O.J. Simpson’s “drag queen dad” blamed for his “murderous rage”

Following the death this week of O.J. Simpson, the British tabloid The Daily Mail suggested that the former NFL player’s well-documented history of violence could be chalked up in part to his “drag queen father.”

Simpson’s family announced Wednesday that the 76-year-old had died of cancer at his home in Las Vegas. Simpson rose to NFL fame in the 1970s and went on to appear in TV commercials and films. But his fame was eclipsed in the 1990s, when he was tried for the brutal murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Simpson was acquitted but was later found financially liable in a civil case. In 2006, he wrote an audacious book, If I Did It, in which he detailed how he would have hypothetically committed the murders.

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In 1989, Nicole Brown Simpson claimed that police had responded to domestic violence calls at the couple’s home eight times, but had failed to arrest her ex-husband. During Simpson’s criminal trial, the jury heard a four-minute 911 call from Nicole Brown Simpson in which she could be heard screaming and Simpson could be heard in the background threatening her. An officer who responded to the call said that he found her severely beaten and hiding in bushes, screaming, “He’s going to kill me, he’s going to kill me.”

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In 2008, he was convicted of robbery and kidnapping, after he and two others stormed a Las Vegas hotel room armed with guns and stole sports memorabilia. He served nine years of his 33-year prison sentence, and was released on parole in 2017.

On Thursday, the conservative Daily Mail published a piece, rife with racist dog whistles, by writer Tom Leonard, which purported to reveal “the dark truths behind OJ [sic] Simpson’s murderous rage.” Chief among those supposed “dark truths,” according to Leonard, and the first one listed in the story’s headline: “A drag queen father who died of AIDS.”

“The child of a broken home, [Simpson] grew up on a grim housing project in San Francisco, so poor that he developed rickets and had to wear steel braces on his skinny legs. His father was reportedly a well-known drag queen who later announced he was gay and died from AIDS,” Leonard writes, delving no further into either Simpson’s father’s life or Simpson’s relationship to him.

In a 2016 piece on Simpson’s father, Jimmy Lee Simpson — published around the release of both the ESPN documentary O.J.: Made in America and Ryan Murphy’s FX series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story — Bustle noted that in his 1996 book The Run of his Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson, author Jeffrey Toobin described Jimmy Lee as a fixture of San Francisco’s drag scene who ultimately came out as gay before dying of AIDS-related complications in 1986. An unnamed source in George Carpozi Jr.’s earlier, more dubious book, The Lies of O.J. Simpson, claimed that Jimmy Lee was known as “Mama Simpson,” frequently dressed in drag, and “Everyone knew he was O.J.’s dad.”

In a 2001 obituary for Simpson’s mother, Eunice, The New York Times reported that Simpson’s father, Jimmy Lee Simpson, had abandoned his family when Simpson was four years old. In a 1994 story, the Times quoted a 1977 interview in which Simpson said that he “resented” his father’s absence as a teenager.

“I really needed a man around then for guidance. I get along with my father now, but it’s taken years for me to come to terms with my feelings,” Simpson said.

Of course, none of this backs up Leonard’s implication that Simpson’s father’s sexuality or interest in drag was in any way responsible for him becoming a “monster” who was prone to violence.

Simpson did, however, make his opposition to transgender women participating in women’s sports known in 2021.

“Somehow it just bothered my senses that [Caitlyn Jenner] would be playing on the ladies tees,” Simpson said in the video posted to X (then known as Twitter), referring to a time he saw Jenner playing golf at a country club, and deadnaming her. “I guess I’m against it. I’m against transgender males competing against women.”

On Thursday, Jenner, who opposes trans women and girls competing in women’s and girls’ sports herself, responded to news of Simpson’s death on X, simply posting “Good Riddance” along with #OJSimpson.