The O.J. Simpson Case: Things You Might Have Forgotten (or Never Knew)

By now, you probably consider yourself an expert on all things O.J. Simpson murder trial-related thanks to FX’s instantly addicting miniseries The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. But we think what you might have forgotten — or maybe never even knew — could fill an article, so… here’s that article.


1. In May 1994, a month before the murders, O.J. Simpson filmed an NBC drama pilot called Frogmen, about a group of former Navy SEALs who operated an A-Team-like business out of a surf shop in Los Angeles. In one scene, Simpson’s character, John “Bullfrog” Burke, holds a knife to a woman’s throat — he thought she was an intruder, but she turned out to be his daughter — and one of his co-stars confirmed the cast had received some knife training. Because Simpson was charged with two murders that June, the project was scrapped, and the two-hour drama was never aired in public.

2. We might have a clue to who Simpson would back for president (if he still had voting privileges, of course): He was a friend of Donald Trump’s, and even attended Trump’s celeb-packed wedding to Marla Maples in December 1993. Of course, future Trump enemy Rosie O’Donnell was among the 1,000 wedding guests, too.

3. The O.J. trial was good news for true crime TV, but bad news for daytime soap operas. Court TV — relaunched as truTV in 2008 — was a niche network until it broadcast the 1993 Menendez brothers murder trial, and the Simpson trial in 1994, and its resulting popularity led to the proliferation of true crime dramas and news programs on TV today, including the all-true crime cable network, Investigation Discovery. As for soaps, because they were so frequently pre-empted by Simpson trial coverage, viewers got out of the habit of watching them. The Los Angeles Times reported that ABC, CBS, and NBC lost 10 percent of their soap audience during the trial.