FILE NO. 0175Case status Closed
O.J. Simpson Trial: Acquittal, Civil Liability and the Record
A Los Angeles jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1995. A civil jury found him liable in 1997. Here is what the record shows.
Legal status: O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman by a Los Angeles jury on October 3, 1995. In a separate civil wrongful-death suit, a Santa Monica jury found him liable in February 1997 under the civil preponderance-of-evidence standard and the court entered judgments totaling $33.5 million, affirmed on appeal in 2001. No one has been criminally convicted of the killings. Simpson’s only felony convictions came in an unrelated 2008 Las Vegas armed robbery and kidnapping case. He died in April 2024.
Content warning: this dossier describes the stabbing deaths of two people, blood evidence from the crime scene and domestic violence.
What was the O.J. Simpson trial?
The O.J. Simpson trial was the 1995 Los Angeles criminal prosecution of the former football star for the June 12, 1994, stabbing deaths of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, outside her condominium on South Bundy Drive in Brentwood. Simpson pleaded not guilty. After a trial that ran most of 1995 and was carried live by a single courtroom camera, a jury acquitted him of both murders on October 3, 1995, after less than four hours of deliberation.
The case did not end with the verdict. The families of both victims sued Simpson for wrongful death, and in February 1997 a civil jury in Santa Monica, applying a lower standard of proof, found him liable and set damages that brought the judgments to $33.5 million. The Goldman family spent the next three decades trying to collect. Simpson himself was later convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping in an unrelated 2007 confrontation in a Las Vegas hotel room, served nine years in a Nevada prison, was paroled in 2017 and was discharged from parole in 2021. He died of prostate cancer at his Las Vegas home on April 10, 2024, at 76.
Case snapshot
- Victims: Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, found dead outside 875 South Bundy Drive, Brentwood, Los Angeles, shortly after midnight on June 13, 1994.
- Defendant: Orenthal James Simpson, born July 9, 1947, Heisman Trophy winner (1968), Pro Football Hall of Fame (1985), broadcaster and actor.
- Charges: Two counts of murder, filed June 17, 1994. Simpson pleaded not guilty.
- Court: Los Angeles County Superior Court, Judge Lance A. Ito, downtown Criminal Courts Building.
- Prosecution: Deputy District Attorneys Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, with a team that included William Hodgman and George “Woody” Clarke, under District Attorney Gil Garcetti.
- Defense: Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. (lead), Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, Gerald Uelmen, Robert Blasier and Robert Kardashian, among others.
- Criminal verdict: Not guilty on both counts, October 3, 1995.
- Civil verdict: Liable for the wrongful death of Ronald Goldman and for battery against Nicole Brown Simpson, February 4, 1997; punitive damages February 10, 1997; total judgments $33.5 million; affirmed by the California Court of Appeal in 2001.
- Separate Nevada case: Convicted October 3, 2008, of armed robbery, kidnapping and related felonies; sentenced December 5, 2008, to 9 to 33 years; paroled 2017; discharged from parole December 2021.
- Death: April 10, 2024, Las Vegas, of prostate cancer, age 76.
The record boundary
Three findings sit at the center of this story, and they do not say the same thing.
The first is the criminal verdict. A jury of twelve found that the state of California had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Simpson committed either murder. In law, that is an acquittal, and it is final. He cannot be tried again for those killings.
The second is the civil verdict. A different jury, hearing a different case under the civil rules, found by a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) that Simpson was responsible for Ronald Goldman’s wrongful death and had committed battery against Nicole Brown Simpson. Only nine of twelve jurors had to agree, though on liability they were unanimous. A civil judgment is a money obligation. It is not a criminal conviction and does not carry one.
The third is the Nevada conviction, which concerns events in September 2007 and has nothing to do with the 1994 deaths. The judge said she was not influenced by the 1995 trial, and jurors said it never came up in deliberations.
Where this dossier describes evidence or defense challenges, it reports what was presented and testified to, not a finding of fact. Simpson denied the killings throughout his life.
Who were Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman?
Nicole Brown met Simpson in 1977, when she was 18 and working as a waitress at a Beverly Hills nightclub, and for nearly half her life, as the New York Times put it in a profile after her death, she was known as his girlfriend, his wife and then his ex-wife. They married in 1985 and had two children, Sydney and Justin. They divorced in 1992. In her last days, her sister Denise Brown told the Times, she had broken off an attempt at reconciliation and was starting over. “She was just so vivacious, so full of life,” Denise Brown said.
The relationship had a documented history of police involvement. On New Year’s Day 1989, after an argument at the couple’s Brentwood home, Simpson was charged with spousal battery. In May 1989 he pleaded no contest to one misdemeanor count. Municipal Judge Ronald Schoenberg placed him on two years’ probation, fined him $200, ordered counseling and directed a $500 donation to a shelter for battered women. Nicole Brown Simpson called the police emergency line again on October 25, 1993, according to police tapes reported by the Times. In a deposition for the civil suit in January 1996, Simpson alleged that his former wife had concocted stories of domestic violence.
