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The real court system, not the Court of Public Opinion, was correct in finding football star Orenthal James “OJ” Simpson, who died last year, not-guilty of murder in 1995, so says a guest on the Mania Podcast, hosted by Daniel Negreanu and Amanda Negreanu.
Alex Tomé, a friend of Mrs. Negreanu since childhood, has researched the double murder case that was dubbed “The Trial of the Century” for over 20 years. He admits he can’t prove the Hall of Fame NFL running back didn’t kill his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, on June 12, 1994. But, as he claimed in a lengthy interview with the GGPoker ambassador and his wife, “the evidence points” to innocence.
The Case Against OJ Simpson
Simpson was an immediate suspect when the two victims were found brutally stabbed to death outside Nicole’s Los Angeles home. The evidence shown to jurors and presented to Judge Lance Ito during pretrial hearings led most Americans to presume the once beloved celebrity was guilty.
There was strong physical and circumstantial evidence against Simpson. A bloody glove matching his DNA was left behind at the crime scene, investigators discovered a deep cut on Simpson’s hand, and the “Juice” had a history of domestic violence against Nicole. Plus, a fugitive OJ taking police on a low-speed chase down the LA freeway for hours didn’t help the public perception. But Tomé, through his exhaustive years-long research into the case, has some concerns with how the investigation was conducted.
“Do you know who collected the evidence from this crime scene? Brand-new people who were just interns the week before,” the podcast guest asked.
Simpson’s high-profile and high-priced “Dream Team” attorneys, most notably Johnnie Cochran and Alan Dershowitz, painted a similar picture in court to defend their client. They portrayed one of the lead detectives, Mark Fuhrman, as a racist in hopes of convincing the jury that the evidence against Simpson was planted and couldn’t be trusted.
OJ’s lawyers even played a recording of Fuhrman using a racial epithet, and it turned out to be a key moment in the eight-month trial. Tomé took his conspiracy theory on the investigators even further. He posited why police may have planted evidence.
“I think originally that’s not what they wanted to go do,” Tomé said of the alleged crime scene failures. “But as things started to come to light and become apparent, they had no choice but to juice up the case a little bit.”
By “juice up” the case, he’s referring to police believing OJ committed the crime but didn’t have enough physical evidence to convince a jury. So, the Mania Podcast guest alleges they planted evidence to bolster their case against the defendant. Tomé claims that Furhman and the other detectives mishandled the crime scene.
“Even the seasoned pros in this case were handling evidence without gloves on,” he claims.
What About the Infamous Bronco Chase?
Negreanu questioned his guest on some of the circumstantial evidence. Simpson’s friend, Al Cowlings, led police on a low-speed chase through Los Angeles with OJ in the backseat of the infamous white Ford Bronco prior to his arrest. The incident caused Americans to assume OJ’s refusal to just turn himself in to police and face murder charges was an admission of guilt.
“How do you get from there, which is ‘I’m all open,’ to being in a Bronco, right, where the whole world is watching you, in some crazy insane car chase with every police officer in the state like where are you going, why are you doing this, and how did it go from, you know?” the seven-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner asked his guest, who had just stated that OJ willingly offered up blood samples to police.
Tomé had a response prepared. He theorized as to why OJ didn’t just go turn himself in right away, suggesting that Simpson may have felt guilty about the murder if he didn’t commit the crime.
“I think the reason why he pled not guilty and was so firm on it was because he didn’t commit the crime, he did not kill those two people. That’s what I believe, in his mind, okay, and that’s an important distinction. Could you have been involved in a crime but not actually committed the crime?” Tomé argued.
Evidence that Points to Innocence?
Amanda Negreanu’s longtime friend whom she grew up with in North Carolina dug into the physical evidence prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden used to prove the case against the actor and football star. He claims there were blood drops at the crime scene that had ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), a substance used in medicine to prevent blood clotting and for other purposes, in them.
EDTA is a preservative dropped in a blood sample to prevent the blood from clotting and to stick together, but it doesn’t occur naturally in the blood. This has caused Tomé and many OJ Simpson case conspiracy theorists to question if the blood and other evidence had been planted at the crime scene.
