During his lifetime, aside from the shunning of the high Hollywood society that once embraced him, O.J. Simpson was only held to account for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman once: by a civil jury in 1998.
When the court initially found him liable for the killings, the plaintiffs were handed a $33.5 million judgment against the former football star and actor. With interest, that amount is now over $100 million.
How much did O.J. end up paying out of that judgment? As of June 2022, just $133,000, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail — despite displaying the lifestyle of a man with much more than that in assets.
Now, in death, the families of Simpson’s victims hope to collect what they couldn’t when he was alive.
According to a Thursday report from the Daily Mail, attorneys for Fred Goldman, Ron’s father, said they were “going to work on” collecting what they could from the estate of Simpson, who died at 76 from cancer on Wednesday.
“We have to start over here,” attorney David Cook said.
“We’re going to work on that. There might be something out there.”
There likely was, considering that O.J.’s “search for the real killer” in the wake of his 1995 acquittal on criminal charges seemed to take place on golf courses in South Florida and the Las Vegas area, in ZIP codes hardly known to be inhabited by the penurious.
However, where the money has gone to — and how much is left — is anyone’s guess.
Should Simpson’s estate be seized to pay off the judgement?
“We’ve had this problem for a long long time,” Cook said. “It could be in a trust, it could be probate. It could be all gone.”
“I’m in San Francisco. The lawyers we hired in Nevada, they were working with me… At this point, we’re just starting out,” he added.
The amount owed has ballooned over the years. In 2015, when Simpson was in prison on robbery and kidnapping convictions, Cook placed the number at $57 million.
When Simpson was released in 2017, meanwhile, Cook said it was “a touch under $70 million.”
A Nevada garnishment case in 2021, meanwhile, calculated the amount owed at “$75,164,425.74.”
Granted, Simpson would never be able to fulfill the entirety of that debt; even before the murders, court documents from his divorce trial with Nicole Brown Simpson revealed that his net worth was $10.8 million.
A hefty amount of that, of course, went toward the “dream team” of lawyers he hired to defend him in his 1995 criminal case — Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran, Alan Dershowitz and F. Lee Bailey among them.
Furthermore, his income dried up after the trial, as the man became radioactive — as well he should have. He still was able to tap into some resources, however, as he appeared to live as a man whose means were far beyond that of the average person.
As for how he managed to do this? “O.J. dodged paying the Goldmans by declaring bankruptcy in Florida, and his annual NFL pension of between $125,000 and $300,000 was protected from debt collection claims,” the Daily Mail reported.
“He also had $42,000 a year in Social Security.”
However, the death of Simpson will allow greater scrutiny of his estate, in particular real-estate purchases made by Simpson’s children.
That’s because, as CBS News noted, even if he “left behind a will, and whatever that document says, Simpson’s assets will now almost certainly have to go through what’s known as the probate process in court before his four children or other intended heirs can collect on any of them.”
Cook told CBS News that Simpson “died without penance. We don’t know what he has, where it is or who is in control. We will pick up where we are and keep going with it.”
However, Fred Goldman wanted the world to know that this wasn’t about the money, but about the monster who died with it.
“The only thing that I have to say today is that this is a further reminder of the loss of my son Ron,” Goldman told the Daily Mail after the announcement of Simpson’s death.
“It is a further reminder of my son’s murder and a reminder about the many years we have missed Ron.
“His death is a reminder that Ron and Nicole were murdered by him. I am not going react to my thoughts about him dying. I have nothing to say about him. My response will not be about OJ’s death but about the loss of my son’s life by him. Thank you for calling. That is the only thing that I have to say.”
That isn’t the only thing that lawyers are going to have to say, however — and whatever money they claw back will be yet another reminder of the perfidies committed by the cultural blight that left us on Wednesday.
