In June 1994, the New York Times published a profile of O.J. Simpson’s first marriage under the headline “No Reports of Violence By Simpson’s First Wife.” Even a story built around her own account ran under a headline that named her only in relation to him. Marguerite Whitley has spoken on the record about that marriage exactly twice in the thirty years since, and both times she said the same thing: he never hit her.
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Quick facts
| Full name | Marguerite L. Whitley |
| Married O.J. Simpson | June 24, 1967, San Francisco |
| Divorced | March 1979 |
| Children | Arnelle, Jason, and Aaren Simpson |
| Later known as | Marguerite Simpson Thomas |
| Last public statement | January 27, 1995 |
Who is Marguerite Whitley?
Marguerite Whitley is O.J. Simpson’s first wife. She grew up in San Francisco and met Simpson at Galileo High School, where he also studied. At the time she was seeing his close friend Al Cowlings, the same Cowlings who would later drive the white Ford Bronco during Simpson’s 1994 police chase. Simpson asked Cowlings to introduce them, and he and Whitley began dating soon after, several years before Simpson’s name became known nationally at USC.
Marriage and children
Whitley and Simpson married on June 24, 1967, in San Francisco. He moved her to Los Angeles the next day to prepare for his first season at USC. Simpson would win the Heisman Trophy the following year, after his second and final season there.
Arnelle was born on December 4, 1968, one day before Simpson accepted the Heisman Trophy in New York. Jason followed in April 1970, by which point Simpson was playing for the Buffalo Bills and the family split time between western New York and Los Angeles.
Court records show the marriage went through several separations during the 1970s. In 1977, while still married to Whitley, Simpson began seeing a waitress named Nicole Brown, whom he would marry in 1985 and who was murdered in 1994.
The death of Aaren Simpson
Whitley and Simpson’s third child, Aaren, was born on September 24, 1977. She drowned in the family’s swimming pool on August 18, 1979, a few weeks before what would have been her second birthday. The couple’s divorce had already been finalized five months earlier, in March 1979. Word of her death reached newspapers as far from Los Angeles as the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.
Life after the divorce
Whitley built a career as an interior designer. She remarried twice: first to Rudolph Lewis, a transit supervisor, in 1986, and later to Anthony Thomas, a furniture sales representative, around 1992. By the mid 1990s she was going by the name Marguerite Simpson Thomas.
Did O.J. Simpson abuse his first wife?
The question entered the public record in June 1994, days after Simpson’s arrest, when a retired LAPD officer named Terry Schauer told television host Geraldo Rivera that he had once answered a domestic violence call at the Simpson home sometime in the 1970s. That same month, Whitley gave her own statement to LAPD detectives investigating the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. According to court documents, she told them plainly that she had been “never battered or beat up” by Simpson.
The New York Times looked into the same question that June, publishing a profile by reporter Lynda Richardson that drew heavily on interviews with Whitley’s divorce lawyer, Harry Fain. Fain told Richardson he had found nothing in the marriage comparable to what would later come out about Simpson. The paper ran the story under this headline:
“No Reports of Violence By Simpson’s First Wife”
The New York Times, June 29, 1994
Schauer’s claim did not disappear. He repeated it to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office later that year, and the Times published the fuller account on January 18, 1995, including his description of officers driving Whitley and her children to a hotel for the night. No LAPD report has ever surfaced to confirm any part of it, and no second officer has ever come forward to back it up. His credibility took a further hit in 2003, when a tabloid printed his description of a nearly identical traffic stop, that time involving Barbra Streisand instead of Simpson.
Nine days after the Times ran Schauer’s account, on January 27, 1995, Whitley addressed it herself, on camera, telling Barbara Walters on 20/20 that Simpson had never hit her and that she believed him innocent of the murders.
Where is Marguerite Whitley now?
There is no public record of her death. Based on her reported birth year, she would be in her late seventies in 2026.
The closest anyone has come to reaching her since was in 2024, when the Lifetime documentary “The Life and Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson” revisited Schauer’s claim. Producers turned to her sister, Veterdata Jones, instead of Whitley herself, and Jones gave them one line in response: that the question belonged to Marguerite, not to her.
Whitley did not take part in the documentary. She has made no public comment since Simpson died of cancer in April 2024, at age 76. The last time anyone heard her own account of any of this remains that afternoon in January 1995, sitting across from Barbara Walters, saying what she had already told police seven months before.
