Following the death of O.J. Simpson, video footage of reactions to his acquittal for his ex-wife’s murder has gone viral.
On April 10, Orenthal James Simpson, 76, died of cancer. The former athlete rose to fame as an NFL player before embarking on a career in acting and entertainment. In 1994, he was accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
The subsequent murder trial captivated global audiences, with an estimated 150 million people tuning in to hear the jury’s verdict in 1995—including Oprah Winfrey and the entire studio audience of her eponymous daily talk show.
On Thursday, the user End Wokeness posted a video of the audience’s reaction on X, formerly Twitter, where it has received 2.7 million views.
Reed Saxon/AFP via Getty Images)
The 32-second clip shows Oprah’s audience watching intently, some with their eyes closed and hands clasped. The jury foreperson can be heard reading a not-guilty verdict, which leads to a polarized reaction from the crowd. Some audience members jump up and cheer. Others look on in disbelief or shake their heads.
In the video, Oprah stands with her arms crossed.
Newsweek has contacted the End Wokeness account via X for further comment.
“This was Oprah’s audience reacting to OJ Simpson’s verdict in real time (1995),” End Wokeness wrote in the post’s caption. “Polarization is not a new phenomenon.”
In the video’s comments section, X users expressed their distaste for some audience members’ celebratory reactions, with one writing, “Celebrating a murderer … Sickening.”
Another shared a screenshot of a woman from the video and added: “This lady right here was me while watching that OJ Simpson verdict being read. Her disgust is written all over her face hearing that verdict.”
Others compared the size of the cheering crowd to those who remained silent.
“A small group of people were really happy when OJ was found not guilty. Everyone else was pretty much disgusted,” a user wrote.
Following his acquittal for murder, Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in a 1997 civil lawsuit for the wrongful deaths of Brown Simpson and Goldman.
In 2007, he published If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, a hypothetical account of how he would have carried out the murders had he done them. That year, Simpson was also arrested in Las Vegas and charged with armed robbery and kidnapping. He was found guilty of the crimes the following year and sentenced to 33 years in prison. In 2017, after serving almost nine years, he was granted parole.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.