Chansky’s Notebook: A Sad Footnote

Despite parole, O. J. Simpson will continue to live in purgatory.

Those of us who remember O.J. Simpson from his All-American days at Southern Cal, his record-breaking seasons in the NFL and his superstar running through airports for Hertz know him only as a celebrity. All the way up to and through the murder trial for allegedly killing his former wife and her friend, The Juice was always surrounded by the superstars.

Simpson will supposedly leave prison with more than $600,000 in NFL pension money that the families of the murder victims cannot touch through their victory in a civil suit after Simpson’s acquittal on criminal charges. He will live in Florida with his now-grown children and is likely to show up everywhere from Miami to Mar-a-Lago.

That will be his public purgatory since the slightest violation of his parole will likely send him back to prison and the sentence that far outweighed the 2007 crime in Las Vegas. So look for O.J. to be visible but basically neutered by what became a wasted life, guilty or not guilty in both high-profile cases. Simpson was always swayed by celebrity and will again.

But thanks to our memory of that mesmerizing trial and the two documentaries that have educated a younger public, any attempt to recapture his former fame will render him a kind of show animal who comes out, gets seen and then goes back into privacy. How much he’s on display will be up to him.

Simpson has no chance to do any good for a society that doesn’t trust him, and his once sensational athletic career has been reduced to the sensationalism and fascination of whether or not he did it.

It is all a terrible shame for the two slain adults, a Los Angeles racial climate that sided with O.J. and against police brutality, and for Simpson, who we once thought could be a well-needed role model in turbulent times.

Instead he will remain the product of a grisly murder trial and a two-bit crime that was further embarrassment to our legal system. O.J. will surely try to make one last social media splash, but hopefully there will be no takers and he lives out his life as one of the saddest footnotes of his generation.

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