O. J. Simpson Might Have Been A Complicated Figure, But His Legacy is Pretty Simple
By stacy lee kong
Image: ESPN
Content warning: This newsletter contains descriptions of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. If you are experiencing abuse, find an emergency shelter in Canada via Shelter Safe.
Immediately after news broke yesterday that O. J. Simpson had died from prostate cancer, it felt like every news article or social post I scrolled past described him as “controversial” and his legacy as “complicated.”
For example:
NBC News: O.J. Simpson leaves behind a complicated legacy after death.
Sky News: Former controversial NFL player dead at 76: Who was OJ Simpson?
MSNBC: Reflecting on O.J. Simpson's complicated life.
The Guardian: OJ Simpson: the complicated cultural legacy of a fallen star.
CNN: Controversial until the end of time: the legacy of O.J. Simpson.
Entertainment Tonight: Here's a look back at O.J. Simpson's complicated life.
As a journalist, I obviously understand why it’s sometimes necessary to have a one-word descriptor for your breaking news headline. And Simpson was complicated—or at least, the space he occupied in America’s cultural landscape was. But describing someone’s legacy as “complicated” has become a bit of a trope that often seems less about acknowledging nuance and more about downplaying their misdeeds. (See: Karl Lagerfeld, Coco Chanel, hockey icon Bobby Hull.) To be clear, I’d never object to an argument that multiple things can be true! But especially in this case, it feels like using the words “complicated” and “controversial” reflect the sensationalized and gossipy way we’ve tended to talk about Simpson over the past three decades, which only feels appropriate if you don’t think too hard about the other people at the centre of this so-called controversy: Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, who were brutally murdered on June 12, 1994. As soon as you remember those people, though, I think that phrasing doesn’t feel… serious enough, maybe? It certainly contributes to a sort of posthumous sanitization for Simpson, which yes, is common when a celebrity dies, but also so frustrating from a feminist perspective.
Also, a more precise word does exist: abusive.
O. J. Simpson’s abusive behaviour hasn’t been a secret for decades now
For legal/libel purposes: In 1995, after that much-publicized 11-month trial, Simpson was acquitted of murder charges—though he was found liable for Brown Simpson and Goldman’s deaths in a 1997 civil suit brought by Goldman’s father. He was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages to the Brown and Goldman families, which he never did. He was also never convicted of domestic violence.
But… as I think we know by now, the absence of convictions and criminal charges don’t necessarily indicate innocence. Also, women's testimony on crimes committed against them counts as evidence as much as photos and witness testimony do. And, we have all of that.
For starters, during their 15-year relationship, Brown Simpson documented 60 specific occasions when she says Simpson abused her in a diary that was later found in a safe deposit box alongside “photos of her bruised face and apology letters from Simpson,” per the Daily Mail. They had met in 1977; at the time, she was an 18-year-old waitress at The Daisy, a Beverly Hills restaurant and nightclub, and he was a married, 30-year-old mega celebrity who had been described two years earlier by People magazine as “the first black athlete to become a bona fide lovable media superstar.” This description was as much for his accomplishments on the football field as for his lucrative endorsements, acting career and commentating gigs. According to that diary, Simpson hit her for the first time in 1978, when she was 19, and her account is horrifying: “1st time he beat me up after Louis + Nunie Marx’s anniversary party — started on the street corner of N.Y.C. 5th Avenue at about 9 o’clock. Threw me on the floor hit me kicked me. We went to Sherry Netherland Hotel where he continued to beat me for hours as I kept crawling for the door. Called my mother a whore. Hit me while he fucked me.”
The diary entries go on to document dozens of other occasions where she says he beat and brutalized her, spanning the first eight years of their relationship, the seven years they were married and the two years where he was stalking her after their divorce.
But it’s not just her diary. In 1989, Simpson was charged with spousal battery. According to the New York Times, which covered the 1994 release of police records stemming from that charge, “Mr. Simpson beat his wife, Nicole, so badly on Jan. 1, 1989, that she required treatment at a hospital. The records also portray her as terrified for her life. When the police arrived at the couple's house after the beating, the records show, Mrs. Simpson ran out of the bushes, yelling: ‘He's going to kill me! He's going to kill me!’ She told the police that they had been called to her house on eight other occasions after her husband had beaten her, the records say, and Mr. Simpson complained about the frequency of the police calls… She said her husband had kicked and slapped her. She told the police: ‘You never do anything about him. You talk to him and then you leave. I want him arrested. I want him out so I can get my kids.’ Mr. Simpson then appeared at the gate and began yelling at his wife. When the police told him that they were going to arrest him, he yelled: ‘The police have been out here eight times before and now you're going to arrest me for this! This is a family matter! Why do you want to make a big deal of it? We can handle it!’”
