Which is like saying the Titanic is not quite the ship it used to be. In fact, life is a far, far cry from what it was for O.J. Simpson, once a popular celebrity and putative role model who is now all but shunned by parents at the private school in Brentwood, Calif., where his daughter Sydney is in seventh grade. Banished from the exclusive Riviera Country Club where he was accustomed to strolling the same lush fairways as Jack Nicholson and Sylvester Stallone, Simpson is now a regular at Rancho Park, a public course that charges 18 bucks a round. And the in-laws with whom he seems so chummy? They've been waging a lengthy battle for custody of Simpson's kids. "His whole world has collapsed," says ex-police officer Ron Shipp, who testified at the criminal trial that his former close friend Simpson had told him he dreamed of killing Nicole. "He has to get up and look at himself in the mirror every day. He knows who the real killer is."
On June 12 it will have been five years since Simpson's wife, Nicole, and her friend Ron Goldman were stabbed to death along the walkway of Nicole's Brentwood condominium. Charged with the murders, Simpson was acquitted in the yearlong trial that held the nation transfixed, then was found liable for the grisly killings in a 1997 civil proceeding. Those conflicting verdicts have trapped the 51-year-old former football hero—a Heisman Trophy winner at USC and a Hall of Fame running back with the NFL's Buffalo Bills—in a complicated and often surreal existence. While most of the world around him is convinced he savagely murdered Nicole, 35, and Goldman, 25—and though he has failed to uncover a single shred of credible evidence suggesting that anyone else could have—Simpson holds firm to his contention that he is not only innocent but in fact the unsung victim in the case. "The public seems to need me to be guilty," he told PEOPLE. "When they don't have an answer, they're quick to blame."
And so Simpson finds himself in some uncomfortable situations. On several occasions he has been taunted and heckled in public, sometimes in the company of Sydney, 13, and Justin, 10, his two children with Nicole. "It doesn't happen very much," Simpson insists. "I tell my kids, 'Don't let someone else's fault get you further away from God.' I don't get mad, and I don't worry about it." Then, two months ago, he claimed that a well-dressed man attacked him at gunpoint in the parking lot of the Wilson and Harding golf courses before fleeing. (L.A. police are investigating.)
Yet nowhere is the strangeness of his position more evident than in his dealings with the family of his late wife, Nicole. Following the murders in 1994, a court awarded Nicole's parents, Lou and Juditha Brown, temporary guardianship of Sydney and Justin. In 1996 an Orange County judge returned the children to Simpson, and they have been living with him ever since. Last November, however, an appeals court overturned the 1996 ruling, maintaining that the judge should have considered evidence that Simpson killed Nicole.
But for the Browns to regain guardianship of the children would require another court fight—something no one wants. "The Browns won't do anything disruptive or detrimental to the kids," says their attorney Natasha Roit. Instead, the two sides have been working on a settlement that could give Simpson physical custody but allow the Browns ample visitation rights—much like the arrangement now in place. Sydney and Justin spend many weekends in the Browns' five-bedroom home in Monarch Bay, a gated community near Laguna Beach. "They can run around and skateboard, and no one bothers them," says Nicole's older sister Denise Brown, 41, who adds that her son Sean, 12, is very protective of his cousins—even though he's as likely as anyone to laugh at the latest O.J. joke. "Kids will be kids," she says. "But Nicole was Sean's godmother, and he still cries for her."
He's not the only one. "This was a tough year," says Denise, who heads the Nicole Brown Charitable Foundation. "I realized that Nicole would have turned 40 on May 19, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I don't think I'll ever get over the anger." Tanya, a computer company sales staffer who at 29 is the youngest of the four Brown sisters (Dominique, 34, also works in the computer business), often drives through Brentwood and remembers her visits with Nicole. "What hurts most is I was just getting to know her as a woman," she says, "and then she was taken away."
To make the shared-custody arrangement work, how-ever, all the Browns maintain a sort of uneasy civility toward Simpson. "I attend virtually all of my kids' games," says Simpson, "and Judy and Lou and I cheer for them together. We have no problems." Adds his custody case lawyer Bernard Leckie: "O.J. told me that Lou sat next to him at one of Sydney's games and even bought him a Coke. That's an encouraging sign." But others close to the Browns claim this never happened, and attorney Natasha Roit insists that things are far from cozy. "The Browns," she says, "are in the unenviable position of having to be courteous to a man who killed their daughter."