Ronald Lyle Goldman was 25, a waiter at Mezzaluna, a trattoria in Brentwood a short walk from his apartment. The Los Angeles Times profiled him weeks after his death under the headline “Dreams of Better Days Died That Night.” He wanted to open his own restaurant. He played beach volleyball, surfed and had once appeared on a television game show. “I think Ron’s philosophy was to shoot for the stars,” a friend, Michael Davis, told the paper. His father, Fred Goldman, and his sister, Kim Goldman, became two of the most visible figures in the case and its aftermath.
June 12 and 13, 1994
On the evening of Sunday, June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson attended a dance recital for her daughter at about 6 p.m. Simpson also attended. Afterward, she had dinner with her family at Mezzaluna. Her mother left a pair of eyeglasses at the restaurant. Goldman, who worked there, left at about 9:45 p.m. to return them to the Bundy Drive condominium, according to the Los Angeles Times’ reconstruction of the night.
Investigators placed the deaths at roughly 10 to 11 p.m. Simpson took an 11:45 p.m. American Airlines flight to Chicago, a trip scheduled in advance for a business engagement. A limousine driver, Allan Park, later testified about waiting outside Simpson’s estate at 360 North Rockingham Avenue that night, and a house guest, Brian “Kato” Kaelin, testified about the evening’s timeline. Their accounts became central to both sides’ arguments about the timeline.
The bodies were found at about 12:10 a.m. on Monday, June 13. Detectives went to the Rockingham estate in the early morning hours. Simpson was reached in Chicago, flew back to Los Angeles, arrived at 11:08 a.m., was briefly handcuffed, and was questioned at police headquarters from about noon to 4:30 p.m. He was released.
Over the next four days, police said, they gathered evidence including blood drops along a walkway at Bundy, a bloodstained left glove at the scene and a matching right glove that Detective Mark Fuhrman testified he found at Rockingham. Detective Philip Vannatter later testified that the trail of blood and the glove led him to regard Simpson as a “very strong suspect.” Simpson attended his former wife’s funeral on Thursday, June 16.
The Bronco chase
On Friday, June 17, 1994, the district attorney’s office charged Simpson with two counts of murder. Under an arrangement made through his lawyer, Robert Shapiro, he was to surrender that morning. He did not. He left the Encino home of his friend Robert Kardashian, and police declared him a fugitive. At a news conference, Kardashian read a letter Simpson had written. “I have nothing to do with her murder,” it said of his former wife. “I love her.” It closed with a plea to the public: “Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.”
That evening, a white Ford Bronco driven by Simpson’s longtime friend Al Cowlings was spotted in Orange County, located by tracking calls from a cellular telephone inside the vehicle. Simpson was in the back seat, and a California Highway Patrol spokesman said he was holding a gun to his own head. A slow-motion pursuit followed on the freeways back toward Los Angeles, with patrol cars trailing at about 35 miles an hour and crowds gathering on overpasses. The New York Times put the distance at about 50 miles at the time; its 2024 obituary of Simpson put it at 60. Television networks broke into regular programming, and an estimated 95 million people watched.
The Bronco reached Rockingham at about 8 p.m. After Shapiro arrived, Simpson surrendered less than an hour later. Police recovered a handgun. Cowlings was arrested on suspicion of aiding a fugitive. District Attorney Garcetti said investigators believed the victims had been killed with “a knife, a substantial knife,” which had not been found. It never was.
The preliminary hearing
Simpson was held without bail. The case went to a preliminary hearing, a public proceeding in which a judge decides whether there is enough evidence to require a trial. Municipal Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell presided over six days of televised testimony beginning in late June 1994.
Prosecutors called Los Angeles Police Department criminalist Gregory Matheson, who testified that conventional blood typing showed that a drop on the trail at Bundy could not have come from Nicole Brown Simpson and could have come from Simpson, along with roughly 1 in 200 people. Defense lawyers cross-examined prosecution witnesses intensely and accused police of illegally searching Simpson’s home in the hours after the deaths. They lost that motion.
On July 8, 1994, she ruled that there was “ample evidence to establish the strong suspicion of the guilt of the accused,” the probable-cause standard that applies at that stage. It was not a finding of guilt. Simpson turned 47 the next day. At his arraignment in Superior Court on July 22, he pleaded “100% not guilty.”
The prosecution and the defense
District Attorney Gil Garcetti’s office assigned the case to Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark, a veteran homicide prosecutor, with William Hodgman as co-counsel. When Hodgman was stricken by chest pains early in the trial, Christopher Darden, a deputy district attorney who as a high school football player had wanted to wear Simpson’s number, moved into a leading role. George “Woody” Clarke and Rockne Harmon handled much of the DNA evidence.
