OJ Simpson's 1995 trial for the murders of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman would become "the trial of the century".
It would also, inadvertently, launch one of the most recognisable names of modern celebrity.
Reality TV family patriarch, Robert Kardashian Sr, played a key role in Simpson's defence team.
Simpson was acquitted in the criminal case but found responsible for the deaths in a civil lawsuit and later imprisoned for armed robbery and kidnapping in a separate matter.
But more than a note in Kardashian's legal career, the trial wound up dividing the now-infamous reality TV family and it continues to haunt them.
Representing 'Uncle OJ'
Before Kim, there was Robert.
The Kardashian father was well-acquainted with Simpson prior to his legal role in the 1995 trial.
The pair first met more than 25 years earlier, on a tennis court in 1969.
Simpson was then introduced to Brown during Robert's wedding to Kris Houghton (now Jenner), according to the LA Times.
Throughout the media frenzy surrounding Simpson, Kardashian remained steadfast in his support and Simpson even spent the night at Kardashian's house before his infamous white Ford Bronco car chase.
But it was arguably his reading of Simpson's goodbye letter to reporters that first launched the Kardashian name into the Zeitgeist.
Kardashian would go on to play a key role in Simpson's defence team, and took young daughters Kim and Kourtney to witness the trial.
"My dad pulled Kourtney and me out of school," Kim told GQ in 2023.
"He said, 'I want you girls to witness a piece of history and what a trial is like.'"
But his legal success didn't come without a personal battle.
His now ex-wife Kris Jenner had become best friends with Brown, and was frustrated by Kardashian's role in Simpson's acquittal.
Khloé Kardashian, who was 10 at the time, expressed how personal the trial became when talking to E! True Hollywood Story in 2009.
"OJ was always our 'Uncle OJ', Nicole was my 'Auntie Nicole'," she said.
"It's sad to see your parents go through so much pain for trying to be true friends."
Family torn apart by court case
Kim has been candid in how her father's defence of Simpson lay in direct opposition to her mother's support of the Brown family.
"My mum was extremely vocal in her feelings — she believed that her friend was murdered by (Simpson) and that was really traumatising for her," she told David Letterman in 2020.
"And then we'd go to my dad's house and it was a whole other situation there.
"We didn't really know what to believe or whose side to take as kids, because we didn't want to hurt one of our parents' feelings."
"It tore my family apart, I'd say, for the whole time of the trial," she added.
Jenner has said her "entire universe" changed when she found out about Brown's death.
Her subsequent condemnation of Simpson even led him to call her after the trial's verdict to explain.
"It was very difficult because my ex-husband was on one side, you know, I was kind of on the other, the kids were in the middle and it was trying to explain this to children and then OJ had called," she told Ellen DeGeneres in 2016.
"I lost, everybody lost, so much that night.
"You lost everything you knew – I can't even imagine being her family, her parents, her sister."
Kardashian's legacy lives on
Culture analysts posit the televised Simpson trial "whetted" society's appetite for reality TV. And almost 30 years on, the Kardashian name still remains at its centre.
But the trial would also go on to shape the future advocacy of the family.
Over the past few years, Kim Kardashian has posed herself as a criminal justice reform advocate.
She successfully lobbied former president Donald Trump, wrote letters in support of clemency petitions and paid legal bills for people trying to get out of prison.
In late 2018, she also made the choice to start studying law.
She says the career shift is, in part, due to her father's ties to the Simpson case.
"I think that by the time I was a teenager and he was working on the OJ case, I was sneaking in his office, looking at all of the evidence and things I shouldn't have been looking at," she told journalists in 2020.
While she and her siblings are yet to comment on Simpson's death, their former step-parent Caitlyn Jenner has taken to social media platform X.
The former Olympian was already married to Kris by the time the trial brought further chaos to the family.
Jenner's post was a pithy two-word "Good Riddance".
But in doing so, it also capped the long and messy history between the disgraced NFL star and the world's best-known reality stars.
