February 9, 2025
by Carla Hay

“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson”
Directed by Floyd Russ
Culture Representation: The four-episode documentary series “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” features a predominantly group of white and African American people talking about the murder investigation and 1995 murder trial of former football star O.J. Simpson.
Culture Clash: Simpson was accused on murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, with the notorious and controversial trial having a verdict that was racially divisive.
Culture Audience: “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in true crime documentaries about celebrities, murder trials and how race, police investigations and attorneys can influence the outcome of a trial.

“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” takes a look into the most famous murder trial of the 20th century. Does the world really need another documentary about O.J. Simpson and his scandals? Not really, but this four-episode docuseries uncovers a few interesting tidbits about the murder investigation and features a rare interview with former prosecutor Christopher Darden. In 2024, Simpson died of prostate cancer when he was 76.
Directed by Floyd Russ, “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” is not as comprehensive as the 2016 Oscar-winning/Emmy-winning documentary “O.J.: Made in America,” directed by Ezra Edelman. “O.J.: Made in America” (which was really a five-episode series pretending to be a movie) took a deeper dive into the racial, socioeconomic and cultural histories of the Los Angeles area to explain the circumstances that influenced the verdict. Because of all the media coverage, the O.J. Simpson murder trial was called the Trial of the Century.
“O.J.: Made in a America” was also a biography of Simpson, whereas “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” focuses mostly on his legal problems after he became famous. He was born and raised in San Francisco as Orenthal James Simpson on July 9, 1947. Simpson became a Heisman Trophy-winning football star at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
He then went to become a celebrity running back in the National Football League (NFL) for 11 seasons, mostly for the Buffalo Bills, and culminating with two seasons with the San Francisco 49ers before his retirement from football in 1979. Before and after he retired from football in 1979, Simpson also had a career as an actor. After retirement as an NFL player, Simpson was also a NFL analyst for NBC and ABC,
“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” sticks to a certain theme in each episode: Episode 1, titled “The Blood,” is about the murder investigation. Episode 2, titled “The Search,” is about Simpson’s apparent attempt to become a fugitive. Episode 3, titled “The Circus,” is about the murder trial. Episode 4, titled “The Verdict,” is about the trial’s verdict and the aftermath. Each episode is edited for maximum suspense, even though most people watching this documentary already know what the trial’s outcome was.
“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” doesn’t look back on historical events before 1994, the year that Simpson’s 35-year-old ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her 25-year-old friend Ron Goldman were murdered in front of her condominium home in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood. O.J. lived in a separate house in Brentwood. “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” also isn’t a comprehensive biography about O.J. Simpson. As the title suggests, “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” is really about the legal cases and controversies surrounding O.J. from 1994 onward.
By now, most people who know anything about O.J. know the basic facts of the case. On June 12, 1994, Nicole and Goldman were found murdered outside her house that night. They were both brutally stabbed to death. (Sensitive viewers be warned: “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” shows the unedited bloody crime scene photos of the slaughtered bodies of Nicole (who was nearly beheaded) and Goldman. “O.J.: Made in America” also showed these photos.)
O.J., who did not have a solid alibi during the estimated time of the murders, was arrested for the murders after taking police on a low-speed, 60-mile, two-hour chase on various freeways in Orange County and Los Angeles County. This chase (which had O.J. in a 1993 white Ford Bronco driven by his best friend Al “A.C.” Cowlings) was famously televised live and showed many spectators cheering for O.J. on the sides of the freeway. In the Bronco, O.J. reportedly had a gun and was threatening to kill himself. O.J. had also written a self-pitying, possibly suicidal note before he fled in the Bronco chase and later surrendered to police.
The murder weapon was never found. O.J.’s blood was found at the crime scene, Nicole’s blood was found in O.J.’s car, and he could never explain how it got there. O.J. had a cut on his hand that night, but he said it was from shaving. A bloody glove was found at the crime scene. The presentation of the glove during the murder trial would be a major turning point in the trial.
