As Ruby Wax has mentioned on a couple of occasions so far in her time in the jungle on I'm a Celebrity… she met OJ Simpson back in the day. But a passing allusion to a banana incident doesn't tell the whole bizarre story, and it's worth telling.
First, a quick reminder of who OJ Simpson was and why their meeting was so controversial. OJ was a successful NFL football player – he played running back for the Buffalo Bills – who went on to a second career as a media personality and actor.
Because the sport (and the TV appearances, promoting Hertz car hire) didn't make much impact outside the US, he wasn't especially well known in the UK except perhaps for his appearances in the Naked Gun movies, where he played occasional sidekick to Leslie Nielsen's Lieutenant Frank Drebin.
That all changed when he became the subject of a protracted low-speed car chase that aired live on TV around the world.
The police were pursuing him as the chief suspect for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, after he failed to hand himself in at 11am as agreed with his lawyers.
The pair had been found four days before, stabbed to death outside Brown's home in Los Angeles.
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OJ Simpson's trial
The trial was a media sensation and made a celebrity of his lawyer Robert Kardashian (you may have heard of his family). It was later made into a TV drama by Ryan Murphy, as The People Vs OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, starring Cuba Gooding Jr as Simpson.
Sensationally OJ was acquitted in the criminal court, though few at the time believed justice had been done. He was later brought to civil court and found liable for Brown and Goldman's deaths, which didn't carry criminal weight but meant he had to pay the Goldman and Brown family millions in damages. It is likely that his financial woes inspired him to commit the armed robbery in Las Vegas which eventually put him behind bars. (He died in 2024.)
When did Ruby Wax meet OJ Simpson?
In 1998, Simpson had been acquitted criminally but found liable in civil court. Ruby Wax was then a familiar face on British TV as a comedy writer and presenter. The Full Wax was a popular and personal guide to US culture viewed through the lens of Ruby's distinctive brash but highly intelligent persona. It was followed by Ruby Wax Meets…, a series of high-profile interviews including Donald Trump, Pamela Anderson and OJ.
They met in LA and Ruby went out for dinner with OJ and his sister. She recalled later that, "He was very funny in the beginning. I immediately thought, 'Ah, here is someone who can play ball with me.'"
She told The Times that the encounter was bewildering because he would go off on so many tangents she could never be sure what he meant. He was also bizarrely popular with young women, given that he was widely believed to be guilty of murder:
"At the restaurant, there was a whole queue of girls lining up to go home with him. And he had quite the appetite for that. His sister told the girls to get lost. I couldn’t imagine why there were so many people who wanted to sleep with a man regarded as a murderer. But it clearly happened a lot."
"Some people are natural born liars," she added. "They don’t even know they are lying. OJ Simpson was one of them."
After 17 hours of filming over three days for their interview, OJ decided to play a prank on Ruby which has subsequently gone viral. He knocked on her door and then pretended to stab her with a banana while making Psycho-style violin screech noises. You can see the (frankly disturbing in the circumstances) moment in the video below.
"I wasn’t scared," Wax told the Times. "I just thought he was insane. I also immediately thought this was very good television."
She also told ABC News in Australia that off camera, that OJ's agent had told her "I'll tell you where the knife is if you get me a job in England". It's impossible to know to what extent he was joking.
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Editor, Digital Spy Chris has over 25 years' experience as a writer and editor, having worked as a journalist covering TV and movies since the '90s. Starting out as a TV listings editor at the Press Association, he was quickly hired by the nascent Heat magazine, where he rose to become Senior Editor, interviewing the likes of Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson and Paris Hilton. Over the years he has written about entertainment with clarity and wit for Heat, Elle, Q, The Telegraph and of course Digital Spy, and has served many times as a judge in the Royal Television Society awards. He has written and recorded a novelty single with Lord Lloyd-Webber, written scripts for the National TV Awards, made Noel Edmonds cry, accidentally punched an Inbetweener and stolen a small piece of rubble from the Battle of Hogwarts movie set. (They can't have it back.) LinkedIn
