Former football star, actor and acquitted murder defendant O.J. Simpson has been diagnosed with cancer, Local 10 News learned Friday.
According to sources, Simpson, 76, who previously lived in South Florida, was diagnosed with prostate cancer and is currently undergoing chemotherapy in Las Vegas.
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Simpson has been reportedly telling his friends and family that he’s been hearing rumors that he’s in hospice care, but announced on X Friday that that is not the case.
He said he plans to host “a ton of friends” for the Super Bowl on Sunday.
Hospice??? pic.twitter.com/OXLzs9jWO6
— O.J. Simpson (@TheRealOJ32) February 9, 2024
Simpson was discharged from parole on Dec. 1, 2021, after his conviction in Las Vegas for armed robbery.
Simpson had told parole officials before his Oct. 1, 2017, release from prison that he planned to move back to Florida.
He instead moved to a gated community in Las Vegas, where he played golf and frequently took to Twitter to offer opinions about college and pro sports, especially football.
“Life is fine,” he told The Associated Press during a June 2019 interview.
Simpson’s saga makes him, in the words of one of his Las Vegas trial lawyers, one of the most famous people on the planet.
He grew up in public housing in San Francisco, attended the University of Southern California and won the Heisman Trophy as college football’s best player in 1968. He became an NFL Hall of Famer and the first running back to gain 2,000 yards in a season with the Buffalo Bills in 1973. He acted in movies and served as a rent-a-car company pitchman and a football commentator.
In what became known as “The Trial of the Century,” he was acquitted in 1995 of the double slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.
The trial was the focus of gavel-to-gavel TV coverage, with Simpson represented by a legal “Dream Team” that included the late Johnnie Cochran Jr. and F. Lee Bailey.
In a separate case more than a decade later, Simpson was convicted by a jury in Las Vegas and sentenced to prison for leading five men, including two with guns, in a 2007 confrontation with two sports collectibles dealers in a cramped room at an off-strip Las Vegas casino hotel.
Simpson insisted he only wanted to retrieve personal mementoes and items stolen from him following his acquittal in the double killings.
Simpson served nine years in a Nevada prison for armed robbery.