 911 again, tearfully saying she feared Simpson was “going to beat the shit out of me.”

“He gets a very animalistic look in him,” Brown Simpson was recorded telling the police. “All his veins pop out, his eyes are black and just black, I mean cold, like an animal. I mean very, very weird. And when I see it, it just scares me.”

She ended the relationship for good at the end of May 1994, not long after her 35th birthday. Less than a month later, she was brutally stabbed and almost decapitated, as if by an animal.

Both 911 tapes were played at the murder trial. Photos of her battered face from the 1989 incident were made public during the trial, as well. It might seem painfully obvious that “an abusive husband, often aroused to violence due to irrational jealousy, probably murdered his ex-wife and the younger man he found with her,” but it wasn’t that simple legally. And, no, Black people on the jury didn’t create the environment where men can terrorize their wives and the police have no legal requirement (and often limited interest) to intervene.

Brown Simpson was a victim, yet in his 1996 comedy routine, “O.J., I understand,” Chris Rock painted her as the villain. Chillingly, as the title suggests, Rock didn’t even believe Simpson was innocent. Instead, he repeats multiple time to uproarious laughter, “I’m not saying he should’ve killed her … but I understand.”

According to Rock, Brown Simpson’s crimes were numerous: She forced Simpson to pay her alimony, and she dared to have a romantic life after (briefly) escaping his abuse.

ROCK: You know what else? O.J. was paying $ 25,000 a month in alimony. $ 25,000! 25! $4000 a month for food! For food! What the fuck was she eating for four grand a month? I guess she’s like: “I gotta get some extra cheese on my whopper! Yo women y’all got it good … When it’s time to get a divorce, women got it made.

Women do not in fact “got it made” when they get a divorce. Rock doesn’t mention that O.J. used Nicole as a punching bag for years. Instead, he just makes her sound like a greedy leech who was sucking the life out of Simpson before she got what was coming to her. The same year he broke into Nicole’s house, O.J. appeared in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear. She deserved every penny she received and more. Unfortunately, it couldn’t buy her lasting freedom.

I once worked with a woman who’d often quote Rock’s O.J. routine, while imitating his angry street preacher delivery. She’d probably consider herself a liberal feminist, but while she hated O.J., she had little sympathy for Nicole. (And no, she wasn’t Black.) This was apparently her favorite part:

ROCK: Who’s the guy, Ron Goldman? That was her boyfriend. Don’t be mistaken thinking there was some guy returning the glasses, right? When was the last time you forgot some shit at the restaurant and they brought it back to your house? Shit, I want to eat there! Shit, you could leave a newborn baby in a restaurant and they’ll put him in the coat room! Second of all, he was known to drive around town in this Ferrari that O.J. had bought for her. Think about this shit. I buy you a car and you’re gonna let another man drive around in my car? Are you out of your fucking mind?! Shit! God! You’d better recognize … Shit, I don’t even have a Ferrari, but if I saw somebody driving in my Pinto … … That shit would blow like in the Godfather! I’m not saying he should have killed her … But I understand!

It does kinda make you want to slap him.

Cable news ghoulishly profited off Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder, and Rock did the same while also defaming her in death. Too many of us laughed at Rock’s routine, but there’s no point in getting defensive. It’s more constructive to fight against the culture that enabled her abuse and made her a punchline.

What is ‘justice’?

O.J. Simpson never spent a day in prison for murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. He was later held liable for their deaths in a civil suit, but he promptly fled to Florida where the Brown and Goldman families couldn’t touch any personal assets such as his home and pension. He still owes them millions.

However, the public verdict was practically unanimous. He was a killer who beat the system. He’d remain a pariah for the rest of his life. What’s horrifying to imagine is that he could have slowly murdered Brown Simpson, perhaps driving her to suicide through his abuse, and remained in Hollywood’s good graces.

The guests at Jay Gatsby’s fancy parties are depicted as shallow and callous when they snub his funeral, but I actually consider it reasonable not to honor a man who split a woman open with his car and kept driving. It’s not as if Nick Carraway told everyone that Daisy Buchanan was behind the wheel (and I don’t believe she was — why should we believe the criminal bootlegger and known liar? — but that’s another column). Simpson’s fall from grace was both well deserved and karmically insufficient.

The mainstream media struggled with this blunt fact when covering Simpson’s hardly tragic death. The San Francisco Chronicle described Simpson as a “fallen hero” and ran a decades-old photo of him with young fans.

The New York Times willingly ran the headline “O.J. Simpson, Athlete Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76.” Simpson’s trial was a tabloid circus and a low point for modern media, but the Times is more interested in Gatsby’s flashy parties than the dead woman he left bleeding out in the Valley of Ashes.

He ran to football fame on the field and made fortunes in movies. But his world was ruined after he was charged with killing his former wife and her friend.

Nicole Brown’s life was ruined when she met O.J. Simpson, and Ronald Goldman was an innocent bystander whose life was snuffed out at 25. I grieve for them, not O.J.’s Q rating.

The Times is technically correct that Simpson was “cleared” in his murder trial, but he was undeniably a wife beater. When we focus more on his football career and commercial endorsements, we continue to deny Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman any true justice.

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