Tomé claims he was “told by a dude” who has inside information about the murder that Nicole had told OJ over the phone the night of the incident that she needed him to stop by her home because “there are a couple of dudes lurking around my house.”
“I know what they want, you know who they are, we’ve got to settle this,” Tomé said of what Nicole allegedly told OJ during the phone call.
Negreanu then asked what “I know what they want” meant.
“Money,” Tomé responded.
He then brought up Nicole’s close friend Faye Resnick, who never testified in court. Resnick, who has over 215,000 Instagram followers, had a highly-publicized cocaine addiction at the time, and Tomé believes a drug related debt may have played into the double murder.
Resnick’s third husband, Paul, claims he called Nicole days before the murder concerned that his now ex-wife’s drug problem had gotten out of control. She even stayed at Nicole’s condo in June 1994 before being convinced to check into a drug rehab center just three days prior to the double homicide.
“They were there to collect Faye Resnick’s debt, according to this theory,” Tomé said of the conversation he had with the person supposedly in-the-know.
He claims the debt Resnick owed some drug dealers was in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, although he admits he is only estimating and doesn’t know the exact amount. OJ, a wealthy celebrity, could have easily paid off the debt, but Tomé says he didn’t want to deal with it as he was focused on getting ready for the Chicago trip.
But, as the podcast guest claims, OJ went over to Nicole’s house at the request of his ex-wife. Tomé, sharing a story he was told by his source, says that Simpson arrived at the scene where he saw “two dudes” arguing with Nicole before they brutally stabbed her. OJ then, according to this story, attempted to defend her, and that is how he ended up with a cut on his finger.
Goldman, who was returning a pair of glasses to Nicole, then supposedly arrived and tried to help but ended up getting fatally stabbed in the process.
Poker Star Asks a Valid Question
Tomé then claims that after seeing dead or dying bodies on the ground and a scene full of blood, OJ quickly bolted from Nicole’s home in panic. He didn’t stick around to help his dying wife or even call 911, and the seven-time World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet winner wants to know why.
“If this is all true, why didn’t OJ say so? Why didn’t OJ say there were two men there that stabbed Nicole in front of me?” Negreanu asked.
“Why was that not part of the defense?”
Tomé believes “to do so would be more hurtful to him, in his mind,” in terms of public perception, not his criminal case. His argument is that OJ didn’t want the public to know he’d been anywhere near the crime scene or that he just left the victims there to die.
OJ flew to Chicago that night, which made many, including police, question if he was skipping town after killing his ex-wife. But it was also assumed that the trip was a spur-of-the-moment decision, when in fact he, as Tomé explained, had planned it months in advance as part of an obligation with Hertz, the car rental company he promoted in the early 1990s.
“You’ve already paid for your limo to pick you up at a certain time, and 15 minutes before that you decide to go murder two people. Let’s not forget, he was charged with murder in the first-degree, which means he planned it out,” he argued.
First degree murder requires premeditation, but premeditation is defined as an individual contemplating, for any length of time, an action and then subsequently acting it out. So, OJ could have committed premeditated murder after, say, discovering that another man had gone over to his ex-wife’s house, even if he knew a limo driver was coming over to take him to the airport minutes later.
“Him being there was bad, bad in so many ways. He was sponsored by Hertz, he had a job at NBC, all of that s**t goes away,” Tomé said.
Simpson was found not guilty on both counts of murder on Oct. 3, 1995, but he was found liable for wrongful death at a 1997 civil trial. He was ordered to pay $33.5 million to the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, which he never did. OJ was, however, convicted in 2008 of robbery and kidnapping stemming from a sports memorabilia incident at Palace Station casino in Las Vegas.
The former Buffalo Bills running back received a sentence of nine to 33 years in a Nevada prison. He was granted parole and released at midnight on Oct. 1, 2017, the day of the mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip. Simpson, who always denied murdering his ex-wife and her friend, passed away from cancer in April 2024.