O.J. Simpson never predicted that Kim Kardashian would be more famous than he is. In ESPN’s new docuseries O.J.: Made in America, the fallen football star’s friend Thomas Riccio revealed what Simpson initially thought of Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
Riccio said that he and the former NFL star watched Kim Kardashian’s appearance on The Tyra Banks Show on September 13, 2007. In the clip (above, which Us Weekly unearthed), she announced that her family was getting their own E! reality show and discussed her infamous sex tape.
“‘That’s my goddaughter; her name is Kim,’” Riccio recalled Simpson telling him. “‘That show ain’t going to last two weeks.’”
Keeping Up With the Kardashians is currently in its 12th season after almost a decade on the air and has inspired numerous spinoff series, including Kourtney and Kim Take Miami, Kourtney and Kim Take New York, Khloé and Lamar and more.
The date of the conversation must have stuck with Riccio because later that September evening, Simpson was arrested for robbing a sports memorabilia dealer in Las Vegas. The former NFL player was found guilty of robbery and kidnapping in 2008 and sentenced to 33 years behind bars. He is eligible for parole after he has completed nine years of his sentence, in 2017.
Kardashian, 35, recently reminisced with GQ about her involvement in Simpson’s famous 1995 trial for the murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, and said that she rifled through some of the evidence as a teenager.
“I know people said at the time that [my dad, Robert Kardashian Sr., joined Simpson’s defense team] so he couldn’t be called as a witness, because he had that Louis Vuitton bag that supposedly had the weapon and stuff like that,” she told the magazine. “But that bag was sitting at my dad’s house. I remember I went through it. The news was like, ‘Where is this Louis Vuitton bag?’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s upstairs.’’’
She added that she “totally” peeked inside, but it was “just toiletries and clothes and golf clothes. Just random stuff. I’m pretty sure it’s, like, still in probably my dad’s storage.”
Watch Kim’s throwback appearance on The Tyra Banks Show above!
