O.J. SIMPSON DEAD AT 76 After Cancer Battle

he may be a murderer, but he is still someones father whose children are hurting right now.

condolences to khloe kardashian.

 

TBH, I never cared for the OJ case when it was happening. Never took a side on if he was or wasn't guilty. Feeling at the time was more annoyance. Annoyed that TV channels paused whatever regular programs was on, for the Bronco chase, and later the trial stuff. It's not that the case wasn't tragic, I just didn't like the fact a celeb's case was so over exposed. They don't do that with other murder cases. A double murder is tragic. But choosing to cover one set of victims versus others for TV ratings is vulture-like.

Anecdotal story. This was years (decades) later after the verdict. there was a renowned detective who profiled the case. He had a speaking event where I worked. The talk was mostly about other things like leadership...etc, but he covered some of his high profile cases. For OJ, he said the alibi for OJ's son was very weak. Presumably he was referring to Jason Sampson (25 at the time). That as the investigation went, OJ tried to get the attention to be on him (instead of his son). The implication was that Jason did it (or was involved). That although OJ, didn't want to go to jail, he rather the risk of be found guilty to be on him than his son.

I imagine this theory was hashed out before by people for followed the case closely. And if I saw it on some YT videos, I probably would have just watched, and then quickly moved on. But since that talk was first time of me hearing it.... from a respected detective no less, it made an impression.

 

Kazabfa!!!!

 

Rest in piece you SACK OF ****, OJ.

 

Cecil’s?

I was about 4 blocks away from there at a friend’s house.

 

I too felt the coverage of Simpson’s arrest and trial was overblown. I also resented interrupting which at the time seemed like the greatest moment for Houston sports history for a ludicrous police chase.

I believe then as now that the trial represented some of the worst of US culture. Obsession with celebrity, violence, race, and the massive advantages the justice system for the wealthy.

 

This NYT piece matches many of my thoughts about OJ's career and trial. How it brought out some of the worst in this culture and changed this culture for the worst.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/11/...type=Article&action=click&module=RelatedLinks
O.J., Made in America, Made by TV
In O.J. Simpson’s life and trials, television was a spotlight, a microscope and a mirror.

One of the strangest quotes I can remember associated with O.J. Simpson came from the broadcaster Al Michaels during the notorious freeway chase in 1994. Michaels, a sports commentator now covering the flight from the law of one of America’s biggest celebrities, said that he had spoken with his friend Simpson on the phone earlier. “Al,” Michaels recalled him saying, “I have got to get out of the media business.”

For a man who was about to be arrested and charged with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, it was an odd statement. But it was accurate. Simpson, during and after his pro football career, was a creature of the media business. With the freeway chase, and the acrimonious trial on live TV, he would essentially become the media business. Simpson, who died Wednesday at age 76, was one of the most-seen Americans in history.

What did people see when they looked at O.J. Simpson? A superstar, a killer, a hero, a liar, a victim, an abuser, an insider, a pariah — often many of these at once. In his fame and infamy, he was an example of what celebrity could make of a person and a symbol of what the media could make of a country.

Simpson’s football career made him a TV star in itself, as he became the first N.F.L. running back to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season, with the Buffalo Bills. But he found his way into mass-market stardom during the commercial breaks, doing endorsements for RC Cola, Chevrolet and, most famously, Hertz rental cars.

As the documentary “O.J.: Made in America” would later detail, race was a subtext of Simpson’s fame, even in his pitchman days. There was a sense of social relief in having white America, after the civil-rights battles of the 1960s, embrace a charismatic Black star. It felt good for the country to like O.J.

But it also required a complex negotiation, particularly in his most famous ad campaign, for Hertz. There was anxiety over how white viewers would take the image of a powerful Black man running through an airport — would it be thrilling or threatening? The commercials made sure to include white onlookers cheering “Go, O.J., go!” as if to validate his passport to mainstream stardom.

Acting roles followed, in “Roots,” the “Naked Gun” movies, the early HBO sitcom “First and Ten.” His fictional and pitchman roles would play up his image of innocuous charisma — an image that would echo surreally in his televised trial and the public reaction to it.

