Chris Darden is still convinced that O.J. Simpson is guilty of murdering ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson. While promoting his book In Contempt on The View Thursday, June 23, the coprosecutor in the former NFL star’s murder trial said that he believes the athlete admitted guilt.
“I think he’s probably confessed it — whether he was awake or in his dreams — many times since 1994,” Darden, 60, told the panel after Joy Behar pointed out that a friend of the athlete said this month that Simpson would eventually say he killed his former spouse and her friend Ron Goldman. “I think he confessed it during trial. I think he confessed it in the L.A. County jail, but we weren’t allowed access to the conversation, the content of the confession.”
When Behar added that the former athlete said during the murder trial that he would find Nicole’s killer, Darden chimed in, “He probably found the real killer in a Nevada prison, which is where he is.”
Simpson, 68, is currently serving a 33-year sentence for kidnapping and armed robbery after he and five other men tried to take sports memorabilia at gunpoint that the athlete claimed belonged to him. He will be eligible for parole in 2017.
Interest in the so-called trial of the century was renewed this year with FX’s The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, which starred Cuba Gooding Jr. as the football player, Sarah Paulson as prosecutor Marcia Clark and Sterling K. Brown as Darden. The true-crime anthology also returned focus to the pivotal moment when Simpson tried on the bloody gloves — Darden’s idea — which helped the defense win an acquittal.
“Let me just say this: I’m a leader,” the former prosecutor pointed out to the panel. “I stood there with [Simpson]. I let him put the gloves on. And why not? They’re his gloves! There are pictures of him in the same gloves. His blood is in those gloves. The blood of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown are in those gloves. So they’re his gloves, and the gloves fit the same way they always fit him.… He’s just a better actor than I thought he was.”
Darden added that he’s heard plenty of theories about why it looked like the gloves didn’t fit, but it all means little to him.
“Maybe I’m in denial — denial ain’t just a river in Egypt — but when I look, I see the gloves fit,” he said.
