News that NFL running back O.J. Simpson passed away at the age of 76 has many falling down memory lane rabbit holes from the athlete’s rollercoaster life, which included one of the most infamous murder trials of the 20th century.
Simpson’s family announced through X, formerly Twitter, that Simpson passed away after a battle with prostate cancer. Simpson was charged with the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1994. He was acquitted of the charges but later found responsible for their deaths in a civil suit.
Following Simpson’s acquittal, he could never fully move out from the shadow of the murders or the question of his actual guilt.
In a 1998 interview on Ruby Wax Meets, Simpson was interviewed by Ruby Wax and one clip that has stood the test of time and continues to be spread around social media is of Simpson using a banana to pretend to stab Wax. The moment startled viewers for years in light of Simpson being charged in a double murder.
At one point during their chats, a grinning Simpson opened his hotel door and used a banana to perform a stabbing motion at Wax.
Wax said later she thought Simpson wanted her to “bust” him.
“I think he wanted me to bust him, he said out of nowhere ‘want to know what my favorite poem is’ and and he went into ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe, And gave her mother forty whacks; When she saw what she had done, She gave her father forty-one,” she said, according to Daily Mail.
Wax also claimed Simpson called her after the interview and joked about killing Brown Simpson, recalling him calling her and saying, “I killed her — April Fool’s!”
In their interview, a tense Simpson denied any guilt over the murders and said he’d been “screwed” during his trial, pointing to “subconscious racism.”
Wax pushed back against this, saying he “got off” and was innocent by the standards of the federal government.
“You’re free. You’re walking around. What’s your problem?” Wax asked.
Before Wax promised to never asked about the murders again, she tried one last time.
“Did you do it?” she asked.
“Nope,” Simpson said. “Did not do it.”
Wax noted that the stabbing prank happened after the interview concluded when Simpson said he had a “surprise” for her in hit hotel room.
“O.J. said he had a surprise for me and I genuinely was surprised,” Wax said after the interview. “I think it was his idea of a joke.”
Watch above via Ruby Wax Meets.
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