Warning: piece will expire in seven days. Read before it’s gone.

 

TW: Mentions of domestic abuse.

The family of OJ Simpson have asked for “privacy and grace” at the time of his death. The announcement was made on X, formerly known as twitter, on Thursday April 11^th, a day after his death. The Telegraph reported that he died, “aged 76, surrounded by family” from cancer: comfortably spending his last days in his reported one and a half million-dollar house.

 

For those of you who might be unaware of OJ Simpson’s infamous past, in short, his sport and movie stardom came crashing down when he was accused of the murder of his ex – wife Nicole Brown, and her good friend, Ron Goldman. In what many publications called the “trial of the century”, Simpson was acquitted. However, just two years later in 1997, he was found ‘liable’ for both victims’ death and ordered to pay 60 million dollars. With this in mind, I’ve been wondering whether I really need to respect his privacy or honour his memory. No, I don’t think so.

 

The day before his death, April 11^th, I wouldn’t have forgiven OJ Simpson’s actions, so why am I being asked to do that right now? And I certainly don’t want to read what Yahoo calls “touching social media statements,” knowing that Nicola Brown and Ron Goldman’s death was nothing short of painful and public. Pictures of their bloody, beaten bodies were plastered across the media at the time and have resurfaced now.

 

Whether or not you think he was a cold-blooded killer: OJ Simpson was a vicious man. Before serving nine years in prison for kidnapping, armed robbery, and burglary with a firearm, he had been reported to the police by Nicole Brown for domestic violence on numerous occasions. Five days before the murder of Brown, she called a domestic violence center hoping for help to disappear somewhere Simpson could not find her. Eight months before her death in June 1994, she called the police saying, “He’s back.”

 

This was not the first time she’d tried to get the police involved. In 1989, Simpson beat Brown so badly that she required hospital treatment, which he was arrested for. At the time of his arrest, he told police that he couldn’t understand why they were arresting him. They’d been called to the house nine previous times for domestic disturbances. Clearly, Simpson failed to treat the victims of his violence with little of the “grace” that we’re being asked to give him.

 

‘The world’s most famous case’ put every detail of Brown and Goldman’s gruesome death in the public light. The Brown family were forced to face traumatizing accounts from the years of violence and abuse she faced during her decade and a half long relationship with OJ Simpson. The sad truth remains: none of us will ever know whether he did it, all we can do is speculate.

 

Surely his behavior in that relationship should be enough to stop him being celebrated in death. But our society loves to canonize the dead. And, for now at least, cancel culture seems to die with the individual: most of the internet turning their attention to whoever has most recently used their influence controversially. But it’s not like the memory of injustice can be as easily blotted out the victim’s family. And social media certainly seems to find it more straightforward to forget when the person who has died is a world-famous sports star known for being the first National Football League player to ‘rush’ for over 2,000 yards in a single season.

 

It’s a strange, yet common phenomenon that when someone (especially if that ‘someone’ is a celebrity) dies, they suddenly become the greatest, most loving friend to all who knew them. It’s as if some internal mechanism kicks into gear and no one is allowed to remember who they really were. No one wants to be remembered for one thing, but they often are. And if we were to pick just one thing for OJ Simpson: it seems acknowledging his disturbing past seems more appropriate than celebrating his sporting success.

 

Nicole Brown hasn’t been remembered by society for much more than her marriage and death. A prison-like marriage, a death that was murder. This legacy has followed the ghost of Nicole, so why should Simpson be gifted the nuances we don’t give to Brown? President of Pro Football Hall of Fame, Jim Porter, remarked that “on-field contributions will be preserved in the hall’s archives in Canton, Ohio.” Why does he get to mention only the “on-field contributions”, and neglect the domestic abuse? Broadcaster of NFL, Bob Costas, told CNN that, “he was not just admired, but beloved.”

 

I’ve always wondered if this tendency to glorify the dead comes from a place of fear, especially when it comes to celebrities. I have a theory on this: to us ‘normal people’, celebrities are unattainable, almost God-like figures. People worship celebrities for their talents, and I, too, find myself sometimes forgetting that their lives span out the same as ours do. Of course, status doesn’t avoid illness, accidents, and death. So, when they die, and it is publicised everywhere, we’re reminded of our own mortality. Perhaps the way we deal with this is to make up stories, to make us feel better. To make us feel like when we die, we’ll be given the same treatment. They, whoever they are, will forget about the bad things we did (like that time you cheated on an exam).

 

OJ Simpson certainly isn’t the only example of this. John Lennon never denied the allegations that he domestically abused his first wife, Cynthia Lennon. During an interview within Playboy magazine in 1980, Lennon said, “I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved… I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter.” Yet Lennon is immortalised as a rock legend, his shocking statements dismissed.

 

Only recently have narratives like Lennon’s, or Simpson’s, begun their unravelling. Sofia Coppola’s 2023 feature film, Priscilla, aims to dismantle the picture of Elvis Presley that Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 biopic ELVIS curated. Priscilla reveals the dark, and true side of Presley’s character—rightly so—letting us in on her own narrative of Elvis’ domestic abuse and instability.

 

I hope OJ Simpson’s death marks the beginning of the end of the canonisation of celebrities who simply don’t deserve our respect. We must do this regardless of what they’ve achieved. I hope instead we start talking about their victims.

 

OJ Simpson might have been a brilliant athlete, but he was undoubtedly a questionable human. Don’t let the scary fact of his death be reason to forget why you didn’t pay respect to him in the first place.∎

 

Words by Violet Aitchison. Graphic by Alice Robey-Cave.