OJ Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, 1981

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Three weeks later, she met O.J. Simpson.


If ever there was a woman whose life has been viewed through the prism of a marriage, it's Nicole Brown Simpson. Even those who knew her best and saw her often when she was alive only had so much time with her before her world became O.J.'s world, and she was just starting to make a life for herself again when she was killed on June 12, 1994, at the age of 35.

"I feel that Nicole has gotten lost in all this," her friend Cici Shahian, a first cousin of one of O.J.'s best friends, Robert Kardashian, told the Los Angeles Times in July 1994, as the world stopped to obsess over the spectacle that the arrest of O.J. Simpson for the murders of Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman had already become.


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"Nicole was bubbly, always happy and smiling," teacher Bill Prestridge told the Times. She also seemed eager to start life beyond school "and go on to bigger and better things," he added.


By the time she enrolled at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo after graduation in 1977, she was already dating Simpson—and then a few months later she moved in with him and dropped out of school, because O.J. "required that she be with him," Nicole later stated in divorce papers.

O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, 1980


"It was a very passionate, a very volatile, a very obsessive relationship. On both sides," Cathy Lee Crosby, who knew O.J. for 15 years and had spent time with the couple, told the LA Times.

During the murder trial, Denise Brown testified to seeing O.J. yell at her sister as far back as 1977, when Denise first met him on a trip to Buffalo to watch him play for the Bills. Denise said Nicole had greeted a friend of O.J.'s with a kiss on each cheek and he "got real upset and he started screaming at Nicole." 


O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, 1982 Sophisticated Ladies Event


"I fell in love with Nicole Brown immediately," Kris Jenner, who met Nicole in 1978, wrote in her 2011 memoir Kris Jenner...and All Things Kardashian. "We were destined to become best friends." O.J. was a groomsman when Kris married Robert Kardashian on July 8 that year and was one of the first visitors at the hospital when they welcomed daughter Kourtney Kardashian the following April. He and Nicole and Kris and Robert vacationed together in Aspen in the winter of 1980.

Nicole "had really fallen for O.J. by then," Kris recalled. "The two of them were madly in love and had this obvious chemistry that you could feel when you were in the same room with them...they absolutely could not keep their hands off each other. He was already incredibly possessive of Nicole. Even when she would go to the bathroom, O.J. would wonder out loud when she was going to come back."

Nicole and O.J. married on Feb. 2, 1985, in the backyard of the Rockingham estate. When Simpson was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame later that year, he thanked his pregnant wife for her support, telling the adoring crowd that she "came into my life at what is probably the most difficult time for an athlete, at the end of my career... [You] turned those years into some of the best I have had in my life, babes."


OJ Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, 1984 Olympics Party


The Simpsons' friends remembered the couple as being so much fun, frequently hosting parties, including annual Easter dinners and Fourth of July bashes where everyone's kids swam and ate and had a blast. They remained very close to Nicole's parents and they and her sisters were usually at all the family-friendly parties, too.

According to the LA Times, Nicole's father, Lou Brown, ran the Hertz rental car outpost that Simpson owned at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, and O.J. paid Dominique Brown's USC tuition. Simpson had also hired a first cousin of Nicole's, Rolf Baur, as the gardener of his estate, and then appointed him manager of two Pioneer Chicken locations he owned. Rolf's wife, Maria, worked as a housekeeper at Rockingham three times a week.


"The truth is, no one really knew her during her marriage," a friend who said she had known Nicole since their early 20s told the LA Times after she was killed. "She was never free to be herself or have friends. She wasn't available for that kind of intimacy." Nicole also was prone to abruptly canceling plans or not showing up when both she and O.J. were expected somewhere, the friend added, recalling that O.J. would regularly claim that his wife was in bed with menstrual cramps.

"She was the type of person who would not say to me what her problems were," added Maria Baur, who told the Times she often heard the couple loudly fighting in Simpson's home office. "She wouldn't talk."

In 1988, Nicole turned up driving a new Ferrari, which she would say was O.J.'s version of an "I'm sorry." 



