Are The Kardashians Finally At Peace?

The disgraced athlete quietly haunted the reality stars' lives long after he was acquitted of murder

- ISLEY ZEGAS

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Kardashians and the Simpsons were inseparable, raising their children together, spending time at each other’s homes and jetting off on tropical family vacations. But in 1994, after O.J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, everything changed. “It tore my family apart,” Kim Kardashian recalled in a 2020 interview, explaining that her mom, Kris Jenner, “believed” that Simpson murdered Nicole. “And then we’d go to my dad’s house,” said Kim, whose late father, Robert Kardashian, represented Simpson in his high-profile murder trial, “and it was a whole other situation there.”

In a verdict that stopped America in its tracks, Simpson was ultimately found not guilty of murdering Nicole and Goldman. But the Kardashians’ lives were forever changed. “O.J. cast a pall of fear and sadness over the entire family,” a former friend of the Kardashians tells Us, adding that prior to his death on April 10 (Simpson had been battling prostate cancer), the “threat” that the 76-year-old posed to the reality stars “was something that they dealt with daily.”