OJ Simpson’s First Wife Didn’t Testify At His Murder Trial—Meet His Past Wives

Nicole Brown Simpson (1985 – 1992)

OJ Simpson’s second wife was Nicole Brown. They met in 1977 when she was working as a waitress at a Beverly Hills nightclub called The Daisy and he was still married to his first wife, Marguerite, but their marriage was on the rocks. Simpson and Brown began dating, and Simpson eventually divorced Whitley in 1979. He and Brown then married in 1985.

But their relationship would be tainted by volatility. “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.

“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. … [She] had really fallen for O.J.,” she continued. “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.”

Their daughter Sydney was born that October and son Justin arrived in August 1988. Nicole didn’t speak openly about her relationship with OJ to anyone, really. During an appearance with Ellen Degeneres, Kris revealed that she had plans to have lunch with Nicole the day after she died.

“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,” she said. “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.” 

They divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman were found brutally killed outside of Nicole’s home. Simpson quickly became the prime suspect in the case, which sparked a media frenzy. The subsequent trial, known as the People v. O.J. Simpson, lasted for nearly nine months from 1994 to 1995.

It was one of the most widely publicized trials in American history, broadcast live on television and closely followed by the public. His defense team, led by prominent attorneys like Robert Kardashian and Johnnie Cochran, successfully argued that Simpson was framed and that evidence was mishandled by the police.

Despite substantial evidence against him, including DNA evidence and circumstantial evidence, Simpson was acquitted of all criminal charges on October 3, 1995. The verdict was met with widespread controversy and debate, with many believing that Simpson had gotten away with murder.

In a subsequent civil trial in 1997, Simpson was found liable for the wrongful deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and was ordered to pay millions in damages to their families. However, he has maintained his innocence in the murders.

Marguerite L. Whitley (1967 – 1979)

O.J. Simpson’s first wife was Marguerite L. Whitley. They met at San Francisco’s Galileo High School when she was dating his best friend, Al “AC” Cowlings. According to a 1994 New York Times article, Al and Marguerite were having issues as a couple and he asked OJ to talk to her, but she ended up breaking it off with Al and began dating OJ.

There were no hard feelings though. “Marguerite was a good friend of Al’s when she was married to O. J.,” said Charley Ferguson, a former Buffalo teammate of both men, per the Times. “We were such kids, it was fun. We didn’t have to answer to our parents anymore. We could party and stay out all night. It wasn’t a crazy wildness,” she told Barbara Walters in 1995 in a 20/20 interview, her last known public appearance.

OJ and Marguerite married in 1967 and had three children together: Arnelle, Jason, and Aaren (their third child tragically died in the family swimming pool just weeks shy of her second birthday). OJ’s celebrity was becoming a problem for the couple.

“There were times in our marriage as in all young couples, we were both bullheaded. We were testing the ground with each other. We had young children. We had an amount of money that no one told us how to invest it. There was an immaturity on our part,” she told Walters in 1995.

The marriage ended in divorce in 1979, around the time of Simpson’s football career transition from the Buffalo Bills to the San Francisco 49ers. In a 1968 interview with Look magazine, Marguerite said of her husband: “He was a beast. He was pretty horrible. If there were other fellows who wanted to talk to girls, he’d make them stay away. He’d been a terrible person, right on the edge of trouble.”

In the year they divorced, Simpson told People: “The price of fame was our biggest problem. My wife is a private person, yet we can’t walk down the street without causing a commotion.” There were also rumors of domestic violence, which both OJ and Marguerite denied. Marguerite told Barbara Walters: “If he did [hit me], he would have gotten a frying pan upside the head. There is just no way I would have let that happen to me.”

During his murder trial, Marguerite believed her ex-husband was innocent and told Barbara Walters as such. She was asked to testify but her lawyer said that “the witness has no relevant material testimony to offer.”

If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer

12 years after the deaths of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, HarperCollins announced the publication of a book in which O.J. Simpson revealed how he would have committed the murders—under the pretense that his confession was “hypothetical.” In response to public outrage that Simpson stood to profit from these crimes, HarperCollins canceled the book. Just one year later, Federal Court Judge A. Jay Cristol awarded the Goldman family the rights to If I Did It. All royalties from the book go to the Goldman family.