O.J.’s well-documented history of physically abusing Nicole (including his 1989 arrest, for which he was fined and received probation) was used as evidence to establish a pattern that he wanted to harm her. Nicole’s older sister Denise Brown famously testified in the murder trial about O.J.’s pattern of abuse against Nicole. Also presented as evidence in the trial: photos of a bruised Nicole and Nicole’s past 911 calls for help to report O.J.’s physical abuse against her.
O.J. and Nicole started dating in 1977, shortly after he met her at a private club, where she worked as a waitress. At the time, she was 18 and he was 30. O.J. divorced his first wife Marguerite Simpson in 1979, after 12 years of marriage. Marguerite had custody of their two children: Arnelle Simpson (born in 1968) and Jason Simpson (born in 1970), who both stayed in contact with their father after the divorce. O.J. and Margeurite had a third child—a daughter name Aaren—who tragically died from a drowning accident at 2 years old in 1979.
O.J. and Nicole got married in 1985, the year that their daughter Sydney was born. Their son Justin was born in 1988. After a volatile relationship with several breakups and makeups, O.J. and Nicole got divorced in 1992. The former couple reunited briefly (but did not remarry) after the divorce, but that reunion didn’t last. By 1994, Nicole had been dating other men and wanted to move on from her ex-husband, who was described by many people as jealous and controlling of her.
The prosecution contended that O.J. “snapped” and committed the murders because Nicole had shunned him earlier that night when he saw her and her family at the restaurant Mezzaluna, where Goldman worked as a waiter. Nicole’s mother had accidentally left her glasses at the restaurant, and Goldman was at Nicole’s condo to return the glasses. Goldman was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.
O.J. hired a so-called Dream Team of famous defense lawyers, including Johnnie Cochran (the lead attorney), Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, Carl Douglas, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. The prosecution was led by Marcia Clark, with assistance from Bill Hodgman and Darden. The televised trial, presided over by Judge Lance Ito, lasted from January 24 to October 3, 1995.
The sequestered jury (which consisted of a majority of black women) heard conflicting testimony about the evidence. The evidence was put into doubt because the defense team successfully argued that the investigation could have been corrupted by racist cops who tampered with or planted the evidence. In the end, Simpson was found not guilty on all counts. Several TV news outlets showed live reactions to the verdicts. Mostly white groups of people looked shocked and disappointed, while mostly black groups of people cheered and looked elated.
There have been many books, documentaries and news reports with analyses of why many black people viewed this trial differently from people of other races. “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” repeats the theory that the black people who cheered for the verdict weren’t cheering because they thought that O.J. was not guilty. They were cheering because they felt that the verdict was a rebuke against a system that often unjustly convicts or mistreats black people. They saw it as a triumph over the mostly white Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which had a long history of racist brutality against black people. (The controversy and 1992 riots over Rodney King are a prime example of how much these issues resonated with people.)
“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” doesn’t reveal much that “O.J.: Made in America” didn’t already cover. However, “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” does mention a few more thngs in a long list of evidence that the LAPD detectives on the scene overlooked or did not handle properly. Among the photographed things that were not taken into evidence at Simpson’s house when the police searched his house right after the murders: some clothes in Simpson’s washing machine, bandages in a bedroom, and blood on a light switch. There was also a photographed bloody fingerprint at the crime scene that was not taken into evidence.
“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” makes a less convincing argument that two people who are interviewed in this documentary—Jill Shively and Skip Junis—should have been called to testify for the prosecution during the trial. The reality is that these two witnesses would not have made a difference in the outcome of the trial because there was too much reasonable doubt in their witness statements. Shively claims that she saw O.J. speeding the Bundy Drive (the street where Nicole’s condo was) on the night of the murder during the time that he said that he was at home. O.J. said he was waiting for a limo to take him to Los Angeles International Airport for a business trip to Chicago. Junis says he saw O.J. throw away something at the Los Angeles International Airport, but Junis can’t say for sure what that something is.
