O.J Simpson and Kato Kaelin: a Gay Connection?

O.J. Simpson was a celebrity of the 1970s and 1980s, a football player turned actor.

I didn't know him from his football days, of course, but I saw him in movies like The Cassandra Crossing (1978), Goldie and the Boxer (1979), Back to the Beach (1987), and The Naked Gun (1988), as well as the famous Hertz Car Rental commercial where he flies across an airport lobby.













He was rumored to be gay, but none of my friends in West Hollywood claimed to have hooked up with him; he wasn't that big a star.

On June 13th, 1994, his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were found murdered outside Nicole's house.

At the time, model and aspiring restauranteur  Ron Goldman was identified as an unrelated passerby, but later he was identified as Nicole's friend, who had come to return a pair of glasses that her mother left at his restaurant.

O.J. was charged with the murders, and for the next year, the "trial of the century" was nearly all we talked about.  We heard the defense and the prosecution, knew all of the players in the courtroom, speculated that O.J. had a romantic relationship going on with his houseguest, aspiring actor Kato Kaelin (played by Billy Magnusson in a tv movie).

Kato became a celebrity in his own right, with interviews and photo spreads.  Later he claimed that he and O.J. were never close friends. No word on whether he is gay or not, but he was briefly married to a woman, and has a child.

It was a hugely polarizing trial: most African-Americans thought that O.J. was innocent, and being railroaded.  Most whites thought he was guilty.

He was acquitted on October 3, 1995, for lack of evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt."  A civil trial, where the burden of proof is lower, found him liable for the murders.

13 years later, he was convicted of several counts of robbery and kidnapping for breaking into the hotel room of a sports memorabilia and drug dealer, an incident parodied on Breaking Bad.

I don't know if O.J. is gay in real life, but apparently his father, Jimmy Lee Simpson, who died in 1986, was.  The family kept his gayness a secret.

There is a nude photo of O.J. on Tales of West Hollywood.

Meanwhile, want to see Billy Magnussen in his underwear?