Simpson’s lawyers became known in the press as the “Dream Team.” Robert Shapiro assembled the early defense. Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., a prominent Los Angeles trial lawyer, succeeded him as lead counsel. They were joined by F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Gerald Uelmen, and the New York lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who had built careers challenging DNA evidence in court. Robert Blasier, Carl Douglas and Simpson’s friend Robert Kardashian were also on the team.
The two sides told the jury very different stories. In his opening statement on January 24, 1995, Darden told jurors that the evidence would show a relationship driven by obsession and the need to control, and Clark laid out what she would later repeatedly call a “mountain of evidence”: blood, hair, fibers, the gloves and shoe prints. The defense argued that the investigation had been “contaminated, compromised and corrupted,” in Cochran’s phrase, and that some evidence had been planted by police.
Judge Lance Ito and the camera
The case was assigned to Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito. One of his most consequential decisions concerned television. After an erroneous news report about DNA evidence aired in the fall of 1994, Ito threatened to remove the courtroom camera. He displayed 21 boxes holding 12,468 letters from people urging him to do so. On November 7, 1994, he ruled that the camera could stay, saying the problems had arisen outside the courtroom. His one condition was that Court TV mount a remote-controlled camera on the wall above the jury box, so jurors’ faces would not be shown.
That single camera made the trial one of the most watched legal proceedings in American history, and it turned the judge, the lawyers and many of the witnesses into public figures.
The jury was sequestered at a hotel for 266 days, which the New York Times described as the longest sequestration in California history. Ten jurors were dismissed over the course of the trial for causes that included keeping a diary and talking to unauthorized people. In one case, the Los Angeles Times reported, an investigation of a juror’s hotel room turned up a computer that he was allegedly using to keep notes about the case. The twelve who returned the verdict were ten women and two men: nine Black jurors, two white jurors and one Hispanic juror.
The prosecution’s case
Prosecutors presented the case in two broad parts. The first concerned motive. Witnesses described the 1989 incident and the 1993 emergency call, and prosecutors argued that Simpson’s behavior toward his former wife showed a pattern of control. The defense said the prior incidents did not prove the killings.
The second part concerned the physical evidence. Police witnesses described blood drops leading away from the bodies at Bundy, drops along the driveway at Rockingham and inside Simpson’s white Ford Bronco, and a pair of socks in Simpson’s bedroom. Vannatter testified about a cut on Simpson’s hand. An FBI shoe print expert, William Bodziak, testified that the bloody footprints at Bundy were left by size 12 Bruno Magli shoes, an expensive Italian style; Simpson wears size 12. Under cross-examination by F. Lee Bailey, Bodziak acknowledged that he could not link the prints to any particular pair of shoes owned by Simpson. An FBI hair and fiber analyst, Douglas Deedrick, testified that carpet fibers that could have come from Simpson’s Bronco were found at the scene and on the Rockingham glove.
Simpson did not take the witness stand in the criminal trial. His lawyers argued that the timeline left him too little time to commit two killings, clean up and be ready for his limousine, and that the physical evidence could not be trusted because of how it had been handled.
The DNA evidence and its challenges
DNA evidence was at the core of the prosecution’s case, and the trial became an early public test of a forensic science that was still new in American courtrooms. Three laboratories tested samples: the LAPD crime lab, the private firm Cellmark Diagnostics in Germantown, Maryland, and the California Department of Justice laboratory in Berkeley. Prosecutors told jurors that the tests showed blood consistent with Simpson’s at the Bundy scene, blood consistent with the victims’ in the Bronco and on the Rockingham glove, and blood consistent with Nicole Brown Simpson’s on a sock found in Simpson’s bedroom.
The defense did not, for the most part, argue that the laboratory results were wrong in a narrow technical sense. It argued that the samples themselves were unreliable. In an eight-day cross-examination in April 1995, Scheck questioned LAPD criminalist Dennis Fung about how evidence had been collected, packaged and stored, and about errors in procedure by Fung and his trainee, Andrea Mazzola. Defense lawyer Robert Blasier questioned the LAPD chemist Gregory Matheson about a reference sample of Simpson’s blood: a nurse had drawn about 8 milliliters the day after the deaths, and police records did not account for roughly 1.5 milliliters of it. The defense said that blood could have been used to plant evidence. Matheson testified that estimates of the amounts used in testing were inexact.
Two items drew particular scrutiny. A bloodstain on the rear gate at Bundy was not collected until several weeks after the deaths. And the defense alleged that officers had put Nicole Brown Simpson’s blood on the sock found in the bedroom. A defense expert, the toxicologist Dr. Frederic Rieders, testified that tests found traces of EDTA, a preservative used in blood collection tubes, in the gate and sock stains, which he said pointed to blood drawn from a tube. FBI chemist Roger Martz, who ran those tests, testified in July 1995 that the stains “did not come from preserved blood,” and that what looked like EDTA could be other compounds or contamination. He also said tests of his own blood showed the same trace readings, because EDTA is a common food additive.
