The executor of O.J. Simpson’s estate says he will do “everything” in his power to keep the families of murder victims Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson from seeing payment of a $33.5 million wrongful death judgment that was granted to them by a jury in a California civil case in 1997.
Simpson, a former NFL star and actor, died on Wednesday at the age of 76, and on Friday, his will was filed in Nevada’s Clark County court.
The documents, reviewed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, show the disgraced football player’s estate was placed into a trust last year with longtime lawyer Malcolm LaVergne named as executor.
LaVergne, who had represented Simpson since 2009, told the Review-Journal that the value of Simpson’s property has yet to be totaled but that he plans to keep the families from receiving any further payouts.
“It’s my hope that the Goldmans get zero, nothing,” he said. “Them specifically. And I will do everything in my capacity as the executor or personal representative to try and ensure that they get nothing.”
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In 1995, Simpson was acquitted of murder charges in the stabbing deaths of his ex-wife and her friend Goldman in what was then called the “trial of the century.”
Years later, a civil court determined the athlete had “willingly and wrongfully” caused Goldman’s and Brown Simpson’s deaths.
LaVergne contends that the court never officially ordered Simpson to pay the judgment, which David Cook, a lawyer for Ron Goldman’s father, told The New York Times has ballooned to $114 million after nearly three decades of accumulating interest.
LaVergne also took issue with how the Goldmans handled the publication of Simpson’s 2007 memoir, “If I Did It,” which they retitled “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer” after winning control of the manuscript in court.
Before his death, Simpson claimed he was living solely on NFL and private pensions.
As part of the civil jury’s decision, he was forced to auction off his 1968 Heisman Trophy, and hundreds of other pieces of valuable property were also seized. The trophy was auctioned for $230,000 in 1999, but it’s unclear how much of those proceeds went to the judgment.
In 2007, Simpson sought to regain property that had been sold off by orchestrating an armed robbery of memorabilia dealers in Las Vegas. He was sentenced and imprisoned until his parole in 2017.
Court documents filed in 2022 and reviewed by the Times showed that the Goldman family had received only around $132,000 from Simpson.
Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman, and sister Kim Goldman reacted to news of Simpson’s death in a statement on Thursday, lamenting how “the hope for true accountability has ended.”