"I didn't know that there was abuse until we heard and saw the whole thing unfold like everybody else and then heard the 911 tapes that were going to be used in evidence during the trial," Kris Jenner, who was supposed to have lunch with Nicole the day after she died, said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2016. "It was heartbreaking... Me and some of her other close friends were all really surprised and shocked by that, because we felt we really failed her as a friend. It was horrible."

O.J. SImpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, 1987

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Friends would say that she fought back with words when she could. "He'd cheat. She'd find out. She'd get angry. She'd confront him," one told the Times. "She's a strong girl and she'd confront him. And they would fight."


Denise Brown testified that, while out to dinner one night with her sister and brother-in-law in 1987, "O.J. grabbed Nicole's crotch and said, 'This is where babies come from and this belongs to me.' And Nicole just sort of wrote it off as if it was nothing, like—you know, like she was used to that kind of treatment and he was like—I thought it was really humiliating, if you ask me."


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Also on the stand, Denise recalled telling O.J. sometime in the mid-'80s that he was taking Nicole for granted after which he flew into a rage.

"He ran upstairs, got clothes, started flying down the stairs and grabbed Nicole, told her to get out of his house, wanted us all out of his house, picked her up, threw her against the wall, picked her up, threw her out of the house," Denise said tearfully. "She ended up on her—she ended up falling. She ended up on her elbows and on her butt...We were all sitting there screaming and crying, and then he grabbed me and threw me out of the house."


When a detective called Nicole's parents on the morning of June 13, 1994, to tell them their daughter was dead, Denise also picked up from another extension. Her reaction: "He killed her! He finally killed her!" 

Nicole Brown Simpson, Denise Brown

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"She never came out and said, 'I'm being abused by O.J.,'" Kris wrote. "I so wish I would have asked her for specifics. But I didn't want to cross a line if she didn't want to talk about something, which would become one of my biggest regrets. All she told me on her walk was, 'I want to leave him and I do not know how. I don't know if I can stay. He's really hard to live with."

Nicole had changed, Kris remembered. "She became more withdrawn and private and seemed anxious. She was biting her fingernails down to the quick and just seemed to be on edge all the time."

On Jan. 1, 1989, at 3:58 a.m., Nicole called 911. At first the operator could only hear screams and what sounded like someone being hit. When officers arrived at Rockingham, Nicole, wearing sweatpants and a bra, emerged from the bushes and yelled, "He's going to kill me!" Asked who was going to kill her, she said, "O.J."

"Yes, O.J. Simpson the football player."


"You guys never do anything," Nicole told one of the officers. "You never do anything. You come out. You've been here eight times. And you never do anything to him."

That time, they told O.J.—who denied hitting his wife, saying he had just pushed her out of bed, that they had a drunken fight after a New Year's Eve party—that he had to go with them to the police station; instead, he drove off into the night in his Bentley.

Nicole went to the cops the next day and told them she didn't really want to press charges, but since she had signed the police report they were obligated to kick it upward to the L.A. City Attorney's Office, which filed domestic violence charges against Simpson, who had just co-starred in The Naked Gun and was working as a broadcaster for NBC Sports.


"We had a fight," Simpson told Up Close host Roy Firestone later that year. "We were both guilty. No one was hurt. It was no big deal and we got on with our lives. It wasn't that big of a deal."


OJ Simpson, O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson

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Just before Christmas in 1990, Nicole bought two pairs of brown, extra-large "Aris Lights" leather gloves—one pair of which prosecutors later insisted constituted the two bloody gloves found, respectively, at the scene of Nicole and Ron's murder and outside the Rockingham house.


Nicole filed for divorce Feb. 25.

When Nicole and O.J. separated, she moved with the kids nearby to a $5,000-a-month rental home on Gretna Green Way in Brentwood—where she later rented the guest house to friend Kato Kaelin, whom she and Faye had met in Aspen on New Year's Eve, for $500 a month. Sometimes the aspiring actor would babysit Sydney and Justin.

"I only attended junior college for a very short time, because [Simpson] wanted me to be available to travel with him whenever his career required him to go to a new location, even if it was for a short period of time," Nicole stated in an affidavit petitioning for spousal and child support during their 1992 divorce proceedings. "I have no other college education, and I hold no degrees...I am not currently employed and spend my time caring for my two young children."