Another defense witness, the Denver microbiologist John Gerdes, testified about what he described as chronic, serious contamination at the LAPD laboratory, and said that because the Bronco had been broken into while in police custody, there could no longer be scientific confidence in samples taken from inside it. On cross-examination, Gerdes acknowledged that he had no special expertise in collecting or analyzing crime scene evidence.
The debate continued after the trial. In April 1997, a Justice Department Inspector General review of the FBI laboratory concluded that Martz had “poorly represented” the bureau in his Simpson testimony, while finding that he had not committed perjury.
The glove
The two leather gloves, a left found at Bundy and a right that Fuhrman testified he found at Rockingham, were among the prosecution’s most important exhibits. Prosecutors said they were Aris Isotoner leather lights, extra large and cashmere-lined. A store buyer testified that Nicole Brown Simpson had bought a pair of that style in December 1990, though she acknowledged that the receipt did not show the size or color.
On Thursday, June 15, 1995, after a brief sidebar conference, prosecutors asked Simpson to put the gloves on in front of the jury. Darden made the request. Simpson first pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves, then worked his hands into the stiff, bloodstained leather and told the jury they were “too tight.” The Los Angeles Times reported that the demonstration was widely perceived as a blow to the prosecution.
The prosecution tried to recover. The next day, Richard Rubin, a former general manager of the glove maker, testified that the gloves could have shrunk by nearly a full size from repeated soaking and drying, and Clark pointed out that the latex liners would also change the fit. Transcripts released the following week showed that Darden had told the judge at a sidebar that prosecutors had been told Simpson had stopped taking an anti-inflammatory arthritis medication, which they said could cause swelling. Cochran accused prosecutors of “being paranoid.” A UCLA rheumatologist told the Times that stopping such medication probably would not cause swelling to return overnight.
The moment produced the trial’s best-known line. In his closing argument in September 1995, Cochran told jurors, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” The New York Times later corrected its own obituary of Simpson to note that this, and not the popular misquotation “If the glove don’t fit,” was what Cochran said.
Mark Fuhrman
Detective Mark Fuhrman was among the detectives who went to Rockingham in the early morning hours of June 13 and was the officer who climbed over the locked gate, an entry made without a search warrant that police said was meant to check for other possible victims. He testified that he found the right glove there. The defense argued that he had moved it from Bundy and planted it.
On March 15, 1995, Fuhrman testified under cross-examination by F. Lee Bailey. Asked whether he had used a racial slur to describe Black people in the past ten years, he said he had not. Analysts at the time thought his calm demeanor had held up well under Bailey’s questioning.
That changed in August. The defense obtained tape recordings that an aspiring screenwriter, Laura Hart McKinny, had made of interviews with Fuhrman between 1985 and 1994. On the tapes, Fuhrman used the slur at least 41 times and described what the defense called 18 incidents of police misconduct. On August 31, 1995, Ito ruled that the jury could hear two of the uses of the slur, enough to contradict Fuhrman’s testimony, but barred most of the rest, including Fuhrman’s descriptions of misconduct.
On September 6, 1995, with the jury out of the room, Fuhrman returned to the stand. Uelmen asked him a series of questions, ending with “Did you plant or manufacture any evidence in this case?” On the advice of his lawyer, Darryl Mounger, Fuhrman answered, “I wish to assert my Fifth Amendment privilege,” and declined to answer any question about the case. Invoking the privilege is a constitutional right and is not an admission of anything.
A year later, on October 2, 1996, Fuhrman pleaded no contest to one felony count of perjury, admitting that he had lied when he testified that he had not used the slur in a decade. The case was prosecuted by the California Attorney General’s office because of a conflict at the district attorney’s office. Superior Court Judge John Ouderkirk sentenced him to three years’ probation and a $200 fine. The New York Times later described Fuhrman as the only person convicted of a crime in connection with the case. No court has found that Fuhrman or any other officer planted evidence.
The LAPD, race and Los Angeles in 1995
The Simpson trial came a few years after the 1991 police beating of the motorist Rodney King and the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which had already damaged the LAPD’s standing, especially among Black residents. The Christopher Commission, convened after the King beating, had focused largely on the practices and culture of patrol officers. The Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Boyarsky wrote in February 1995 that the Simpson trial was subjecting the department to its toughest scrutiny since that commission.
The defense made the police its central theme. Cochran argued that investigators had “contaminated, compromised and corrupted” the case. LAPD Chief Willie L. Williams pushed back publicly, saying the idea that detectives, officers and civilian technicians from several units could plot and keep a frame-up secret was “unbelievable.” After the verdict, the Times reported that the decision to try the case downtown, where suspicion of the police was considered higher, was among the factors analysts said had hurt the prosecution. Those same analysts singled out the prosecution’s decision to rely on Fuhrman.
