A new Larry David biography places the comedian face-to-face with O.J. Simpson twice on June 12, 1994, the same day Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed.
Fox News Digital reports that Blake J. Harris’s authorized book, “Emperor Of Nothing: The Making of Larry David,” recounts the encounters in plain detail as the title hits shelves.
David and comedy writer Alan Zweibel say they saw Simpson at breakfast in Los Angeles, then again that afternoon, before the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found dead. Simpson was later tried for the killings and acquitted in October 1995. The murder weapon was never recovered.
On the morning of June 12, 1994, David was at the Riviera Country Club with then-wife Laurie and newborn daughter Cazzie. Zweibel and his wife, Robin, joined them.
Zweibel has never forgotten the date.
"We were having breakfast and all of a sudden I hear somebody say my name: ‘Zwa-bell.’ I turn around. It’s O.J. Simpson."
David’s reaction in the book is blunt.
"[We] saw him in the dining room the day of the murder!"
Zweibel knew Simpson from earlier years. He attended the University of Buffalo while Simpson starred for the Buffalo Bills. When Simpson hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1978, Zweibel wrote for that week’s show and told Lorne Michaels the football star was his hero. In later years they shared a social circle through a mutual friend on Rockingham and crossed paths at kids’ birthday parties.
That old familiarity made the country-club hello feel ordinary. It would not stay ordinary for long.
Later that afternoon, Zweibel saw Simpson again. Their daughters were both performing at a middle-school dance recital. On the way out, Zweibel heard the familiar voice once more.
He answered, “Hey, Juice!”
Simpson’s reply, as Zweibel tells it, was short and startled: “S***. Twice in the same day!”
Looking back, Zweibel layered a dark joke onto the memory.
"Though, of course, [in retrospect] what I should have said was ‘Stay home tonight! Order in! Don’t go out!’"
That night, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed. Brown had married Simpson in 1985. They separated in 1992, and she filed for divorce after seven years of marriage. They had two children, Sydney and Justin. Simpson sat in open court in Los Angeles later in 1994 and won acquittal the following October.
The criminal case left a permanent hole: no murder weapon in evidence. That gap is why fresh claims about a possible helper keep drawing attention.
Separate Fox News reporting on a New York Times investigation describes Joseph “Joey” Ippolito as a mob-linked drug trafficker and longtime associate of Simpson and Al Cowlings. After a 1995 arrest, Ippolito became a valuable federal informant.
Previously sealed records show he told authorities he had information about Simpson’s alleged efforts to dispose of evidence, including the unrecovered murder weapon. Then-federal prosecutor David Kelley called Ippolito a “remarkable source of information” whose cooperation had proven valuable. He was never called to testify in the Simpson case.
Ippolito’s brother, Sam, gave the Times a stark scene from that same night. He said Joey returned to a Los Angeles apartment around midnight on June 12, 1994, appearing to have blood on his hands and carrying a bag with a heavy object. Sam said he was told to dump the bag while his brother showered, and that he overheard Joey tell Cowlings he had been “helping” Simpson that night.
Sam later sought compensation and tried to pull back parts of his account. The claims face scrutiny. Even so, the Los Angeles Police Department has treated the matter as an open investigation years after the criminal acquittal and a later civil finding that held Simpson liable.
Harris’s biography is not a crime book. It is a Larry David life story that happens to freeze two ordinary Los Angeles errands on the most infamous day in modern celebrity crime. A country-club breakfast. A kids’ recital. Small talk with “the Juice.”
Set beside the Ippolito material, those errands sit next to a harder public record: an acquittal, a missing weapon, an informant who talked to federal prosecutors, and a brother who described bloody hands and a bag headed for a dumpster. None of that restores what Brown and Goldman lost. It does show how unfinished the accounting remains when fame, soft process, and lost evidence collide.
Three decades on, the country still knows the white Bronco and the courtroom circus. It still does not have the knife. Taxpayers and victims’ families deserved a cleaner search for the truth than the one they got.
