Following the death of OJ Simpson this week, veteran TV presenter and comedienne Ruby Wax has written about the time she spent interviewing the footballing legend turned pariah for her BBC chat show.
Back in 1998, Wax travelled to Los Angeles where she spent 17 hours with Simpson. Writing in The Times of London this weekend, she says the moment he re-enacted his alleged killings of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman – for which he went through “the trial of the century” before being acquitted in 1995 – wasn’t even the weirdest part of the day.
Wax writes:
“After a manic 17 hours’ filming, I asked him for the final time whether he was involved in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. I was sure we could get him to confess. But he simply turned to the camera, said “no” and gave a rueful smile.”
Wax remembers an incident when she had returned to her hotel room after finishing filming:
“There was a knock at the door. It was Simpson, making stabbing motions with a banana held above his head while screeching, in the vein of the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.”
Wax recalls an equally strange incident at dinner the previous evening when Simpson asked her if she wanted to know his favourite poem:
“He went into the poem about Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted of killing her father and stepmother in Massachusetts in 1892: ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe/ And gave her mother forty whacks/ When she saw what she had done/ She gave her father forty-one.’”
And she adds: “The last time I spoke to him was, I think, on April 1, 1998, shortly after we had finished filming. He called me up here in London and said: ‘Hi, it’s OJ. I did it.’ Then he said ‘April fool’s’ and hung up.”
Read the full piece by Wax here
Wax interviewed Simpson in 1998, just over two years after he was notoriously acquitted of double murder. In February 1997, the former footballing star and actor was found guilty in a civil lawsuit brought by the victims’ families and fined $33million in damages – triple that amount remains owed today. Simpson died on April 10 2024 aged 76.