He plays golf a lot. Visits his grown kids on occasion. And checks in with his parole officer.
Almost 25 years to the day of the killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, O.J. Simpson is living a relatively quiet life in Las Vegas, the city he’s called home since his 2017 release from prison after being locked up—not on murder charges, but for trying to steal his own stuff.
“The town has been good to me,” Simpson said of Vegas, the Washington Post reports. “Everybody I meet seems to be apologizing for what happened to me here.”
Interesting.
Well, lets see: What had happened was that in 2007—years after the former football great miraculously was found not guilty of murdering ex-wife Nicole and Goldman (all praises are due the brilliant legal mind of the late Johnnie Cochran)—Simpson got the bright idea to roll up on some memorabilia dealers and try to take back some of his trinkets collectibles from his Hall of Fame days.
Yeah, not so bright.
Simpson, who at the very least figuratively got away with murder, got himself convicted of robbery and kidnapping in that crazy caper and ended up spending nine years in prison. He has lived in Vegas since his release in October 2017.
Simpson says he and his family aren’t interested in revisiting the past, a past for which he still owes the bulk of a $33.5 million civil judgment against him for the wrongful deaths of both Nicole Simpson and Goldman.
“The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again,” Simpson told the Associated Press, according to the Post. “My family and I have moved on.”
The “subject” at hand is the 25th anniversary of the killings of Nicole Simpson and Goldman, whose bodies were found June 12, 1994, inside Nicole Simpson’s California home.
The prosecution of O.J. Simpson in their deaths was heralded as the “Trial of the Century,” highlighted by Cochran’s often-quoted pronouncement on behalf of his client, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” said when a blood-soaked glove Simpson was asked to try on during the trial didn’t fit.
The trial made household names of folks like the defense team’s Cochran and (Kim and them’s daddy) Robert Kardashian; Judge Lance Ito; and prosecutors Chris Darden and Marcia Clark.
O.J. Simpson’s acquittal shone a light on the deep racial chasm that existed in this nation over issues of criminal justice, race, celebrity and domestic violence. It was a take on #MeToo before #MeToo (or Twitter) even existed.
And 25 years later, the issues—and the chasm—are just as deep as ever.