A 65-year-old entrepreneur who dated Nicole Brown Simpson in the early 1990s says he knew OJ Simpson was abusing her, and so did plenty of people in the entertainment industry. Nobody did a thing about it.
Joseph Perrulli, who met Nicole through Kris Jenner shortly after Nicole's 1992 divorce from OJ Simpson, sat down for an exclusive interview with Page Six in which he described a culture of silence around one of the most famous athletes in America. Perrulli has written a book about his relationship with Nicole titled "The Forgotten Briefcase," prompted by his 2024 rediscovery of a case full of mementos from their time together.
The picture Perrulli paints is one that should be familiar by now, a powerful man whose celebrity insulated him from consequences, and a woman whose suffering was known but tolerated by the people around her. What makes Perrulli's account worth reading is the bluntness of it.
Perrulli told Page Six that he learned about OJ's abuse not just from Nicole herself, but from contacts in the movie business:
"I had people in the [movie] industry telling me about, you know, informing me about his abuse, so I knew."
Nicole, he said, confided that OJ had beaten her so badly she feared for her life. None of this was hidden. OJ Simpson had pleaded no contest to spousal abuse after police responded to a domestic disturbance call on December 31, 1989. Officers found Nicole badly beaten and half-naked, hiding in bushes outside their home.
That incident was public record. OJ kept his Hertz sponsorship. He kept his sportscasting job. He kept his celebrity. Perrulli described the dynamic in terms that echo every institutional abuse scandal of the past decade:
"We were all powerless. He was still a spokesperson for a very big company [Hertz], a rental car company, and he was still a sportscaster. So, you know, everybody was powerless, and it seemed like he could do what he wanted. And he did."
That word, "powerless", deserves scrutiny. The people around Nicole Brown Simpson were not powerless in any literal sense. They were afraid. They were comfortable. They chose not to act. There is a difference, and it matters. OJ Simpson's wealth and fame did not make intervention impossible. It made intervention inconvenient.
Perrulli began dating Nicole in 1992, when she was newly separated from OJ. The two had married in 1985, shared two children, Sydney and Justin, and divorced that same year, though they later reconciled for a period not fully specified.
Even after the divorce, OJ's presence loomed. Perrulli described OJ spying on him and Nicole at her Brentwood home and following them while they jogged. The surveillance was brazen enough that Perrulli ultimately ended the relationship out of fear.
The former Buffalo Bills star was not a man who respected boundaries, legal, personal, or otherwise. His no-contest plea to spousal abuse in 1989 had carried no meaningful professional penalty. His ex-wife's new boyfriend was left to weigh his own safety against his feelings.
Perrulli chose safety. He broke things off. But Nicole wanted to stay connected.
"She wanted to be friends. It was very difficult to be friends with her when I was in love with her, trying to maintain a platonic relationship like that."
The last time Perrulli saw Nicole was at a Jenner family holiday party at Christmas 1993. Nicole was there with OJ. Perrulli described believing he would see her again and wanting to apologize for how things ended between them.
He never got the chance.
"[I] would see her again. I would apologize, but I got the phone call six months later that she'd been murdered."
Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and her friend Ron Goldman were killed outside Nicole's Los Angeles home in 1994. OJ Simpson was charged with their murders. A criminal jury found him not guilty in 1995, a verdict that divided the country along lines of race, class, and trust in institutions. A civil jury found him liable for both deaths in 1996.
The case remains one of the most consequential criminal proceedings in American history, not least because of the questions it raised about celebrity, justice, and whether the system treats the powerful the same as everyone else. The detective at the center of that trial, Mark Fuhrman, became a lightning rod in his own right, a reminder that the case touched and damaged nearly everyone it reached.
Perrulli says he never planned to write about Nicole. What changed was a briefcase. In 2024, the same year OJ Simpson died at age 76, Perrulli came across a case he had packed away decades earlier, filled with mementos from his relationship with Nicole.
He described sitting with it for hours:
"I spent close to four hours on the stairs rediscovering this woman and and and realizing who she was. All these little mementos. I'd say they humanized her. She was a victim. And because of the way we broke things off, I. I ignored how much I loved her."
The halting, unpolished quality of that quote, the repeated "and," the broken sentence, suggests a man still working through something unresolved. Whether readers find that authentic or self-serving will depend on how much credence they give a single witness account offered more than thirty years after the fact, timed to promote a book.
That timing is worth noting. Perrulli's "The Forgotten Briefcase" is available for purchase. His interview coincides with its promotion. None of that necessarily invalidates what he says, but it does mean his account arrives with a commercial motive attached. Readers should weigh it accordingly.
The OJ Simpson case has a long history of belated revelations, some credible, some less so. Perrulli's claims about the "open secret" of OJ's abuse are consistent with the documented record: the 1989 police call, the no-contest plea, the pattern of control and surveillance that multiple sources described over the years. His personal account of dating Nicole and being surveilled by OJ is harder to independently verify.
The phrase "open secret" has become a cliché in abuse cases, Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, Jeffrey Epstein. It always means the same thing: people knew, and the knowing did not translate into action.
In OJ Simpson's case, the knowing was especially well-documented. A woman called the police. Officers saw the injuries. A plea was entered in court. And the man kept his endorsements, his broadcasting career, and his social standing. The system, legal, corporate, social, absorbed the information and moved on.
Perrulli's account adds a personal dimension to that institutional failure. He was not a bystander in the abstract. He was a man who dated the victim, heard her fears, watched her abuser follow them through the streets of Brentwood, and ultimately walked away because he was afraid.
OJ Simpson died in 2024, leaving behind a legacy defined almost entirely by the murders he was acquitted of committing and the civil liability a second jury assigned. Nicole Brown Simpson has been dead for more than three decades. Ron Goldman, too.
The people who knew, the industry contacts, the friends, the ex-boyfriends, are still here. Some of them are now writing books.
There is a pattern in American life that conservatives, in particular, should be willing to name plainly: institutions protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable, and they do it most effectively when everyone agrees to call their cowardice "powerlessness."
Perrulli said "everybody was powerless." But OJ Simpson's power was not supernatural. It was commercial. It was social. It was the power of a man whose face sold rental cars and whose name drew television ratings. The people around Nicole Brown Simpson were not powerless. They were unwilling to pay the price of speaking up.
That distinction matters, not just in retrospect, but as a principle. Accountability requires someone willing to bear a cost. When no one is, the cost falls on the victim.
Nicole Brown Simpson paid it in full. Thirty-two years later, the people who watched it happen are still explaining why they couldn't have done anything differently.