Shively says she vividly remembers her encounter with O.J. because O.J. was speeding when he nearly collided with a Nissan car and she heard him speak as he glared at her. Shively gave this testimony to the grand jury that indicted O.J. for the murders. If Shively’s testimony is true, the driver of the Nissan never came forward.
However, Shively could not reasonably be a witness for the prosecution for the murder trial because, by her own admission, her credibility was tainted after she was paid $5,000 to do an interview with the tabloid TV show “Hard Copy” about her run-in with O.J. In “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson,” Shively says at the time she did this interview, she thought it was normal for get paid for this type of interview, and she didn’t know at the time the prosecution would disregard her as a witness.
Junis says he saw that when O.J. at Los Angeles International Airport after the murders took place, Juris says he saw O.J. take an object from a duffel bag and throw that object in an outside garbage can. Junis says the object looked like something long and was possibly in a sheath. He says that it could have been a knife. However, Junis admits in the documentary that it was dark outside, he was too far away to actually see what was thrown away, and he never bothered to look in the garbage can to see what the object was. In other words, he’s not a reliable witness. It’s no wonder he wasn’t called to testify in the trial.
Former prosecutor Darden, who is now a defense attorney, has a world-weary and generally resigned attitude about losing the most famous case of his career. He says of the verdict: “It’s a beautiful thing or a travesty of justice. It’s about one’s perspective.” His former prosecutor colleague Clark participated in “O.J.: Made in America” and apparently declined to participate in “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson.” Clark took a leave of absence from the California District Attorney’s office and officially quit in 1997, the same year that her non-fiction book “Without a Doubt” (about her trial experiences) was published. She no longer practices law and is now an author who has written several crime novels.
Douglas is the most flamboyant person interviewed in the documentary and is one of two members from O.J.’s defense team who is interviewed in “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson.” The other former Dream Team attorney who’s interviewed is Bill Thompson, who focuses mainly on talking about what he says was untrustworthy DNA evidence that was mishandled by police investigators. Thompson gives a lot of credit to fellow defense attorneys Scheck and Neufeld for their expertise in DNA.
Some members of the so-called Dream Team are now deceased, including Kardashian, Cochran and Bailey, who was disbarred in 2001 and 2003. In 2002, Kardashian died of esophageal cancer at age 59. Robert Kardashian’s ex-wife Kris and their daughters Kim, Kourtney and Khloe would later become reality TV stars. In 2005, Cochran died of a lung infection at age 67. An ailing Bailey died in 2021, at age 87, and his family will not disclose his cause of death.
Douglas repeats the well-known facts that the Dream Team had internal conflicts about strategy and leadership, including Shapiro’s ego getting bruised when O.J. decided to have Cochran replace Shapiro as the lead defense attorney. Shapiro and Cochran clashed over the direction of the defense team strategy. Shapiro (who is white) didn’t want race and racism to be major factors in the defense. By contrast, Cochran (who was black) wanted race and racism to be the central points in the defense.
Douglas also keeps pushing the notion that the LAPD could not be trusted in this case because there were too many incompetent and/or racists cops involved who could have mishandled or tampered with evidence. The credibility of the evidence was also put in doubt when video evidence showed members of the LAPD, including evidence technician Dennis Fung, not wearing gloves when handling evidence at the crime scene. Defense attorney Scheck famously ripped into Fung during Fung’s testimony about blood and DNA found at the crime scene.
Douglas also freely admits that he loved the controversial decision to allow the trial to be televised. “Trial lawyers have great egos,” Douglas comments. “I always say that the most dangerous spot to be is between a trial lawyer and a camera that’s running. We lawyers thrive on that attention and that celebrity. And we want it to continue forever.” Douglas doesn’t say whether or not he thinks O.J. was guilty of the murders but he does say that the verdict was correct because the LAPD made so many mistakes in the investigation, there was plenty of reasonable doubt.