Yet all parties seem to agree on one point: Simpson is an attentive parent. "Every expert, whether they were hired by the Browns or Simpson or the court, came up with the conclusion that he was a good father," says Marjorie Fuller, the independent attorney for Sydney and Justin in the case. "They get good grades, they take vacations with their dad, and there's a lot of visitation with the grandparents. These kids are exactly where they want to be." Even Tanya Brown says, "O.J. is their dad, and they love him, and you can't take that away from them."
By most accounts, Sydney and Justin, who have expressed a desire to stay with Simpson, are doing as well as can be expected. "They are tough but sweet kids," says Fuller. "They're not easily intimidated." While Simpson gets a chilly reception from parents at his daughter's private school, Sydney, a student there since before the murders, has no such problems. (Justin goes to a public school in Los Angeles.) "My family is doing fine," says Simpson. "If most people were doing as well as my family, we'd have a lot less problems."
Then again most people aren't in debt to the tune of $33.5 million, which Simpson was ordered to pay in damages to the families of Ron and Nicole. So far they stand to collect only a share of $430,000, the proceeds of a recent auction of some of Simpson's possessions, including his Heisman Trophy. In July 1997 a bank foreclosed on Simpson's $4 million Rockingham estate; its new owners promptly had the house demolished and are starting from scratch.
Simpson, though, has managed to keep other assets intact. For instance, his primary source of income these days is a monthly pension he draws from a special corporation set up before the murders by his friend and attorney Skip Taft as a way to ensure his financial security. The fund yields Simpson a monthly pension of $25,000—every penny of it exempt by law from creditors. "The law that protects pensions didn't have someone who killed two people in mind," says Dan Petrocelli, the Los Angeles attorney who prosecuted Simpson in the civil case and who keeps tabs on his finances. Simpson now pays $6,200 a month to rent a four-bedroom, five-bath house, complete with pool, on a secluded hilltop in Pacific Palisades, and has recently scoped out homes in Coconut Grove and Coral Gables near Miami. "I've been trying to move there forever," Simpson says. "I just like it there, the whole state."
His creditors vow to follow Simpson wherever he may go. "We will continue to pursue his assets and remind America that he is a murderer," says Petrocelli. Yet collecting on the damages seems highly unlikely. Once a well-paid pitchman who dashed through airports for Hertz, Simpson has not been gainfully employed since the trials. Gone also are his gigs as an NFL commentator and as an actor in movies such as The Naked Gun series.
Simpson's wholesome image isn't all that has soured on him. Most of his old friends have long since stopped hanging around. Robert Kardashian, Simpson's confidant since the 1970s, hasn't spoken to him in a year. "I miss the O.J. I know," he says. "I miss the fun we had." Even Simpson admits, "Most of the friends I spend time with now I met since the trial, at places like school, restaurants, golfing."
In 1997, Simpson was denied service at the Brentwood Inn (patrons complained when he showed up for dinner), but since then he has apparently learned to stay away from places where there might be trouble. Even so, he would hardly be described as thin-skinned. He spends much of his time these days on one of several public golf courses he frequents, yet he is almost always recognized and sometimes accosted even there. Last year "he was on the tee when someone shouted, 'O.J., you sliced it,' says Earl West, who runs the shoeshine service at the Rancho Park golf course. "O.J. just walked off." Though he says he doesn't care that people make cracks about the murders, Simpson—who also signs autographs and poses for photos with fans—observes, "My biggest supporters seem to be women, but the more vicious detractors are also women. I see their husbands trying to get them to shut up, and I understand why men get into fights with women."
Of his own social life, Simpson admits, "I hope to one day fall in love again. But I probably won't get married. I don't want any more commitments in my life." For the past couple of years, he has been dating 24-year-old Christie Prody, a cocktail waitress and beauty school student who staked out Simpson's home in order to meet him. Prody's mother, Cathy Bellmore, has desperately tried to get her daughter to leave Simpson. "He has her convinced that he didn't [kill Nicole and Ron]," Bellmore says. "I told her, 'DNA doesn't lie.' She says, 'They planted the blood.' "
Proving his innocence to the world at large does not seem as great a priority for Simpson. "I'm not the kind of guy who lives in the past," he says. "I'm an up-spirited person. But I know that someday I'll be vindicated." What he will likely never recover is the affection and admiration that he could always count on prior to June 12, 1994. "O.J. is a man who strived for attention, who loved to be loved," says Ron Shipp, who has had virtually no contact with his former friend since Nicole and Ron were murdered. "And I think he really misses that celebrity part of his life. I think he's in his own little prison now. Every time he tees off, he's in his own little jail."
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