Joseph Perrulli says O.J. Simpson’s presence helped end a brief romance with Nicole Brown Simpson, turning what started as a private connection into something that felt impossible to keep. He is now packing the relationship’s letters and pictures into a book called The Forgotten Briefcase, and the interview published on June 16 brings that long-sealed story back into view.
Perrulli said he briefly dated Nicole Brown Simpson in 1992, then reconnected with her years later at Kris Jenner’s home while she was separated from O.J. Simpson. He said Caitlyn Jenner told him Brown Simpson was “a wonderful girl, great mother” and that her “only problem is O.J.,” a warning that now reads less like gossip than shorthand for the pressure around her life.
He said he became extremely enchanted with Brown Simpson and spent time with her at her rental home in Brentwood, where he learned her musical tastes and favorite restaurants. The relationship, he said, felt personal and ordinary until it did not. One night, after leaving her house, he said he had an eerie feeling and kept looking over his shoulder. A neighbor, he said, later told him that O.J. Simpson had been secretly spying on his date with Brown Simpson.
Perrulli said Brown Simpson told him that Simpson physically assaulted her, but he also said he was woefully unprepared to handle what he was hearing. “I knew nothing about domestic violence,” he said, adding that Brown Simpson kept the abuse close to the vest. The account matters because it is not coming from a commentator or a retrospective; it is coming from a man who says he was in her life, saw enough to be shaken, and only later understood how little he knew.
The relationship ended after Simpson unexpectedly showed up to a holiday weekend with Brown Simpson’s family. Perrulli said he could not imagine living with the feeling that Simpson was “lurking everywhere” he went, and he left the next day. What he carried out of the breakup was not a clean break but a briefcase filled with memories, later stored away and forgotten until he began sorting through it again.
That is where the story turns from recollection to project. Perrulli is turning the letters and pictures into The Forgotten Briefcase because, as he put it, the story was always about O.J. Simpson, but he wanted to share Nicole Brown Simpson’s side. He said that piecing the material back together helped him rediscover who she was and that she came across as more spiritual and more down-to-earth than the version the public had been given. For a woman whose name was pulled into the center of a national tragedy over three decades ago, Perrulli’s book is meant to do something narrower and harder: restore the person he says he knew before the case erased her.
