By STEPHEN HUNT

OJ SIMPSON, who has died aged 76, was a football star who went on to become an actor – but who was then the centre of the “trial of the century” for the murder of his wife and her friend in 1994.

After being acquitted in 1995, he visited The Bahamas in 1996, where he took part in a celebrity golf tournament organised by William Roberts, of the New England Patriots, to raise funds for victims of sickle cell anaemia in The Bahamas and the United States.

During the visit, he was also a guest at a luncheon held by then PLP Senate leader Franklyn Wilson at his Eastern Road residence. Also present at the time were PLP secretary general Calsey Johnson, Senator Elliston Rhaming, Magistrate Sherry Wilson, PLP chairman Obie Wilchcombe and PLP MP Philip “Brave” Davis.

Mr Wilchcombe talked to The Tribune about the event, saying: “We talked about everything. We talked about his love of The Bahamas, a bit about the case.”

Mr Wilchcombe said that Mr Simpson’s visit to The Bahamas – his first time in the country – was one of the best times he had, adding that should Simpson decide to set up home here, he should not be considered “persona non grata”.

He said: “OJ is a very warm person. It’s very easy to come to like him.”

Simpson and the PLP contingent ate a Bahamian meal of conch and fish, washed down by Kalik beer, said Mr Wilchcombe.

At the time, Mr Simpson was still facing a civil trial for the knife slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman in Los Angeles. The year after his visit to The Bahamas, a jury found him liable for those deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5m to family members of Brown and Goldman.

That was not his last brush with the law. A decade later, he led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns. A jury convicted him of armed robbery and other felonies. At the age of 61, he was jailed and served nine years in a Nevada prison.

When released on parole in 2017, he showed no contrition, insisting to the parole board he was only trying to retrieve memorabilia stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.

He sought to publish a book offering a hypothetical account of the killings he was accused of, called If I Did It, but publisher HarperCollins cancelled the book after public outrage.

Simpson won the rights back to the book – two months before being arrested in Las Vegas.

There was also a claim that the knife used to kill Brown and Goldman had been stashed in The Bahamas. The National Enquirer reported that Simpson was offering to sell it for $5m in a “strictly cash deal”, a claim that Simpson’s camp rejected, saying the idea he would even have the knife was “ludicrous”, let alone be trying to sell it. He had long denied owning the knife, which was never found.

When in The Bahamas, he spoke to the press, saying he hoped that the civil suit that he went on to later lose “will all soon be over” and that he could have his two younger children full time.

He said of the Bahamian welcome: “The people have been loving. I’ve never gotten so much sugar in my life – I’ve got lipstick all over me.”

He added: “Feels like I’m running into a hundred of my sisters and mothers since I’ve gotten here. I’ve been getting love and affection from everybody since I’ve been here, and I’m surprised that I’ve never been to The Bahamas, very surprised.”

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947. He played 11 NFL seasons, nine with the Buffalo Bills where he became known as “The Juice”. He had two sons, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife, Marguerite Whitley; one of those boys, Aaren, drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.

Simpson and Brown were married in 1985. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.

Includes reporting from the Associated Press