(WBEN) - Former Buffalo Bills star running back, who famously stood trial for the murders of his former wife and her friend, has died at the age of 76.
Simpson's family made the announcement in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Thursday morning.
It was reported in February that Simpson had been undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, though he had posted a video on X denying he was in hospice care.
The former USC star running back and Heisman Trophy winner became a household name in Buffalo and beyond between 1969 and 1977, where he rushed for 10,183 yards and 57 touchdowns. He was the league's leading rusher four times while playing with the Bills.
In 1973, Simpson became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season and won league MVP honors. That in a year the Bills missed the playoffs, making him the second and last player to win NFL MVP honors on a team that failed to qualify for the postseason.
The six-time Pro Bowler and five-time All-Pro went on to play 11 total seasons in the league, two more after the Bills with the San Francisco 49ers, and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985 in his first year of eligibility.
"O.J. Simpson was the first player to reach a rushing mark many thought could not be attained in a 14-game season when he topped 2,000 yards," said Pro Football Hall of Fame President Jim Porter in a statement. "His on-field contributions will be preserved in the Hall’s archives in Canton, Ohio."
Then in 1994, Simpson was arrested and charged with the murder of his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. Both the chase leading up to his arrest and lengthy trial were highly publicized.
A criminal court jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to family members of Brown and Goldman.
A decade later, still shadowed by the California wrongful death judgment, Simpson led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns. A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other felonies.
Imprisoned at age 61, he served nine years in a remote Northern Nevada prison, including a stint as a gym janitor. He was not contrite when he was released on parole in October 2017. The parole board heard him insist yet again that he was only trying to retrieve sports memorabilia and family heirlooms stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.
"I’ve basically spent a conflict-free life, you know," Simpson, whose parole ended in late 2021, said.
Public fascination with Simpson never faded. Many debated if he had been punished in Las Vegas for his acquittal in Los Angeles. In 2016, he was the subject of both an FX miniseries and five-part ESPN documentary.
"I don’t think most of America believes I did it," Simpson told The New York Times in 1995, a week after a jury determined he did not kill Brown and Goldman. "I’ve gotten thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me."
12 years later, following an outpouring of public outrage, Rupert Murdoch cancelled a planned book by the News Corp-owned HarperCollins in which Simpson offered his hypothetical account of the killings. It was to be titled, "If I Did It."
Goldman’s family, still doggedly pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment, won control of the manuscript. They retitled the book "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer."
"It’s all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals," Simpson told The Associated Press at the time.
He collected $880,000 in advance money for the book, paid through a third party.
"It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead," he said.
Less than two months after losing the rights to the book, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.
And, of course, Simpson went on to other fame.
One of the artifacts of his murder trial, the carefully tailored tan suit he wore when he was acquitted, was later donated and placed on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Simpson had been told the suit would be in the hotel room in Las Vegas, but it turned out it wasn’t there.
Orenthal James Simpson was born July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidized housing projects.
After graduating from high school, he enrolled at City College of San Francisco for a year and a half before transferring to the University of Southern California for the spring 1967 semester.
He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day so he could begin preparing for his first season with USC — which, in large part because of Simpson, won that year’s national championship.
Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He accepted the statue on the same day that his first child, Arnelle, was born.
He had two sons, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife; one of those boys, Aaren, drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.
Simpson and Brown were married in 1985. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.
"We don’t need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives," he told the AP 25 years after the double slayings. "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."