After filming a 1998 interview with Ruby Wax, O.J. Simpson opened his hotel-room door and made a stabbing motion toward her with a banana, according to accounts of the segment. Wax said she thought it was Simpson’s idea of a joke; that was her interpretation, not proof of his intent.
What happened in Ruby Wax’s interview with O.J. Simpson?
Wax interviewed Simpson in 1998. The banana gesture reportedly happened after filming, when Simpson opened his hotel-room door and pretended to stab at her with the fruit. In the original episode, Wax described it as, “I think it was his idea of a joke.” That wording matters: it records how Wax understood the moment, rather than establishing what Simpson meant by it. Mediaite’s account adds that Simpson had announced a “surprise” and recited the Lizzie Borden rhyme before making the gesture.
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When Wax later asked him directly whether he had committed the murders, Mediaite reports that Simpson answered, “Nope,” then, “Did not do it.” Those reported remarks and the banana gesture are part of accounts of the exchange; neither establishes his private motive for the gesture.
Why the moment was unsettling
The gesture took place against the backdrop of the 1994 deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. That context makes Wax’s description of a “joke” especially charged, but it does not change the legal distinction between the two cases that followed. Simpson was acquitted in the criminal trial. In a separate civil case, a jury found him liable for the wrongful deaths, and a judge ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages, according to a contemporaneous CBS/AP report from 2000. Civil liability was not a criminal conviction.
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Don’t confuse it with Michael Moore’s interview
Simpson also appeared in a separate 1998 interview for a Michael Moore show pilot. In Esquire’s account, Moore questioned Simpson about the killings and Simpson denied them. That was a different interviewer and exchange: the post-filming banana gesture is associated with Ruby Wax’s interview, not Moore’s.
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