Las Vegas (July 21, 2017): O.J. Simpson was granted parole on Thursday after serving nearly nine years in prison for a 2007 armed robbery in Las Vegas. But the former NFL superstar and movie actor’s future outside of prison may not be so rosy.
Life outside the Lovelock Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in Nevada’s high desert, could well resemble Simpson’s solitary years after he was acquitted in the slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, said Jeffrey Toobin, a legal expert.
“I think it will be a lot like life was between 1995 and 2007,” Toobin said. “He was really a pariah. His old life was gone — celebrity pitchman, sportscaster, actor, all gone.”
At his parole hearing Thursday, Simpson said that he is a Baptist, and that a few other inmates asked him to help create Lovelock’s first Baptist service. “I worked with them,” he said. “We now have an ongoing Baptist service that … is well attended. I attend it religiously, and pun is intended.”
“I was always a good guy but could have been a better Christian and my commitment to change is to be a better Christian,” he added.
Simpson also said he recently became commissioner of the 18-team softball league. “My primary responsibility was rules enforcement and, you know, player comportment,” he said, adding that he decided on removing players from games and suspensions.
“I never got any blowback from the guys because they know how to act. I’ve done the best I can and just trying to keep them out of trouble. So my agenda was full here. I’ve been active, totally active for as long … I’ve been here. I don’t have much time to sit around and do anything.”
He also completed a number of courses, he said, including one entitled “Alternative to Violence.”
“I think it’s the most important course anybody in this prison can take, because it teaches you how to deal with conflict, through conversation,” Simpson said.
“I have been asked many, many times here to mediate conflicts between individuals and groups,” he said. “And it gave me so many tools on how to use it, that you … try to walk these guys through. Not throwing punches at one another.”
Simpson said he completed a computer course that has helped him stay in touch with his four children. “I took a computer course here not because I was computer illiterate, but I took the computer course because … sometimes I could never get my kids on the phone,” he said. “But if you text them or send something to them on the computer you can get them.”
In June 1967, Simpson, then 19 years old, married his 18-year-old high school sweetheart, Marguerite Whitley. The couple had three children, Arnelle, Jason and Aaren. Aaren drowned in the family swimming pool just before her second birthday in 1979.
At his parole hearing, Arnelle Simpson, O.J. Simpson’s oldest daughter, said her father was “my best friend and my rock.”
Simpson lamented to the parole board that he had missed too many graduations and birthdays. He’s anxious to get back to family and friends. “I’ve done my time,” he told the board. “I would just like to get back to my family and friends, and believe it or not, I do have some real friends.”
Simpson and Brown married in 1985 and had two children, daughter Sydney and son Justin. Simpson stands to do better than most who have just been released from prison.
Simpson was found liable in a 1996 civil trial for the deaths of Goldman and Brown-Simpson, and was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages — more money than he had. Most of that money has not been collected.
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