O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, 1993

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During a court-ordered meeting with a career counselor, she had said that the only goal she had to date was to raise her kids well. "Beyond that I haven't thought about me," she said. "I'm sure I will get a goal someday."



"She became Nicole Brown, her own person," Cora Fischman, a friend and neighbor from Rockingham, told the LA Times. "She started all over again."


"She called me up and said, 'I want my husband back,'" the friend told the Times

Nicole then called O.J., but when he wouldn't take her call, she went to his house. He dismissed her, said he was fine without her. By the time she got him, he was calling to say yes, he too wanted to get back together.

On Oct. 25, 1993, Nicole called 911, telling the dispatcher with an audibly shaky voice, "Could you get someone over here now to 325 Gretna Green? He's back. Please... " Asked what "he" looked like, she said, "He's O.J. Simpson. I think you know his record. Could you just send somebody over here? He's f--king going nuts." Told to stay on the line, she replied, "I don't want to stay on the line. He's going to beat the s--t out of me." 

O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, Thanksgiving 1993

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The call, played in court less than two years later, was 13 1/2 minutes long. Simpson could be heard vaguely in the background, but at one point came through clearly, when Nicole told him the kids were sleeping. He said, "You didn't give a s--t about the kids when you was sucking his d--k in the living room. They were here. Didn't care about the kids then."

Nicole told the dispatcher her ex was referring to something that happened "a long time ago." (Simpson had seen her through the front window having a sexual encounter with a boyfriend in 1992.)




"At the end of Nicole's life, I think she finally was at a place where she knew she had to be more vocal with what was going on and she was in trouble," Kris said in the 2015 special. "The one thing she would tell all of us by the time, you know, it got to that level was, 'He's going to kill me and he's going to get away with it.'"


"I kept asking her, 'Are you okay?' and she kept saying, 'They won't believe me. He's charming. People don't know.' When she started to cry, she stiffened her back and pulled away. I can still see her holding on to the sleeve of my jacket. Just before walking off, I pulled her pigtail and said, ‘Nicole, you be smart. You know what to do.' She was trying to be strong, but she just got in above her head."


She was going to rent a room to Kaelin, but Simpson—who was still very much involved in his ex's life—told Kaelin he could live in his guest house rent-free because it wasn't appropriate for him to live inside Nicole's house while they were supposedly in the process of working out their relationship.

Though that could be perceived as a delusion on Simpson's part, they were still seeing each other all the time, although Nicole had other men in her life. At the civil trial in 1996 after the Goldman and Brown families filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Simpson, O.J.'s attorney Robert Baker painted Nicole as desperate to get back with her ex-husband while also partying and associating with all sorts of shady characters. 

Back in 1993, the National Enquirer had reported that Simpson was begging Nicole to get back together, a headline that, when asked about it during the civil trial, he insisted was backwards, that Nicole did the begging. "I think everyone, including our family, knows it was her pursuing me," Simpson said.



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"Nicole wanted to be free of him, she wanted to live her life with the children and raise them away from all this fiasco of the marriage," Rolf Bauer told the LA Times later that summer. "She wanted to have a happier, more peaceful life...This time it was different. She really meant it and he knew it."

OJ Simpson, Nicole Simpson, Sydney Simpson, Justin Simpson



In a diary entry dated June 3, per Jeffrey Toobin's The Run of His Life, Nicole wrote, quoting O.J., "'You hang up on me last nite, you're gonna pay for this bitch, you're holding money from the IRS, you're going to jail you f--king c--t. You think you can do any f--king thing you want, you've got it comming [sic]--I've already talked to my lawyers about this bitch--they'll get you for tax evasion, bitch, I'll see to it. You're not going to have a dime left bitch' etc."

On June 6, Simpson sent her a formal letter instructing her to stop using the Rockingham address, a letter she reportedly showed to Cici Shahian on June 7—the same day Nicole called a Santa Monica women's shelter for victims of domestic abuse and said she was being stalked by her ex-husband.


