Following OJ Simpson’s death in April, JOE STREET spoke to Matt Elton about the 1995 murder trial that grabbed the attention of audiences around the world – and what the crime and its aftermath tell us about recent US history
BEHIND THE NEWS
How famous was OJ Simpson in the United States in the mid-1990s?
The fact he was often referred to only by his initials tells us just how famous and popular he was. Simpson had been a star American football player in college and university, and had gone on to become a record-setting running back for the Buffalo Bills team in the 1970s. In more recent years, he had turned to acting, with roles in a number of successful films and a string of adverts for a vehicle rental firm. So he’d become a pop-culture phenomenon as well as one of the most prominent sportsmen in the US. I definitely think that it’s easy, 30 years on, to forget the full extent of his celebrity.
Was the fact he was a prominent black athlete a specific dimension to his fame?
Simpson had emerged in the wake of the huge fame of sportsmen such as Muhammad Ali and [basketball star] Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who linked their racial identity with political activism. Simpson was one of the figures who attempted to move beyond that, prefiguring what celebrities including Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan would later do on a larger scale by saying: I’m a brand in myself, and that brand is more important than my racial identity.
In 1985 Simpson had married Nicole Brown, who he’d met in 1977 when she was an 18-year-old waitress. The couple divorced in 1992.
This first half of the 1990s was a period of heightened racial tension in the US. Was that a factor in this story?
It’s vital to understand the city that formed the backdrop to these events: Los Angeles. In the mid-1990s, its African-American and white communities lived largely separately. This was partly a result of race, but also class and wealth: African-American people tended to have lower incomes, and tended to be unable to buy in white areas. The city really experienced segregation, even though it wasn’t legally codified.
The LA police department was renowned for its racism and brutality, too. In 1991, for instance, its officers had been caught on camera viciously beating an African-American man named Rodney King, but were acquitted. That verdi