The verdict
Closing arguments ended in late September 1995. The trial had produced 126 witnesses, 1,105 items of evidence and 45,000 pages of transcript. The jury reached its verdicts in less than four hours of deliberation.
Just after 10 a.m. on Tuesday, October 3, 1995, Deirdre Robertson, Ito’s clerk, read the verdicts: not guilty of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, and not guilty of the murder of Ronald Lyle Goldman. Simpson, who had spent 474 days in jail, waved at the jurors and mouthed “Thank you,” and he was released within about an hour. As he left court, the juror Lionel Cryer gave Simpson a raised-fist salute. Another juror, Brenda Moran, later said, “We were there for nine months. We didn’t need another nine months to decide.”
Across the country, people stopped to listen. The Los Angeles Times reported that stockbrokers stopped trading and long-distance phone calls dropped sharply. President Clinton interrupted a meeting to hear it. Outside the courthouse and in some neighborhoods there was cheering.
In a statement read in court by his son Jason, Simpson said the killers were still at large. “They are out there somewhere,” the statement said. “I can only hope that some day, despite every prejudicial thing that has been said about me, people will understand and believe that I would not, could not and did not kill anyone.”
The prosecutors spoke at a somber news conference. Garcetti said, “This was not, in our opinion, a close case.” Clark said her team had tried to make sure “that the lives of Ron and Nicole were not thrown away.” Darden said, “We came here in search of justice. You have to be the judges, I expect, as to whether or not any of us found it today. But I’m not bitter and I’m not angry.”
Fred Goldman spoke briefly. “Last June 13, 1994, was the worst nightmare of my life,” he said. “This is the second.”
Within the defense, there was division too. That night, Shapiro, in an interview with Barbara Walters of ABC News, criticized Cochran’s strategy: “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”
Public reaction and the racial divide
Polling captured how sharply reactions split. A Los Angeles Times poll taken in the days after the verdict found that most county residents disagreed with it, and that Black residents were more than four times as likely as white residents to believe Simpson was not guilty. Almost half of white respondents described themselves as “angry” at the verdict, compared with 4 percent of Black respondents. A CNN and Time magazine poll at the time found that 62 percent of white Americans surveyed believed Simpson was guilty, while 66 percent of Black Americans surveyed believed he was not. The Times poll also found broad support across groups for charging Fuhrman.
Some commentators argued that the jury had nullified the law to send a message about the police. Jurors who spoke publicly said doubts about the evidence, not a message, led them to acquit. The verdict answered one legal question: whether the state had proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury said it had not.
The civil trial
The acquittal ended the criminal case. Under the constitutional bar on double jeopardy, Simpson could never be tried again for the deaths. But a criminal acquittal does not prevent a civil lawsuit, which is decided under a different standard. Fred Goldman and Sharon Rufo, Ron Goldman’s parents, along with the estates of both victims, sued Simpson for wrongful death and related claims. The trial was held in Superior Court in Santa Monica, before Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki.
The civil trial looked very different. Fujisaki allowed no television cameras, and he barred the defense from making race a major issue. The Fuhrman tapes were not played. Simpson’s lawyer was Robert C. Baker; the lead lawyer for the Goldmans was Daniel Petrocelli. Because civil defendants can be compelled to testify, Simpson took the stand for four full days, and he told the jurors that he was innocent. The plaintiffs introduced new evidence, including 31 photographs of Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes of the style that had left the bloody prints at Bundy. In his deposition, Simpson had insisted he would never wear such shoes, and he called the first photo to surface a fake.
The standard of proof was also lower. A criminal jury must be unanimous and must find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. A civil jury in California decides by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning more likely than not, and only nine of twelve jurors need to agree.
On February 4, 1997, the civil jury unanimously found Simpson liable for the wrongful death of Ron Goldman and for battery against Nicole Brown Simpson. It awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages to Goldman’s parents; Nicole Brown Simpson’s estate, whose heirs were her two children, did not seek compensatory damages. On February 10, 1997, the jury, led by foreman Stephen Strati, added $25 million in punitive damages: $12.5 million to Nicole Brown Simpson’s estate and $12.5 million to Ron Goldman’s estate. The total judgment was $33.5 million.
Simpson appealed. On January 26, 2001, the California Court of Appeal affirmed the judgments in Rufo v. Simpson, finding no reversible error and rejecting the argument that the damages were excessive. The civil verdict is a finding of liability, not of criminal guilt. It means that a civil jury found it more likely than not that Simpson was responsible for the deaths. It did not alter the criminal acquittal, which remains final.
If I Did It
In November 2006, ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins, announced a book by Simpson titled “If I Did It,” to be published November 30 and paired with a two-part Fox television special in which Simpson was interviewed by the publisher Judith Regan. Both companies were owned by News Corporation. The project was presented as a hypothetical account of the killings, which Simpson had always denied committing.
