![O.J. Simpson sits in court during his 1995 trial.]() Photograph by Eric Draper / AP O. J. Simpson diedon Wednesday at the age of seventy-six. In 1994, when the former football player and actor was charged with the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and of a waiter named Ron Goldman, the case became a lurid national obsession. The televised trial, held the next year, was, in turn, appointment viewing, with its cast of characters—witnesses, lawyers, the presiding judge—becoming instant national celebrities. Jeffrey Toobin covered the trial closely forThe New Yorker, gaining insider access to the defense team’s provocative strategy of suggesting that police officers had plotted to plant evidence and frame Simpson. In October, shortly after Simpson was acquitted by a Los Angeles jury, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., captured the complicated swirl of cultural resentment and competing ideas about facts and justice that the verdict, and the divergent reactions to it, revealed in the country. “As blacks exulted at Simpson’s acquittal,” he writes, “horrified whites had a fleeting sense that this race thing was knottier than they’d ever supposed.” In the years that followed, Simpson retained a place in the public imagination. In 2001, Pat Jordan,in a series of interviews, found him living in Florida, “free of doubt, shame, or guilt,” and sure that he would one day return to his heights of fame and adulation; more recently, as Naomi Fry noted, Simpson, perhaps inevitably, became asocial-media star. All along, the story of the so-called Trial of the Century would be frequently studied and reëvaluated as one of the most influential events of its time. | 
