The American Dream in chains: Simpson is sentenced to 15 years

Published on Friday 5 December 2008 21:21

IT WAS the final humiliation of an athlete and Hollywood star once considered the embodiment of the American dream.

OJ Simpson was jailed yesterday for 15 years after being found guilty of recruiting five other men to help him rob two sports memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel room on 13 September last year.

Sentencing Simpson, 61, the judge, Jackie Glass, described his crime as "much more than stupidity". She continued: "You went to the room, you took guns, you used force, you took property, and in this state that amounts to robbery with use of a deadly weapon."

Simpson had earlier tried to apologise for his actions and pleaded for leniency. "I wasn't there to hurt anybody, I just wanted my personal things," he said.

"And I realise I was stupid and I'm sorry. I didn't mean to steal anything from anybody and I didn't know I was doing anything illegal.

"I thought I was confronting friends and retrieving my property. So I'm sorry, I'm sorry for all of it."

Simpson could serve a maximum of 33 years but may be eligible for parole after nine years, a court clerk said.

The crime drew together the strands of Simpson's life and career with ironic neatness. He had been attempting to retrieve sporting memorabilia he had lost while trying to conceal them from the family of Ronald Goldman as part of a 22.7 million civil wrongful death judgment. He was cleared of murdering Mr Goldman in 1995 but lost the civil case in 1997.

Simpson's imprisonment is a tragic dnouement to a life that is Shakespearean in its scope. Having worked his way out of a San Francisco ghetto, Simpson, or "the Juice" as he was known, was considered in the 1970s one of the finest American football players of his generation.

Retiring from the game in 1979, he faced the predicament of many elite sportsmen: how to carve a new role for himself away from a familiar, adrenaline-filled world in which every success was met with the roaring adulation of thousands of fans.

For Simpson, the film world beckoned. During his sporting career, his charisma had helped to land him parts in big-ticket films such as Towering Inferno, starring alongside Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, and the Naked Gun comedy series, as well as numerous appearances in adverts and as a sports commentator.

His modest success as an actor, establishing his own production company, while never equalling his sports career, supported his public image as an easy-going, generous embodiment of the American dream: somebody who had earned his fortune through sheer hard work, transcending class and race.

But on 12 June, 1994, when the bodies of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Mr Goldman were found in the front courtyard of her condominium in Los Angeles, having been stabbed to death, Simpson's apparently charmed life began to fall to pieces in the most public way possible.

Arrested on suspicion of murder, he escaped and was followed for 90 minutes by a cavalcade of police and press in his white Ford Bronco, watched by a global television audience. The ensuing court case, which was broadcast worldwide, was as gripping as any film Simpson had appeared in, and for once he was playing the lead role.

The trial revealed his darker side – he was portrayed by the prosecution as jealous and violent towards his former wife.

However, on October 1995, after just three hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. But a civil case brought by the Brown and Goldman families two years later found Simpson liable for both deaths, and ordered him to pay 22.7 million compensation.

For 12 years following the civil case, Simpson seemed to withdraw from the public eye, but last year he courted controversy once again, when a hypothetical account of how he would have carried out the Brown-Goldman murders entitled If I Did It appeared under his name, for which Simpson received 2.4 million.

But yesterday's sentence will have put paid to any further money-making schemes. At best, Simpson will be 70 when he is finally freed, and whatever remained of his "bankability" has been left in tatters.

And while his life may yet make it to the big screen, there will be no happy Hollywood ending for him.