The reaction was immediate. Several Fox affiliates said they would not air the special. On November 20, 2006, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, canceled both the book and the broadcast, calling it “an ill-considered project” and apologizing to the families of the victims. A corporation spokesman said Simpson was not expected to repay an $800,000 advance.
The manuscript then became part of the fight over the civil judgment. Fred Goldman sued, arguing that the deal had been structured to keep the money from the plaintiffs. The rights were held by a company called Lorraine Brooke Associates, whose shareholders were Simpson’s children and which was headed by his daughter Arnelle. That company went into bankruptcy, and on July 30, 2007, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge A. Jay Cristol in Miami approved an arrangement giving the book rights to the Goldman family to help satisfy the judgment. The judge had found the company was essentially a fraud set up to hide Simpson’s involvement. Lawyers for Nicole Brown Simpson’s father, Louis Brown, objected, arguing that all creditors should share equally. Simpson, who had been paid about $630,000, said most of the manuscript was written by a ghostwriter without his involvement.
The Goldman family published the book later in 2007 under a new subtitle, with added commentary, and printed the word “If” in small type on the cover. The book is a document of how Simpson and his publisher presented the case in 2006. It is not sworn testimony, and it did not change the legal record of the case.
Collecting the judgment
For the Goldmans, winning the civil case was the easy part. Simpson paid little. Records submitted in the criminal trial had put his net worth at about $11 million, and people with knowledge of the case told the New York Times he had about $3.5 million afterward. A 1999 auction of his Heisman Trophy and other memorabilia brought in about $500,000 for the plaintiffs.
In 2000 Simpson moved to Florida, bought a home south of Miami and lived largely on pensions from the NFL, the Screen Actors Guild and other sources, about $400,000 a year. Florida law protects a home and pension income from seizure to satisfy court judgments. By 2006, with interest, the debt had grown to about $38 million.
The Las Vegas case: an actual conviction
Simpson’s later criminal conviction came from an unrelated case in Nevada, and it is a separate matter from the 1994 deaths. In September 2007, Simpson and five other men, at least two of whom carried guns, confronted two sports memorabilia dealers, Bruce Fromong and Alfred Beardsley, in a room at the Palace Station Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas and took a trove of memorabilia. Simpson said he was trying to retrieve items that belonged to him. Four of the men with him pleaded guilty and testified against him.
On October 3, 2008, thirteen years to the day after his acquittal in Los Angeles, a Clark County jury convicted Simpson of 12 felonies, including armed robbery and kidnapping. His co-defendant, Clarence Stewart, was convicted of the same charges. On December 5, 2008, Simpson apologized in court. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” he said. “I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.” Clark County District Judge Jackie Glass sentenced him to a minimum of 9 years and a maximum of 33 years in prison. She said the evidence was overwhelming and that she was not influenced by the 1995 trial.
On October 22, 2010, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed Simpson’s conviction, while ordering a new trial for Stewart on the ground that he should have been tried separately. In 2013, the Nevada Parole Board granted Simpson parole on some of the counts, citing his conduct in prison, but he remained in custody on the others.
On July 20, 2017, after a hearing of about 90 minutes conducted by videoconference from Lovelock Correctional Center, the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners voted 4 to 0 to grant parole on the remaining counts. Commissioner Tony Corda said Simpson was at “low risk to re-offend.” Simpson told the board, “I am sorry the things turned out the way they did.” Fromong spoke in his favor. Simpson was released on October 1, 2017. At an early discharge hearing on November 30, 2021, ratified on December 6, 2021, the board discharged him from parole, which otherwise would have expired in February 2022.
Death and the estate
Simpson announced in 2023 that he had cancer. He died on April 10, 2024, at his home in Las Vegas, at 76. His death certificate listed prostate cancer as the cause. His lawyer, Malcolm LaVergne, became executor of the estate.
The civil judgment did not die with him. In July 2024, Fred Goldman’s lawyers filed a creditor’s claim against the estate that, with decades of interest, sought just over $117 million. In November 2025, LaVergne approved a claim of nearly $58 million plus interest in a filing in Clark County District Court. The estate’s assets were far smaller: the Los Angeles Times reported they were worth just under $600,000, including proceeds from an auction of Simpson’s belongings at which a replica Heisman Trophy sold for $42,700. The Goldmans’ lawyer, Michaelle Rafferty, called the agreement a “positive acknowledgement of the debt,” and noted that acknowledging it did not mean it had been paid. Over three decades, the families collected only a fraction of what the court awarded.
Media legacy
Some news outlets called it “The Trial of the Century.” The Bronco chase drew about 95 million viewers, and Court TV’s single camera, which Ito kept in place over the objections of thousands of letter writers, turned a criminal trial into a daily national program. The civil trial, by contrast, was held without television cameras, and most of the public learned about it from news reports.
The case has never left the screen. In 2016 it returned in two major productions: FX’s scripted series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” and ESPN’s documentary “O.J.: Made in America.” Both introduced the case to viewers who had not watched it live, and both renewed the arguments over policing, race, celebrity and domestic violence that the trial had raised.
