My sister Nicole married OJ Simpson. This is what I wish I had known

‘I told her so many times to leave him’ … Denise at her home in Florida, US. Photograph: Mikaela Martin/The GuardianView image in fullscreen‘I told her so many times to leave him’ … Denise at her home in Florida, US. Photograph: Mikaela Martin/The GuardianInterviewMy sister Nicole married OJ Simpson. This is what I wish I had knownEmine SanerSince Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder in 1994, Denise Brown has devoted herself to ending domestic violence. She talks about her beloved sister, the trauma she witnessed in the couple’s marriage and how lives can be saved

The last night Denise Brown spent with her sister Nicole Brown Simpson was at a restaurant for a family celebration. Nicole looked out of the window. “All of a sudden she goes, ‘Oh my God, there he is.’ He was driving by.” Brown looked out, trying to get a glimpse of her sister’s ex-husband, the former American football star OJ Simpson. “I saw these headlights. She said, ‘He’s constantly following me.’” They went back to talking about their plans for the summer.

The following morning, 13 June 1994, Brown was up early at her parents’ house in Orange County in southern California, when the phone rang shortly after 6am. “I heard my mom scream a scream that I had never heard from a human being,” says Brown. “It was so guttural. Just awful.”

She ran to her parents’ room and took the phone from her mother’s hand. It was a detective from the Los Angeles police department, who explained that Nicole, who was 35, had been found dead, along with her friend Ron Goldman, stabbed outside her house. He finally did it, she told the detective, who asked who she meant. “I said: OJ Simpson. I knew in my heart, in my gut, in my soul that he killed Nicole. Everything started flashing back into my head. Everything about her relationship, everything over the 17 years.”

View image in fullscreen‘She was a kid’ … Nicole (left) with Denise. Photograph: Courtesy of Denise BrownSimpson was acquitted of the two murders in a trial the following year, though a civil trial in 1997 found him liable. Later, he would be convicted of armed robbery and kidnap, and served nine years in prison. Released in 2017, he died in 2024.

After her sister’s murder and the evidence of long-term abuse that emerged during the trial, Brown became a campaigner against domestic violence. Now she is about to publish a book, For My Sister Nicole. “I feel like after 32 years I’ve learned a lot, and I thought it was time,” she says, when we speak over Zoom. “I want this book to save lives.”

As well as a memoir of her relationship with her younger sister – and her sister’s relationship with Simpson – Brown includes advice and resources for people experiencing domestic abuse (the vast majority of whom are women), or their family and friends. This includes recognising abuse, putting together a safe plan for leaving, and custody of children. “I said all the wrong things to Nicole: ‘You’ve got to leave him. You’ve got to get out of this situation. What are you doing?’ That was not being supportive. I want people to get educated and be supportive, and I want victims to know they’re not alone in this situation, and it’s not their fault that this is happening to them.”

In the days after Nicole was murdered, Brown stated that she didn’t think Nicole was a “battered woman” (a term commonly used in the 1990s). “I didn’t know anything about domestic violence,” she says now, and gives a pained smile when she adds that her impression was that it only happened to women in poverty. “Like a lot of people even think today: ‘This kind of stuff happens to poor people, people that have their teeth knocked out, people that don’t have a loving family.’ That’s what I thought a victim of domestic violence was.”

View image in fullscreen‘I want victims to know it’s not their fault this is happening to them’ … Denise Brown at home in Florida. Photograph: Mikaela Martin/The GuardianNicole came from a close and loving family – she was the second oldest of four sisters, growing up in an affluent Orange County coastal city – and was a sparky, confident person. The scale of the abuse only became clear after her murder, when Brown and her family found and read Nicole’s journals, where she had detailed beatings and controlling behaviour. They had seen signs, sometimes blatant ones, but Nicole always minimised it. “I did not know that this was something that happens as a cycle,” Brown says, “over and over again.”

When Brown first met Simpson, her sister had already been with him for eight months. Nicole was 18 when they met; he was about 30. “What people have to remember is that she was very much head over heels in love with this guy, and she was a kid. She was young; he could mould her into whatever he wanted, and that’s exactly what he did.” Nicole took Brown and their younger sister Dominique to watch Simpson, one of the NFL’s biggest stars, in a football game. That evening at Simpson’s home, Brown heard raised voices and then saw Nicole in tears. He had seen her, from the football field, kiss a mutual male friend on the cheek, says Brown. “She comes back [upstairs], and goes, ‘Everything’s OK. I embarrassed him.’ She blamed herself.” The next day, feeling uneasy, Brown tried to get Nicole to come back with her to New York, where she was working for a modelling agency, but Nicole refused.

Worse was to happen another night, when Brown and a friend went out for dinner with Nicole and Simpson in Los Angeles, and continued drinking back at Simpson’s house. Nicole had been living with him for several years by this point. He asked Nicole to get them some food, and Brown pulled him up on it. “I said, ‘You really take her for granted. She does everything for you.’”

View image in fullscreenDenise at Nicole’s grave in 1996. Photograph: Fred Greaves/Zuma Press Wire/ShutterstockSimpson became angry, went upstairs and started pulling photographs off the wall and smashing them on the floor. “Then he goes into her closet. He takes her clothes, he starts throwing them down into the foyer. He comes running back down and he grabs Nicole by the throat, up against the kitchen door, and she’s about six inches off the ground. I run over and I am pounding on him, yelling and screaming. He finally lets her go, and he throws her out the door. She’s all bloodied.” He shoved Brown out, too.

The following morning, Nicole went back to the house. Brown thought she would be getting some of her things, leaving him, but she stayed. “She goes, ‘It was just too much drinking. Everything is OK.’”

