Robert Kardashian

Robert Kardashian (born February 22, 1944, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died September 30, 2003, Los Angeles) was an Armenian American businessman and lawyer in Los Angeles who became well known in the mid-1990s for his involvement in O.J. Simpson’s murder trial. He and Simpson had been friends for decades, and he acted as a liaison between the defendant and the rest of the legal team. The reality television show Keeping Up With the Kardashians, which made celebrities out of his first wife (Kris Jenner) and their children (Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, and Rob Kardashian), debuted in 2007, four years after he had died of esophageal cancer.

Personal life, education, and careers

Kardashian was a second-generation L.A. resident. His family, which lived in the Baldwin Hills area, owned a meatpacking business. Kardashian attended college at the University of Southern California (USC), graduating in 1966. He finished his law degree at the University of San Diego in 1969. However, he largely stopped practicing law in the late 1970s and turned his focus to start-up businesses and investing. He and his future wife, whose name at the time was Kris Houghton, met in the early 1970s. He dated Priscilla Presley, the ex-wife of Elvis Presley, in the mid-1970s, but he and Houghton married in 1978.

Kardashian’s business career also blossomed in the 1970s. He and his brother, along with a third investor, started a trade magazine that they later sold for about $12.5 million.

By then, Kardashian was spending time with Simpson, who had also graduated from USC—though he started there in 1967, the year after Kardashian left campus. The two men met on a tennis court. Kardashian was with Simpson when he met Nicole Brown, his future wife, in 1977. In the years that followed, their families often traveled together—they typically spent Christmas in Aspen, Colorado—and they dined and went to nightclubs with their wives. Kardashian and Simpson also went into business together, opening a fashion boutique at USC, forming a company, called Juice Inc., that launched several frozen yogurt shops, and investing in a music video business.

Both couples divorced in the early 1990s. Kardashian’s ex-wife, Kris, later married Caitlin Jenner, the Olympic decathlete. Kardashian remarried in 1998, though the marriage ended in an annulment almost immediately. In 2003 he learned that he had esophageal cancer. He married his third wife, Ellen Pierson, just six weeks before his death.

Involvement in the O.J. Simpson trial

In 1994, when Simpson was accused of murdering his former wife Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman, he immediately turned to Kardashian. On the day that Simpson was supposed to surrender to the police, he was at Kardashian’s home, from which he fled before he could be arrested. That evening, when Simpson was leading the police on the now-infamous 60-mile chase in a white Ford Bronco, Kardashian spoke with him on his cell phone, trying to persuade him to surrender.

At the time, Kardashian hadn’t been in a courtroom in 20 years, but he reactivated his law license so that he could join Simpson’s defense team. Throughout the legal proceedings he frequently visited Simpson in jail. “There are so many things I know about his personality,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “My job is really strategy and liaison between the lawyers and O.J.”

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Investigators never found the murder weapon used to kill Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman, and prosecutors suggested during the trial that Kardashian may have helped Simpson dispose of it. Kardashian was filmed picking up a bulging bag outside Simpson’s home and taking it to a car driven by Simpson’s assistant. When the bag was later introduced into evidence, Kardashian avoided testifying by claiming attorney-client privilege, and Goldman’s sister later charged that this was the real reason Kardashian reactivated his law license in the first place.

Kardashian and Simpson later had a falling out over the book American Tragedy: The Uncensored Story of the Simpson Defense (1996), by Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth, which was also later the basis of a 2000 television miniseries. Simpson accused Kardashian of betraying attorney-client privilege by revealing information to the authors. In a 1996 interview to promote the book, on ABC’s 20/20, Kardashian told Barbara Walters that he was no longer confident of Simpson’s innocence. “I have doubts,” he said. “The blood evidence is the biggest thorn in my side; that causes me the greatest problems.”

Kardashian was played by the actor David Schwimmer in the 2016 series The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story. The creators deliberately portrayed him in a sympathetic way. “He was the one guy in this case that didn’t have any other weird motive involved. He had no agenda,” they told Vulture in 2016. “He was there because his best friend said he didn’t do it, and he loved his friend.”