Myth versus record
- Myth: The civil verdict proved Simpson guilty of murder. Record: It found him civilly liable under a preponderance standard. Only a criminal court can find guilt, and the criminal jury acquitted him.
- Myth: Simpson went to prison for the 1994 deaths. Record: His prison sentence was for the 2007 Las Vegas robbery and kidnapping, a separate case with separate victims.
- Myth: Cochran said “If the glove don’t fit.” Record: His words were “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
- Myth: The jury openly said it acquitted to send a message about the police. Record: Jurors who spoke publicly said reasonable doubt about the evidence decided the case.
- Myth: A court found that police planted evidence. Record: No court made that finding. Fuhrman’s perjury plea concerned his testimony about the slur, not the evidence.
- Myth: “If I Did It” is a confession. Record: It was presented as a hypothetical account. Simpson said a ghostwriter wrote most of it, and he always denied the killings.
- Myth: The families were paid the $33.5 million. Record: They collected only a fraction, and the estate was worth far less than the debt it acknowledged in 2025.
People
- Nicole Brown Simpson: killed June 12, 1994, at 35; Simpson’s former wife and mother of Sydney and Justin.
- Ronald Lyle Goldman: killed June 12, 1994, at 25; a waiter at Mezzaluna.
- O.J. Simpson (1947 to 2024): acquitted of both murders in 1995; found civilly liable in 1997; convicted in Nevada in 2008.
- Marcia Clark, Christopher Darden, William Hodgman, Woody Clarke, Rockne Harmon: prosecutors under District Attorney Gil Garcetti.
- Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, Alan Dershowitz, Gerald Uelmen, Robert Blasier, Carl Douglas, Robert Kardashian: defense lawyers.
- Lance A. Ito: trial judge in People v. Simpson.
- Mark Fuhrman: LAPD detective; pleaded no contest to perjury in 1996.
- Fred Goldman, Kim Goldman, Sharon Rufo: Ron Goldman’s father, sister and mother.
- Hiroshi Fujisaki: civil trial judge. Daniel Petrocelli, Robert C. Baker: civil trial lawyers.
- Jackie Glass: Nevada trial judge in the 2008 case.
Timeline
- 1989: Simpson pleads no contest to spousal battery.
- June 12 to 13, 1994: Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are killed at 875 South Bundy Drive; bodies found after midnight.
- June 17, 1994: Simpson is charged; Bronco chase; surrender at Rockingham.
- July 8, 1994: Judge Kennedy-Powell orders him to stand trial.
- January 24, 1995: Opening statements.
- June 15, 1995: Glove demonstration.
- September 6, 1995: Fuhrman invokes the Fifth Amendment.
- October 3, 1995: Not guilty verdicts.
- October 2, 1996: Fuhrman pleads no contest to perjury.
- February 4 and 10, 1997: Civil jury finds Simpson liable; $33.5 million judgment.
- November 20, 2006: News Corporation cancels “If I Did It.”
- July 30, 2007: Bankruptcy court awards book rights to the Goldman family.
- September 2007: Palace Station confrontation in Las Vegas.
- October 3 and December 5, 2008: Nevada conviction and sentence of 9 to 33 years.
- October 22, 2010: Nevada Supreme Court affirms.
- July 20 and October 1, 2017: Parole granted; release.
- December 2021: Early discharge from parole.
- April 10, 2024: Simpson dies in Las Vegas.
- November 2025: Estate accepts a claim of nearly $58 million.
Frequently asked questions
Was O.J. Simpson convicted of murder?
No. A Los Angeles jury acquitted him of both murders on October 3, 1995. Double jeopardy bars any retrial.
Why was he found liable in the civil trial?
A civil jury in Santa Monica found him liable in 1997 under the preponderance of the evidence standard, which is lower than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. It heard different evidence, including Simpson’s own testimony and the Bruno Magli photographs.
How much was the civil judgment?
$33.5 million: $8.5 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.
Did the families collect the money?
Only a fraction. Florida law protected Simpson’s home and pensions, and his estate was worth under $600,000 when it accepted a claim of nearly $58 million in 2025.
What happened with the glove?
On June 15, 1995, Simpson tried on the gloves in court and said they were too tight. Prosecutors argued the leather had shrunk and that latex liners affected the fit.
What did Mark Fuhrman plead to?
No contest to one felony count of perjury, in October 1996, for testifying that he had not used a racial slur in ten years. He received three years’ probation and a $200 fine.
Did a court find that evidence was planted?
No. The defense argued it, and Fuhrman invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked, but no court found that evidence was planted.
Why did Simpson go to prison?
For the 2007 Las Vegas armed robbery and kidnapping. He was convicted in 2008, sentenced to 9 to 33 years, paroled in 2017 and discharged from parole in 2021.