The murder case would show electronic media’s power to bring a country together and to rip it apart. The low-speed chase on the Southern California freeway was one of those where-were-you-when monoculture moments, like an earthbound perversion of the moon landing. It happened on a Friday night, interrupting Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals, riveting tens of millions of viewers, none of them — at home or in the broadcast studios — knowing if they were about to witness a death on live TV.

But amid this classic mass-media, global-village moment, there were signs that the case was already becoming something more surreal and disjointed, a macabre carnival that would consume TV. People showed up on the freeway with signs and cheers, as if to an N.F.L. playoff game. A prank caller, evidently a Howard Stern fan, got on the air on ABC and saluted the anchor Peter Jennings with a hearty “Baba Booey.”

The trial, once it began, was the biggest series on TV, although even that feels like an understatement. What part of TV, in 1994 and 1995, wasn’t the O.J. Simpson trial? It was “The Tonight Show,” “Larry King Live” and Norm Macdonald’s “Weekend Update” on “Saturday Night Live.” It was the first topic of conversation in the morning and the last, on cable news, at night. It inspired a “Seinfeld” episode and a fantasy sequence on “Roseanne” in which the prosecutor Marcia Clark (Laurie Metcalf) crawls out of the TV to talk to Roseanne Conner (Roseanne Barr), who provides her with the missing murder weapon.


The trial was all TV. It was every kind of TV. It was a soap opera. It was a legal thriller. It was an interactive whodunit before the age of murder podcasts. It was a social drama that exposed racial chasms and the flaws of the legal system. It was a dark comedy with buffoons, villains and comic-relief figures.

It was a tragedy too, of course, and viewers could not agree which part of it was a tragedy, and that too was the tragedy.

It was also a preview of coming attractions. It was the model for the all-in immersion coverage that 24-hour news would apply to everything from wars to missing-persons cases to sex scandals. All-O.J.-all-the-time would seamlessly become all-Clinton-Lewinsky-all-the-time, complete with legal commentators reprising their roles.

But even as the Simpson case showed the media’s power to plunge us all into the same story, it also revealed how different communities could inhabit different realities. We could watch the same trial, with the same testimony, but disagree not just on the proper verdict but on the stakes of the case.

It was open-and-shut or it was built on fraud. It was about domestic violence against women or it was about racism. It was about how the rich and famous were above the law or about how Black defendants were beneath it. It was about the crimes of a person or the crimes of a system.

Like the home audiences caught reacting to the verdict, some cheering and some wailing, we would become a split-screen nation. Eventually, with TV news augmented by partisan outlets and social media, people would come to many more stories — elections, wars, pandemics — encased in their own ecosystems, listening to their own experts, believing their own facts.

As for the Simpson case, TV would eventually catch up with the more complicated reality. In 2016 both the “Made in America” documentary and the mini-series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” laid out the case against Simpson as well as the trial’s racial-historical context. Taken together, they suggested that you could believe Simpson guilty without believing the system innocent.

Nuance and complexity are still possible. But they tend to work on the slow, patient timetable of history. As far as the daily news is concerned, on the other hand, we still live in the world that the Simpson trial created. This week, O.J. Simpson finally left the media business. The rest of us are stuck with it.

 

Rocket River

 

I hope you're joking.

 

That's it!

 

RIP Norm...the tension was real.

 

Norm didn't back down when his boss told him to quit mocking OJ...............he leaned in even more, got to respect the balls on Norm. RIP Norm....................Burn in hell OJ. Does anyone think he may have "left" something behind to show what he did, or did he have so much guilt that he took that to the grave.

 

Subject matter is dated and a little cringy at times but Norm's comedy is timeless. Thanks!

 

Can I start calling orange juice OJ again?

 

I remember that place. What was that other one around there, aquarium lounge?

 

Pamela Anderson Joins Liam Neeson In Paramount’s New ‘Naked Gun’ Movie dedicated to OJ

https://deadline.com/2024/04/pamela-anderson-naked-gun-1235887034/

 

Thoughts and prayers.

 

That's the weirdest sentence I've read in a week or so. Mad Libs kinda sh*t.

 

The trial was the biggest circus most of us have ever seen. I think the people on this board who were alive were irked that what was about to be the biggest moment in our favorite teams history was being overshadowed by a terrible person even though most people didn't realize he was a terrible person because he was a pro at putting his best face on in public. The internet is full of these type now but it was unique in 1994.