# The Bargain *A Biography of Oj Simpson* — Legendary Biographies No. 030 - **Subject:** Orenthal James Simpson - **Written by:** Bernard Pell - **Shelf:** Crime / Crime - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 207 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 207 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 207 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-025-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Alasdair Finn (ISBN 979-8-90623-006-5) - **Content notes:** domestic violence; homicide Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/030-the-bargain.html ## About this book On the morning of June 13, 1994, two bodies were found outside a Brentwood condominium. Sixteen months later, a jury took less than four hours to acquit the man the country had watched flee down a Los Angeles freeway in a white Ford Bronco. He would spend the next three decades as the most famous defendant in American memory, alive and unwelcome, golfing in Florida and signing autographs in hotel ballrooms, until cancer took him in the spring of 2024. Bernard Pell's biography of Orenthal James Simpson begins in the San Francisco housing projects and follows its subject through the Heisman Trophy at USC, the broken-field runs in Buffalo, the Hertz airport sprints, and the Brentwood marriage that ended on a tiled walkway. It traces, too, the second life: the civil verdict, the Las Vegas memorabilia room, the nine years in Lovelock, the parole, the diagnosis. Pell is interested less in the question of guilt — long since settled, in two courtrooms, by two different standards — than in what the country did with its answer. How did a single trial come to hold so much: the Rodney King verdict, the Fuhrman tapes, the daylight gulf between a Black jury pool and a white viewing public? A portrait of a man who traded everything for celebrity, and of the bargain a country made to watch him do it. ## Contents 1. Potrero Hill 2. USC and the Heisman (1965-1968) 3. The Buffalo Bills (1969-1977) 4. The Hertz Years 5. Marguerite Whitley 6. Nicole Brown 7. The Abuse 8. The Divorce, 1992 9. June 12, 1994 10. The Bronco Chase 11. The Dream Team 12. The Trial 13. The Verdict 14. The Civil Trial 15. If I Did It 16. Las Vegas 17. Prison and Release 18. April 10, 2024 19. The Cancer ## Questions **Who is The Bargain about?** Orenthal James Simpson. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Bargain — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,644 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 207 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: domestic violence; homicide. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Bernard Pell is an Oxford-educated military historian who served briefly in the Royal Marines before pursuing a career in journalism. His time in the military and his years reporting on international affairs shaped his deep interest in the realities of command and conflict. He specializes in writing detailed biographies of generals, dictators, and the wars they ran. In his book, The Bargain, he explores the complex decisions and personal compromises made by key figures during wartime, using archival research to bring history to life. He lives in Devon, England, where he spends his time hiking the coast and researching his next historical project.