25 years after the killings that transformed him from football hero to murder suspect, O.J. Simpson says ... ‘Life is fine’

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES

Twenty-five years after the grisly killings that transformed him from Hall of Fame football hero to murder suspect, 71-year-old O.J. Simpson says he is happy and healthy living in Las Vegas, plays golf nearly every day and stays in touch with his children.

“Life is fine,” Simpson recently told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home.

He added that neither he nor his children want to talk about June 12, 1994, the night his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death.

Simpson was ultimately acquitted of the crime in what came to be known as “The Trial of the Century.”

“We don’t need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives,” he said as today’s anniversary of the killings approached. “The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again. My family and I have moved on to what we call the ‘no negative zone.’ We focus on the positives.”

Relatives of the two victims are disgusted Simpson is able to live the way he does while their loved ones had their lives cut short so tragically.

“I don’t suffocate in my grief,” Goldman’s sister, Kim, told the AP in an interview. “But every milestone that my kid hits, every milestone that I hit, you know, those are just reminders of what I’m not able to share with my brother and what he is missing out on.”

Ron Goldman, then 25, was returning a pair of sunglasses that Nicole Brown Simpson’s mother had left at a restaurant where he worked when he and Simpson’s ex-wife were killed.

Simpson’s televised trial lasted nearly a year and became a national obsession. Represented by a legal “Dream Team,” he was acquitted by a jury in 1995 in a verdict that split the country along racial lines, with many white Americans believing he got away with murder and many black people considering him innocent.

He has continued to declare his innocence. The murder case is officially listed as unsolved.

The victims’ families subsequently filed a civil suit against him, and in 1997 he was ordered to pay $33.5 million. Some of his property was seized and auctioned, but most of the judgment has not been paid.

He later served nine years in prison for robbery and kidnapping over an attempt to steal back some of his sports memorabilia from a Las Vegas hotel room. He insisted his conviction and sentence were unfair but said: “I believe in the legal system and I honored it. I served my time.”

For a man who once lived for the spotlight, Simpson has generally kept a low profile since his release from prison in Nevada in October 2017. Many expected him to return to Florida, where he had lived for several years. But friends in Las Vegas persuaded him to stay there.

“The town has been good to me,” Simpson said. “Everybody I meet seems to be apologizing for what happened to me here.”

Simpson is among the most sought-after figures in town for selfies. But the glamor of his early life is just a memory. After his football career, Simpson became a pitchman, actor and commentator. Once a multimillionaire, most of his fortune was spent defending himself from the murder charges.

Simpson declined to discuss his finances other than to say he lives on pensions.