“He was wrong, but I understand the sentiment.”
That was how the patron saint of restraint, O.J. Simpson, captioned a video he tweeted out addressing Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars ceremony.
Simpson goes on to equate his own life experience to what Smith and wife Jada Pinkett Smith experienced when Rock made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s shaved head. (Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.)
“Uh, look, I understood the feeling. In my life, I've been through a lot of crap. I was raising two young kids and every comedian in the country had an O.J.
routine, and don't think I wouldn't want to b-slap a couple of those guys,” Simpson said in the video.
“You've gotta accept it. It’s humor,” Simpson says. “And I didn't even think that was all that egregious. I thought it was a semi-unfunny joke, but I don't know. I don’t get it.”
Simpson was indeed the butt of many comedians’ jokes during his yearlong trial in the mid-90s for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and in the decades since his controversial acquittal, during which he would serve nine years of a 33-year sentence for armed robbery and kidnapping in a separate incident before being paroled in 2017.
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