Denise Brown is still fighting to pull women out of abusive relationships 32 years after her sister Nicole Brown Simpson was stabbed to death in Los Angeles.
As Domestic Violence Awareness Month begins, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson sat down with ABC News’ Diane Sawyer to describe a mission she has carried for decades: reach victims before another family loses someone to intimate-partner violence.
ABC News reported that Brown’s book, “For My Sister Nicole: Love Shouldn’t Hurt,” is set for release on Tuesday, Oct. 6, and that she is using the moment to push shelters, early education, and hard talk about how abuse escalates.
“I want to talk to every victim out there, before it's too late,” Brown said. “You don't want to end up like Nicole.”
Nearly three women are killed by an intimate partner every day in the United States, according to the Violence Policy Center. Brown’s warning sits against that national toll, and against the 1994 case that made her family a permanent part of the country’s domestic-violence debate.
On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and Ron Goldman, 25, were stabbed to death outside Brown Simpson’s Los Angeles home. Her two young children with O.J. Simpson were sleeping inside.
O.J. Simpson, the NFL star turned actor and Nicole’s former husband, was arrested in the double killing. In October 1995, a criminal jury acquitted him of all charges. In 1997, a civil jury found him liable for wrongful death and ordered him to pay millions in damages to the Goldmans and to Brown Simpson’s estate.
Simpson always said he was innocent of the killings. He later served prison time in Nevada for a botched robbery and died of prostate cancer in 2024.
Thirty-two years after the Los Angeles killings, Denise Brown is still treating her sister’s death as a public warning, not a closed chapter.
Nicole met Simpson at 18. They married in 1985 and divorced in 1992. Denise Brown told Sawyer that Simpson lured Nicole into what became a cycle of domestic abuse, and that the Browns say his rage continued after the divorce.
In one incident Denise described, Simpson started taking clothes out of the closet and throwing them into the foyer, then ran back downstairs, grabbed Nicole by the throat, and had her six inches off the ground.
Denise said Nicole rationalized the episode, insisted Simpson apologized, and said it would not happen again.
“Strangulation... it is a precursor to murder,” Denise Brown said. “Nicole was strangled.”
The Journal of Emergency Medicine has reported that when abuse escalates to hands around the neck, the odds of being killed rise by 750%. Brown is putting that clinical warning in plain English for women who still hope the next apology will stick.
Brown said years of talking with women taught her a simple pattern.
"There's three things that I've learned from women: hope, shame, and fear. The hope that things are going to get better, the shame of not wanting anyone to know, and the fear of, ‘Where am I going to go?’ Especially if there's children."
That fear of having nowhere safe to land is why she promotes shelters in concrete terms, not slogans.
“But what I want them to know is that they're not dormitory-style beds in these places, they are homes,” she said. “You get your own bedroom, you get your own bathroom... you keep your family with you.”
The National Domestic Violence Hotline says it takes a woman seven attempts, on average, to escape an abusive relationship. Brown’s message matches that reality: leaving is rarely a single clean break, and families need a real destination when they finally go.
People experiencing domestic violence can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or text START to 88788.
Brown is not only talking to women already trapped. She wants campus chapters and young audiences while the stakes are still lower.
“I would love to go and speak to every single one of those chapters, because I think it's so important to reach people when they're young, before they get into these horrific relationships,” she said.
That is prevention talk with a hard edge. It treats early warning as cheaper and more humane than another funeral, another trial, and another family left explaining the unexplainable.
Brown has come to a painful conclusion about why her sister’s story still matters.
"This, to me, is probably one of the hardest realizations I came to.... She was fated to become a person to shine a light on domestic violence. I think that was the reason she was put on this earth -- to crack the dirty little secret wide open and show the world that this could indeed happen to anyone."
The “anyone” point is the part polite society still resists. Fame, money, and public charm did not protect Nicole Brown Simpson. A divorce did not automatically end the danger the Browns described. A criminal acquittal did not erase a civil judgment finding Simpson liable for the wrongful deaths.
Those are separate legal tracks with separate standards. They left the country with a split verdict and left Denise Brown with a lifetime of unfinished work.
Her book lands in that unfinished space. The title is blunt on purpose: love should not hurt. The sister behind it is still naming the traps, hope that the abuser will change, shame that keeps the violence private, and fear that there is no safe door out.
Victims do not need another celebrity myth. They need clear warnings, real shelters, and adults willing to say that apologies after a hand on the throat are not a safety plan.