How did she feel about her sister going back to him after that? “I figured she’s an adult, and she knows better. I thought it was an isolated incident. I decided he’s crazy, he’s an asshole, and I saw a side of him I did not like. Could I explain what it was? No. I just knew I didn’t like it.” But in the years after that – after Nicole and Simpson got married and had two children, and she learned more about his behaviour – Brown says, “I told her so many times to leave him.”

After Nicole was killed, Brown learned that it’s rarely simple to leave. It’s not just that abuse can destroy victims’ self-esteem: “They are the only ones that know how dangerous their [abuser] can be. I’m not saying this happened in Nicole’s relationship, but batterers usually threaten to take children away, threaten family members. When you are in a cycle like Nicole – like a lot of victims of domestic violence – was in, you are the only one who realises how dangerous that situation can be.” That danger peaks when you actually leave.

View image in fullscreenOJ Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994. Photograph: Vinnie Zuffante/Getty ImagesNicole once asked Brown to photograph bruises on her body, and in 1989 Simpson was sentenced to community service for spousal abuse. “But she never wanted to talk about it.” It can take several attempts to leave an abuser, and many women return. It can be frustrating to friends and family members watching this, Brown acknowledges. “But don’t give up on them.” When she goes to speak to law enforcement officers, “I always say, ‘You may go to 50 calls to the same residence, but that 51st call may be the one where you actually save her life.’”

Brown was pleased when Nicole finally left Simpson, but she says he continued to stalk her sister even after their 1992 divorce. (Nicole made a phone call to the police eight months before she was murdered to say Simpson had broken into her house.) Five days before she was killed, she phoned a shelter. “It’s the hardest call a victim of domestic violence will ever make, and that’s why I want people to take them seriously,” says Brown. “Because when they make that call, it’s a desperate plea for help. They need to get a safety plan because a victim of domestic violence is in more danger [when leaving] the situation.”

The murder of Nicole and Goldman became a global news story, and the media scrutiny of the families was intense. It helped that Brown was living at her parents’ house in a gated community, together with Nicole’s children, Sydney and Justin, but helicopters would circle overhead, trying to photograph the kids. “It was a time of chaos. It was absolutely horrific.” She was so angry, she says, that she would go for long runs every day, “until I just finally collapsed. That was the only way I could deal with it.”

View image in fullscreenDenise at a candlelit vigil to mark the second anniversary of Nicole’s death. Photograph: Andrew Shawaf/Getty ImagesThe day after Nicole’s funeral, Simpson was scheduled to turn himself in to the police, but went on the run. The car chase, with Simpson in a white SUV, was televised live, with millions watching, until he was arrested back at home that night. Brown and Dominique even joined in the chase. “We were out of our minds. We got on the road, but he was so far ahead of us. I mean, come on, really?” She laughs at herself, but says, “It was a time of our lives that was insane.”

The trial, which ran for most of the following year, was also televised and became a huge spectacle – it played a big part in sparking the true crime genre. Brown and her family were driven to the courthouse and entered underneath the building; they weren’t confronted by Simpson supporters outside, or by people selling merchandise. Brown took to the stand, but says prosecutors wanted “to educate the jurors about domestic violence, and that was nixed. Afterwards, I remember jurors saying, ‘This wasn’t a domestic violence case. This was a murder trial.’ Well, the ultimate form of domestic violence is murder.” How did she cope with the jury’s not guilty verdict? “I didn’t, not very well. But not guilty does not mean you’re innocent.”

View image in fullscreenDenise (left) and Nicole. Photograph: Courtesy of Denise BrownBrown never saw Simpson again after the 1997 civil trial, in which he was found liable for Nicole and Goldman’s deaths, and ordered to pay the victims’ families $34m. But he didn’t disappear. In 2006 it was announced he had co-authored a book called If I Did It, about how hypothetically he could have murdered his ex-wife and Goldman. It was cancelled after an uproar. “He wasn’t around me,” says Brown. “I still continued doing my advocacy work, I still continued my life, and I paid him no mind. He does not exist in my space. He didn’t then, and he doesn’t now.”

The murders and trial are still the subject of documentaries. “When I see something on TV, I usually just switch the channel,” says Brown. She is in contact with Sydney and Justin, who lived with their father, but she doesn’t want to talk about them. “They’ve got their own lives. They’ve had a tough upbringing, and I want people to respect their privacy.”

Now 69, she plans to be campaigning for the rest of her life. “This is something that I feel the need to do. When we started the foundation [in Nicole’s name, but since closed], I thought, ‘Great! Domestic violence is going to end.’ Well, we’re still at it.” In the US, an estimated one in three women have experienced physical or sexual violence, or stalking by an intimate partner.

There and elsewhere, shelters “are on the verge of closing”, she says. “They are not getting the funding that they need from our government.”

View image in fullscreenDenise with a copy of the book she has written, For My Sister Nicole. Photograph: Mikaela Martin/The GuardianThe murder and abuse of Nicole highlighted domestic violence and helped push through the Violence Against Women Act three months later. Does Brown hope it will continue to be supported and funded under a president who is not known for his commitment to women’s rights? She holds up two crossed fingers. We speak just after US police reopened an investigation into the alleged rape of a woman by seven men at Cornell University in 2024. “It’s just horrific,” Brown says.

Read moreHad she known then what she knows now about domestic abuse, she says, “I’m hoping that I could have saved Nicole’s life. When I saw the very first thing that happened to her, I would have had the knowledge to realise that it’s going to continue, not just think it was an isolated incident.” She hopes her book will help educate, and save, others.

“I’m hoping that my sister is proud of me, and all the things that we’ve done. I truly believe that if the roles were reversed, Nicole would do the same for me.”

For My Sister Nicole: Love Shouldn’t Hurt – What to Know About Domestic Violence, by Denise Brown, is out in the US on 6 October (Blackstone, $29.99)