Eight and five years old are awfully young ages to experience what will become the worst days of your lives, but that’s exactly how old Sydney and Justin Simpson were when their mother Nicole Brown Simpson was taken from them, brutally murdered alongside her friend Ron Goldman at her home on June 12, 1994.
In the ensuing aftermath of that tragic night a quarter of a century ago, the Simpson kids were not only forced to grapple with the idea that they’d never see their mother again, but to watch as their father, retired NFL superstar O.J. Simpson, was accused of the heinous murders and ultimately acquitted of the crime in what would be dubbed the “trial of the century” thanks to the media frenzy it created.
In the years following the trial, while O.J. was battling the Goldman family in a civil lawsuit, where a jury unanimously found him liable for the wrongful death and battery against Ron, as well as battery against Nicole, the children were kept out of the spotlight, living a life of custody split between their father and their mother’s family.
After a move to Florida in 2000 with their Florida, Sydney and Justin were able to grow up in relative anonymity, even as their father was repeatedly accused of committing further crimes, eventually winding up behind bars at Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Center in 2008, where he remained until he was granted parole on July 20, 2017, getting released that October.
By the time he had been released, his children had grown up into adults, each with careers and lives of their own.
Sydney had gone on to attend Boston University, where she graduated with a BA in Sociology from the school’s College of Arts and Sciences in May 2010. Following her graduation, she spent some time in Atlanta before moving to St. Petersburg, Fla., where she purchased a home in August of 2015. At 33, she currently operates her own business, Simpsy LLC, which manages the three properties she owns in the area.
While the terms of their father’s release means that he has to check in with a parole officer before he can visit his grown children, he has made a handful of short trips to Florida to see them, caught by paparazzi during a November 2018 visit for Thanksgiving. “I’ve been to Florida two or three times to see the kids and my old buddies in Miami. I even managed to play a game of golf with them,” O.J. told The Associated Press in June. “But I live in a town I’ve learned to love. Life is fine.”
And while there are certainly plenty of people who remain convinced that O.J. was the culprit that fateful night 25 years ago, regardless of his acquittal, he explained that he and his children don’t spend a lot of time living in the past.
