LAS VEGAS -- O.J. Simpson, the football star and Hollywood actor acquitted of charges he killed his former wife and her friend in a trial that mesmerized the public and exposed divisions on race and policing in America, has died. He was 76.
His family announced on Simpson's official account on X, formerly Twitter, that he died Wednesday of prostate cancer. He died in Las Vegas, officials there said Thursday.
Simpson earned fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles.
His "trial of the century" captured America's attention on live TV. Simpson didn't testify, but the prosecution asked him to try on the gloves in court.
He struggled to squeeze them onto his hands and spoke his only three words of the trial: "They're too small."
His attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. told the jurors, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."
The jury found him innocent of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to family members of Brown and Goldman.
Twelve years later, after public anger, Rupert Murdoch canceled a planned book by HarperCollins in which Simpson offered his hypothetical account of the killings. It was to be titled "If I Did It."
Goldman's family, still pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful death judgment, won control of the manuscript. They retitled the book "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer."
"It's all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals," Simpson told The Associated Press at the time. He collected $880,000 in advance money for the book, paid through a third party.
"It helped me get out of debt and secure my homestead," he said.
Less than two months after losing the rights to the book, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.
Simpson led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns.
A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other felonies.
Imprisoned at age 61, he served nine years in a Nevada prison. He was not contrite when he was released on parole in October 2017.
The parole board heard him insist yet again that he was only trying to retrieve sports memorabilia and heirlooms stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.
Simpson played 11 NFL seasons, nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, where he became known as "The Juice." He won four NFL rushing titles, rushed for 11,236 yards in his career, scored 76 touchdowns and played in five Pro Bowls.
His rise in football happened simultaneously with a career in television.
He signed a contract with ABC Sports the night he won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. During his pro career, Simpson was a color commentator for a decade on ABC followed by a stint on NBC. In 1983, he joined ABC's "Monday Night Football."
Simpson quickly became a charismatic pitchman. In 1975, Hertz made him the first Black man hired for a corporate national ad campaign.
He made his big-screen debut in 1974 in "The Klansman," an exploitation film in which he starred alongside Lee Marvin and Richard Burton. The film was a flop but Simpson would go on to appear in several dozen films and TV series.
Most notable was his performance in 1988's "The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad" and its two sequels. Simpson played Detective Nordberg in the slapstick films opposite Leslie Nielsen.
Orenthal James Simpson was born July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidized housing projects.
After graduating from high school, he enrolled at City College of San Francisco for 1½ years before transferring to the University of Southern California for the spring 1967 semester.
He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day so he could begin preparing for his first season with USC -- which, in large part because of Simpson, won that year's national championship.
On the day he accepted the Heisman Trophy, his first child, Arnelle, was born.
He had two sons, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife. Aaren drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979 -- the same year he and Whitley divorced.
Simpson and Brown were married in 1985. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.
"We don't need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives," he told the AP 25 years after the double slayings. "The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again. My family and I have moved on to what we call the 'no negative zone.' We focus on the positives."
Information for this report was contributed by Linda Deutsch formerly of The Associated Press.