Is “If I Did It” a confession?
No. It was presented as a hypothetical account. The Goldman family obtained the rights through bankruptcy court in 2007 to help satisfy the judgment.
When did Simpson die?
April 10, 2024, at his home in Las Vegas, of prostate cancer. He was 76.
Citations & Sources
Sources
- O.J. Pleads No Contest in Beating (Los Angeles Times, 1989)
- O.J. Ordered to Undergo Counseling (Los Angeles Times, 1989)
- Slaying in Brentwood (Los Angeles Times, 1994)
- THE SIMPSON CASE: THE FUGITIVE: Simpson Is Charged, Chased, Arrested (New York Times, 1994)
- THE SIMPSON CASE: THE VICTIM; Nicole Brown Simpson: Slain At the Dawn of a Better Life (New York Times, 1994)
- Dreams of Better Days Died That Night (Los Angeles Times, 1994)
- Judge Cites ‘Ample Evidence,’ Orders Simpson to Stand Trial (Los Angeles Times, 1994)
- Simpson Team Taking Aim at DNA Laboratory (New York Times, 1994)
- Ito Approves a Televised Trial (Los Angeles Times, 1994)
- Excerpts of Opening Statements by Simpson Prosecutors (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Abuse Expert Stirs Uproar With Simpson Defense Role (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Simpson Dreamed of Killing, Witness Says (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Battered LAPD Image Faces Its Own Trial (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Detective Tells of Trail of Blood at Simpson Home (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Limo Driver’s Testimony Centers on Bronco, Luggage (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Simpson Defense Presses Police Conspiracy Claim (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Jury Rapt as Simpson Tries Bloody Gloves (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Simpson Prosecutors Focus on Shrinkage of Gloves (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Simpson Jury Hears Details on Shoe Prints (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Prosecutors Say Simpson Trick Thwarted Glove Test (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Prosecutors Say Hair, Fibers Link Simpson to Scene (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- F.B.I. Disputes Simpson Defense on Tainted Blood (New York Times, 1995)
- DNA Witness Concedes a Lack of Expertise (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Excerpts From the Ruling on the Fuhrman Tapes (New York Times, 1995)
- Fuhrman Invokes 5th Amendment, Refuses to Testify (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Scheck Moves From Sidelines to Center Stage (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- NOT GUILTY: THE OVERVIEW; Jury Clears Simpson in Double Murder; Spellbound Nation Divides on Verdict (New York Times, 1995)
- The Verdict Is In: A City Divided (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Miscalculations, Bad Luck Hurt Prosecution (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Snubbing the Law to Vote on Conscience (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Most in County Disagree With Simpson Verdicts (Los Angeles Times, 1995)
- Ex-Wife Fabricated Domestic Abuse Charges, Simpson Says (Los Angeles Times, 1996)
- Fuhrman Enters Plea of No Contest to Perjury (Los Angeles Times, 1996)
- Civil Jury Finds Simpson Liable in Pair of Killings (New York Times, 1997)
- Jury Heard Much Different Case in Civil Trial (Los Angeles Times, 1997)
- Simpson Verdict: $25 Million (Los Angeles Times, 1997)
- Probe Faults Performance of FBI Worker in Simpson Case (Los Angeles Times, 1997)
- RUFO v. SIMPSON (2001) (California Court of Appeal via FindLaw, 2001)
- Fox, News Corp., Pull Plug on O.J. Simpson Project (NPR, 2006)
- Fox drop kicks O.J. special (Variety, 2006)
- Goldman Family Gets Rights To O.J.’s Book (CBS News, 2007)
- After Apologies, Simpson Is Sentenced to at Least 9 Years for Armed Robbery (New York Times, 2008)
- O.J. Simpson appeal denied by Nevada Supreme Court (Las Vegas Sun, 2010)
- OJ Simpson granted parole after serving nine years of armed robbery sentence (The Guardian, 2017)
- O.J. Simpson granted early discharge from parole in Nevada (KSNV News 3 Las Vegas, 2021)
- O.J. Simpson, Football Star Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76 (New York Times, 2024)
- O.J. Simpson dies of cancer at age 76, his family says (CNN, 2024)
- O.J. Simpson died of prostate cancer, death certificate says (Los Angeles Times, 2024)
- O.J. Simpson’s estate agrees to pay nearly $58M to Ron Goldman’s father (NBC News, 2025)
- After three decades, O.J. Simpson’s estate agrees to pay millions to Goldman family (Los Angeles Times, 2025)
Image credits
- Photo: Gerald Johnson, U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
- Photo: Larry D. Moore, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.
- Photo: John Mathew Smith & www.celebrity-photos.com, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.
- Photo: TwinsofSedona, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.
- Photo: Jeff Costlow, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
- Photo: Jengod, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Photo: John Phelan, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.
- Photo: Doncram, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Browse every case in the Case File Index
Discover more from The Dark Side of Humanity
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
