Finally free. O.J. Simpson was granted early release from his parole following his 2007 armed robbery in Las Vegas.
“Mr. Simpson is a completely free man now,” his attorney, Malcolm LaVergne, told Us Weekly in a statement on Wednesday, December 15.
NBC News reported that a hearing took place on November 30, during which parole commissioners agreed to the Nevada Division of Parole and Probation’s request for Simpson, 74, to be released. The decision was made official on December 6, two months before he was scheduled to be freed in February 2022.
According to Nevada state law, people on parole can earn credits for “complying with the conditions of their supervision.” Those credits helped reduce Simpson’s term.
The former football player was sentenced to serve nine to 33 years after he was convicted in 2008 of robbing a sports memorabilia dealer. He completed the minimum requirement at Lovelock Correctional Center, a medium-security prison near Reno, Nevada, and was granted parole in July 2017.
Simpson was previously acquitted of the murders of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in 1995, one year after they were fatally stabbed. A civil jury later found him liable for the deaths and the now-infamous trial was the subject of FX’s first American Crime Story anthology, The People v. O. J. Simpson.
In June 2019, just shy of the 25th anniversary of Nicole and Goldman’s deaths, the retired athlete became active on social media.
“Hey, Twitter world. This is yours truly,” he said in a Twitter video at the time. “Coming soon to Twitter, you’ll get to read all my thoughts and opinions on just about everything. Now, there’s a lot of fake O.J. accounts out there, so this one, @TheRealOJ32, is the only official one.”
He added: “This should be a lot of fun. I’ve got a little getting even to do. So God bless. Take care.”
Earlier this year, O.J. told The Athletic that he has “trouble” visiting Los Angeles, explaining in August, “People may think this is self-serving, but I might be sitting next to whoever did [the murders]. I really don’t know who did this. … I figured eventually somebody would confess to something, you know? I had one suspect I told my lawyers to look at. I still think he might be involved, but I can’t talk about it.”
The If I Did It author frequently finds himself back in the spotlight due to his connection with the Kardashian family. (The late Robert Kardashian represented O.J. in court during the ’90s.)
“I think the last time I saw [O.J.] was in Miami. It was before he had gone to jail this, you know, last situation,” Kim Kardashian said on a September 2019 episode of the “FoodGod: OMFG” podcast with pal Jonathan Cheban. “I think me, Kourtney [Kardashian] and Khloé [Kardashian] were in Miami in a club and we ran into him in the VIP section. It was behind a stage or something, I don’t even know what club it was at. I started crying. It was emotional, I think.”