Simpson pleaded no contest to the charge and was sentenced to 120 hours of community service, two years’ probation and a embarrassingly small fine, something then-Los Angeles district attorney Gil Garcetti characterized as “special treatment.”
And then there’s Simpson’s own accounts of his behaviour, including interviews where he calmly describes his financial control over Brown Simpson and disrespect for her belongings, both of which are classic warning signs of abuse.
It’s also not just Brown Simpson. After his 1995 acquittal, Simpson began a relationship with 21-year-old Christie Prody that lasted for 13 years and, according to her, followed a similar dynamic to his relationship with his ex-wife. In 2009, Prody told Good Morning America that he “subjected her to constant physical and emotional abuse. She says Simpson threatened to kill her, an accusation he has denied. She said she tried to leave on several occasions. ‘If I did he would find me. [The] only place I had to go were to friends of ours. He would come by… threaten, manipulate. I had no choice at that point. I had nowhere to go.”
Of course, there is important nuance here
To me, that is enough evidence to justify a news outlet being specific about the ‘complicated’ parts of Simpson’s legacy, even if it also had to use the word allegedly to cover itself legally. That said, I understand why so many people want to acknowledge the complex space Simpson occupies in pop culture. Because that part actually is complicated.
As Vox’s Constance Grady wrote this week, “around Simpson, our fraught and confused feelings about race, gender, celebrity, and spectacle swirl into a vexed storm. He is the point in time and space where all our sins meet… Simpson’s celebrity was, perhaps, able to protect him from a guilty sentence in criminal court. Yet the act of cashing in his social capital in such a way seems to have transformed fame into infamy. There was a kind of hole in the fabric of American culture where a hero used to be, and it was hard to know what stood in its place now.”
I would argue that, while his celebrity played a role in his acquittal, there were other factors. Like, you know, racism. Until Brown Simpson’s murder, Simpson was so famous and so beloved that he was able to ‘transcend’ his Blackness in the eyes of white Americans, to a certain degree and for a short time, anyway. Some of this was due to his own efforts to distance himself from his race. As filmmaker Ezra Edelman, who made the five-part ESPN documentary O.J.: Made In America, told NPR’s Code Switch podcast in 2016, he often used the phrase, “I’m not Black, I’m O. J.,” deliberately chased white acceptance and entry into white spaces and seemed totally uninterested in even acknowledging the existence of racial injustice. (In fact, this was a man who “charm[ed] local police officers by inviting them over for barbecue, in the same city that burned during the Watts riots of the 1960s and again after the Rodney King beating in 1992,” NPR points out.)
But some of it was due to America’s enthusiasm for a Black man who wasn’t ‘too’ Black, and who embraced the racist perception that he was ‘one of the good ones.’ But then, during the trial, the prosecution worked hard to emphasize Simpson’s Blackness, which backfired because of everything else going on in the world. The trial happened just a few years after Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles police officers, who were later acquitted, sparking five days of riots in the city—and several commissions that found ample evidence of racism and excessive force in both the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. As Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Newton explained this week, “whatever one thinks about Simpson’s guilt or innocence in the double murder, it’s easy to understand why jurors in the case would have questions—even doubts—about a case investigated by officers whose colleagues had beaten Rodney King and by a detective whose racism was something he bragged about [ed note: and who invoked his 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination while testifying, including on the question of whether he planted or manufactured evidence]. The LAPD had forfeited its presumption of honesty.”
I also think it’s important to consider gender when we think about Simpson’s cultural significance. I’ve written before about the ways women of colour are expected to downplay individual harm to protect their communities, which is especially fraught for Black women and girls, who are more likely to experience some forms of gender-based violence, including sexual violence, physical violence and stalking by an intimate partner, than Hispanic, white or Asian women and girls. For example, former music executive Drew Dixon, who is suing L.A. Reid for sexual assault and harassment and has accused Russell Simmons of rape, posted a tweet about the way she and her team at Def Jam reacted to Simpson’s acquittal (with “cheering… so intense that it felt like the building might fall down”), and how in hindsight, that reaction was so clearly about the “celebration of patriarchy and disregard of a female victim.” That’s a super important reflection, I think, especially since Dixon says she was being harassed by her boss during that time. Similarly, Jennifer Taylor-Skinner, the founder and host of political podcast and website The Electorette, has talked about being a student at UCLA at the time of the trial, and how wild it was to “[root] for this man that didn’t like us, because he symbolized some vindication against a system that also despised us.”