Mark Fuhrman, one of the detectives who gathered evidence at the crime scene, was the defense team’s chief villain, especially after the team uncovered Fuhrman’s admitted history of racism against black people. In “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson,” Fuhrman is interviewed and seems less interested in defending all the known blunders that he made in the investigation and is more interested in trying to convince whoever watches this documentary that he wasn’t as terrible of a racist as O.J’s defense team made him out to be.
“I can’t undo what has been done,” Fuhrman says while adding that he’s not looking for forgiveness. Fuhrman also bitterly complains that his supervisor at the time, Philip Van Atter, was at the crime scene and didn’t properly look at Fuhrman’s notes. Van Atter died in 2012, at the age of 71.
Kim Goldman, Ron Goldman’s younger sister, is the only person from the victims’ families who is interviewed in “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson.” She’s given many interviews about her family’s involvement in the murder case and has a podcast about it. Kim Goldman really doesn’t say anything new about Ron, O.J., the murder trial or the 1997 wrongful death civil trial that the Brown family and Goldman family won against O.J Simpson. The O.J. Simpson estate has yet to pay the $33.5 million judgment that was awarded in the trial.
Ron and Kim’s father Fred Goldman, another outspoken critic of O.J., participated in “O.J. Made in America” but chose not to be in “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson.” The members of the Brown family presumably did not participate in “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” because they did a separate documentary project: the 2024 Lifetime docuseries titled “The Life and Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.”
Douglas isn’t very convincing when saying that because he saw O.J. cry, that made Douglas doubt that O.J. could be a cold-blooded murderer. Douglas comments that you’d have to be a sociopath to commit that type of murder and then calmly go to an airport an hour later. However, former LAPD homicide detective Tom Lange, who was one of the chief people in the murder investigation, says in the documentary that O.J. was indeed a “sociopath.”
Mike Gilbert, O.J.’s former sports agent, repeats what he’s said in many other interviews: Gilbert was loyal to O.J. until after O.J. made a comment to him years after the murders that convinced Gilbert that O.J. murdered Nicole and Ron. O.J. told Gilbert that Nicole and Ron would be alive if she didn’t have a knife when she opened the door. Coincidence or not, Gilbert says his friendship with O.J. ended shortly after O.J. filed for bankruptcy in 2007.
Other people interviewed in “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” include Brian “Kato” Kaelin, a wannabe actor who was living as a guest on Simpson’s property and was a prosecution witness to what he saw that night; prosecution witness Ron Shipp, a former cop friend of O.J.’s; Brad Roberts, a former LAPD detective who worked on the murder case; Bettina Rasmussen, a witness who saw Nicole’s dog wandering around the neighborhood with bloody paws on the night of the murder; Peter Weireter, the crisis negotiator who helped convince O.J. to surrender to police; Yolanda Crawford, who was jury member for the murder trial; and journalists Geraldo Rivera, Jeffrey Toobin, Conan Nolan and Marika Gerrard.
Crawford says of the jury’s verdict in the murder trial: “I hated that we had to do that,” but she adds that the verdict came down to reasonable doubt that the prosecution could not erase. Crawford also comments that she will never forget the scream that Kim Goldman made after the verdict was read. As she has said in other interviews, Crawford believes she and the rest of the jury made the right decision in the verdict.
“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” does a brief summary of what O.J.’s life was like after 1997, including his 2008 conviction of robbery and 2017 early release from prison. He served nine years from a 33-year sentence. “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” director Russ has said in interviews that O.J. was still alive when the documentary began filming and was asked to participate. But the documentary filmmakers decided not to include O.J. because O.J. wanted to be paid to participate and wanted to dictate who else could be in the documentary.
“American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” is a generally competent chronicle about a very divisive true crime story. A few things were left out of the documentary, such as Simpson’s controversial 2007 book “If I Did It: Confessions of a Killer,” which was labeled as a fiction book. Fred Goldman was awarded the rights to the book because of his civil case judgment against O.J. Simpson. Ultimately, “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” is a docuseries worth watching for a shorter and more updated version of what was essentially covered in “O.J.: Made in America.”
Netflix premiered “American Manhunt: O.J. Simpson” on January 29, 2025.