On June 9, Nicole's friend and real estate agent Jeane McKenna put the Bundy condo up for lease at $4,800 a month and then they went looking for new places for Nicole to live.

"She knew the kids really liked Bundy and wouldn't want them to move, so she wanted to do something special for them, to give them something they would want—especially a pool," McKenna later said, per Toobin. "And by the end of the day, we found a place for her in Malibu, a one-story contemporary with a pool and a view of the ocean, for $5,000 a month. I remember walking up the hill there with her. We were smoking. Nobody smokes in Brentwood, so we used to sneak it together, and she was saying, like she couldn't really believe it, 'I can really do this. I can lease the house and move. I can really do this.'"



"She said she wanted to show me some things and talk about what was in her safe," Jenner told Ellen DeGeneres. "And so now unfortunately it all makes sense that that's probably what she wanted to reveal to me that next day, which broke my heart because I will always feel horrible that I didn't pay enough attention."


"I didn't want to go," Simpson later said in an interview for E! True Hollywood Story: O.J., Nicole & Ron: Countdown to Murder, which aired in 1998. "To be honest, I was tired. At this particular time, I was avoiding Nicole. I thought she owed me an apology." He smiled. "And I just didn't want to go. I thought I'd see Paula. I was tired, and I just didn't want to sit up there and go through this [whole situation with his in-laws]."

The Browns left Mezzaluna at 8:30 p.m.

"We were going to take a lot of trips," Denise told E!, recalling the plans they started making that night. "We were going to do a lot of stuff. And I think that was probably the best talk we'd had in a long time. Then when we left, walking out the door, it was 'I love you, Nic.' And that was the last thing I said to her."

O.J. Simpson, Ron Goldman

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Shortly after 9 p.m., O.J. called Nicole. Then Faye called from rehab, later recalling in her book that Nicole said during their 15-minute chat that she would always support her and said, "'I just want all of us to have a healthy and happy life.'"



Ron Goldman


"He was always a good kid," Ron's father, Fred Goldman, told 20/20 years later about his eldest child, who was just starting college when he moved with his dad, sister Kim Goldman, stepmom and her three children to Southern California from Chicago in 1987. "He was fun, he had a good sense of humor, always laughing...He had a good heart."

Ron aspired to open his own restaurant one day and have a family of his own, Kim, whose 10-episode podcast Confronting O.J. Simpson launches today, told E! News in a recent interview. "He was a young guy that just loved life and had an infectious smile and had a zest for living...and I miss him a lot." 

A neighbor who lived diagonally across the alley behind Nicole's place later told authorities he heard a dog start barking at 10:15 p.m.

At 10:55 p.m., Steven Schwab, another neighbor out walking his own dog, came across a big white Akita barking in the alley. Schwab didn't know the dog, but saw it had an expensive collar, as well as blood on its paws.

Nicole Brown Simpson, Condo

AP Photo/Lois Bernstein


The dog led them back to the front of 875 Bundy just after midnight, and that's when Boztepe looked past the front gate and saw a woman lying in a pool of blood.

Sydney and Justin had been asleep upstairs when their mother and Goldman were murdered outside, Nicole's head nearly severed by the deep cut to her throat and Ron stabbed at least 22 times.



Kevin Winter/Getty Images

"She was nothing but a woman who put other people in front of herself," a friend remembered her to CNN later. "She cared so much about her kids, Sydney and Justin, and her family. She was such a warm woman."

When the children, then 8 and 5, were ushered out of the house through a back door by police on the morning of June 13, they had no idea what had happened. Sydney called the house phone from the police station, leaving a message asking her mom why she and Justin were there. "Mommy, please call me back. I want to know what happened last night...Please answer, Mommy!"

Nicole's funeral was June 16.


"I loved her, always have and always will. If we had a problem, it's because I loved her so much," Simpson wrote.


On Oct. 3, 1995, Simpson was acquitted of murder. In 1997, however, a jury unanimously found him liable for both deaths and awarded the Brown and Goldman families $33.5 million in damages. In her 2015 book Can't Forgive, Kim Goldman wrote that they had received less than .075 percent of the money owed to them.


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