So, sure: complicated. But still, when we talk about complicated legacies, it doesn’t feel like an attempt to delve into that complexity as much as a way to mute it.
But there’s a reason his violence and abuse have overshadowed his talent: because it should
This news cycle also brings to mind other examples of celebrities whose power, fame and wealth were considered justifiable reasons to undermine their female victims. Think, Johnny Depp’s obsessive fanbase, who, egged on by bots, spread misinformation and viciously attacked Amber Heard during the defamation trial he brought against her. Or Angelina Jolie’s recent allegation that Brad Pitt had begun abusing her “well before” the 2016 incident that led to their divorce, a news story that has received relatively little attention—though what I’ve seen has been split between straightforward reporting and anti-Angelina trolls who see her bisexuality, former ‘bad girl’ image and perceived ‘difficulty’ as either proof she’s lying, or justification for her treatment. It’s hard not to see parallels between this phenomenon of downplaying a woman’s abuse to protect allegedly abusive men and the way Simpson and his legal team downplayed his abusive behaviour during the trial. (As feminist writer Andrea Dworkin reminds us in her excellent 2019 piece, “In Memory of Nicole Brown Simpson,” “O.J. Simpson’s defense team asked Judge Lance A. Ito to order the prosecution to say domestic discord rather than domestic violence or even spousal abuse—already euphemisms for wife-beating—and to disallow the words battered wife and stalker. Ito refused to alter reality by altering language but some media complied— for example, Rivera Live, where domestic discord became a new term of art. The lawyer who successfully defended William Kennedy Smith on a rape charge also used that term systematically.”)
And all of that plays into the memeification of Simpson, which creates a sort of rhetorical distance between the man as a pop cultural figure and his behaviour. I mean, think about how we have talked and thought about this case over the decades. From repeating “if [the glove] doesn’t fit, you must acquit” enough times to make it what some have described as the most iconic or memorable quotation of the ‘90s, to turning Simpson’s white Bronco and the infamous police chase into memes, to treating him as something of a joke in the later decades of his life (something he quite deliberately encouraged), we’ve been buying into the spectacle instead of centring, or even just remembering, the reason for that spectacle—the brutal murders of Brown Simpson and Goldman.
So… I think the reason the words ‘complicated’ and ‘controversial’ don’t sit right with me is that, even if they’re not inaccurate, they speak to the wrong impulse—to protect a legacy that the actual man wasn’t overly concerned about living up to—instead of acknowledging the simple truth: he was an American hero for a short time, but he spent the vast majority of his life behaving like a monster.
It’s Here! Not Bad For Some Immigrants, Ep. 1: WTF Does ‘The Immigrant Experience’ Even Mean?
We’re kicking off season 2 of Friday Talks with a conversation about ‘the immigrant experience,’ Or rather, why there’s no such things as a singular immigrant experience, even though we’re often told all newcomers go through the same things (think: hardship, culture shock and striving to assimilate). Featuring author and public speaker Bee Quammie, journalist Pacinthe Mattar and Friday Things assistant editor Ruth Young, this candid chat delves into their varied immigrant experiences, from growing up second-gen and wishing ‘immigrant’ was a label that applied, to identifying as a third-culture kid who doesn’t seem herself as an immigrant at all, to being an immigrant who isn’t perceived as one. Watch now!
And Did You Hear About…
Trader Joe’s alleged pattern of ripping off indie food businesses’ products—especially those making so-called ethnic foods.
This smart essay about ‘authentic’ Black stories.
YouTuber Kayla Says’ spot-on video essay about JoJo Siwa’s (very bad and annoying) rebrand.
All the hilarious—and often convincing—hate reads in Delia Cai’s Deez Links newsletter. (First link explains the concept, second link is the reads themselves.)
Them’s nuanced look at how trans makeup artists and stylists are influencing red carpet fashion—and why it matters that trans aesthetics are going mainstream while trans rights are simultaneously being eroded.
The TikToker who studies how climate change is affecting food, often with a side of pop culture analysis. (After I watched this video, I started seeing this everywhere.)
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