Joseph Perrulli dated Nicole Brown Simpson in 1992, fell in love with her, and broke things off because he feared what her ex-husband might do. Now 65, the entrepreneur has written a book about the relationship, and in an exclusive interview with Page Six, he says that OJ Simpson's violence against Nicole was widely known in the entertainment industry and that nobody with any power lifted a finger to stop it.
The claim lands more than three decades after Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were killed outside her Los Angeles home in 1994. OJ Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995 but found liable by a civil jury in 1996. He died in 2024 at age 76.
Perrulli's account matters less as celebrity gossip than as a case study in institutional cowardice, the kind of willful blindness that lets a powerful man operate without consequence because the people around him decide the cost of speaking up is too high.
Perrulli told Page Six he met Nicole through Kris Jenner when Nicole was newly separated from OJ. Their divorce was finalized in 1992, and the two had married in 1985 and shared two children, Sydney and Justin.
Even early in the relationship, Perrulli said, he was warned. People inside the movie industry told him directly about OJ's abuse of Nicole.
"I had people in the [movie] industry telling me about, you know, informing me about his abuse, so I knew."
Nicole herself confided in Perrulli, telling him that OJ had beaten her so badly she feared for her life. None of this was news to the Hollywood circles they moved in, Perrulli said. It was simply tolerated.
"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. OJ Simpson was famous. He was rich. He had corporate sponsors and broadcast contracts. The people Perrulli describes were not powerless in any ordinary sense. They were comfortable, and comfort has a way of looking like helplessness when confrontation carries a price.
Perrulli described a relationship shadowed by OJ's presence even after the divorce. He said OJ spied on him and Nicole at her Brentwood home and followed them while they jogged. The surveillance was not subtle. It was persistent enough to make Perrulli fear for his own safety as well as Nicole's.
Eventually, Perrulli said, he ended the relationship because of OJ. He described a disturbing dream in which he and Nicole were driving together and fell off a cliff. After that, he collected mementos from their time together, placed them in a briefcase, hid it away, and put distance between himself and the woman he loved.
Nicole wanted to stay friends. Perrulli told Page Six that was more than he could handle.
"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 attended with OJ Simpson, the couple had reconciled after their 1992 divorce. Roughly six months later, Perrulli received a phone call telling him Nicole had been killed.
The abuse Perrulli describes as an "open secret" had already produced a documented law-enforcement record years before he entered Nicole's life. On December 31, 1989, police responded to a call at the Simpson residence. Nicole told officers she believed OJ was going to kill her. Responding officers found her hiding in bushes, badly beaten and half-naked.
OJ Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse.
That plea did not cost him his Hertz endorsement deal. It did not cost him his sportscasting career. It did not trigger any visible professional consequence at all. He remained a public figure in good standing, which is precisely the dynamic Perrulli describes: a man whose status insulated him from accountability, and an industry that chose not to ask hard questions.
This pattern will sound familiar to anyone who followed the broader reckoning that swept Hollywood decades later. Powerful men whose misconduct was widely whispered about but never confronted. Institutions that treated silence as sophistication. Victims who were left to manage the danger alone.
In 2024, Perrulli found the briefcase he had hidden away more than thirty years earlier. He sat on a staircase and spent close to four hours going through the mementos inside, photographs, keepsakes, small personal items that brought Nicole back to him as a person rather than a tabloid figure or a case file.
"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 says more than a rehearsed statement would. Perrulli wrote a book about the experience, titled "The Forgotten Briefcase," which chronicles his relationship with Nicole and the years of silence that followed.
Perrulli's claims are his own. He does not name the specific industry figures who warned him about OJ's abuse. He does not provide dates for every encounter he describes. His account is that of a single witness, speaking decades after the fact, with a book to promote.
But the broader factual record does not contradict him. OJ Simpson's 1989 no-contest plea to spousal abuse is a matter of public record. Nicole Brown Simpson's fear for her life is documented in the police call that night. The criminal acquittal in 1995 and the civil liability finding in 1996 are both established legal outcomes. OJ Simpson's estate later agreed to pay Ron Goldman's family $58 million.
What Perrulli adds to that record is not new evidence of a crime. It is a portrait of a culture, one in which a famous man's violence was known, discussed privately, and never confronted publicly until it was far too late.
Conservative readers do not need to be told that domestic violence is wrong. What Perrulli's account illustrates is something broader: the failure of institutions and social networks to enforce basic standards of conduct when doing so would inconvenience powerful people.
OJ Simpson was a corporate spokesman, a broadcaster, and a celebrity. The system around him, sponsors, networks, agents, friends, treated his abuse of Nicole as a private matter, something to whisper about at parties but never address. The 1989 police response produced a plea deal and nothing more. No one with influence demanded consequences.
Perrulli himself acknowledges his own retreat. He walked away from Nicole because he was afraid. He hid the briefcase. He spent three decades not talking about what he knew.
He is talking now, and the story he tells is less about one man's guilt than about the collective decision of an entire social ecosystem to look the other way.
When everyone is "powerless," the only people who pay the price are the ones who needed help the most.
