Celebrities, authorities and media outlets the world over are still reeling and reacting to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage at the 2022 Academy Awards.
Now OJ Simpson has decided to air his thoughts on whether the violent act was justified.
Simpson, who was famously acquitted for the 1994 double murder of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, posted a video rant on Twitter.
Captioning the video 'He was wrong but I understand the sentiment', Simpson said while he "understood the feeling" of wanting to slap a comedian, the joke about Smith's wife Jada Pinkett-Smith wasn't "all that egregious".
"In my life, I've been through a lot of crap," he says in the selfie-style video recorded at a bar in Florida.
"I was raising two young kids and every comedian in the country had an OJ routine, and don't think I wouldn't wanna slap a couple of those guys... But it's humour."
Rock was among the countless comedians making jokes about Simpson's sensational murder trial in the 1990s.
"If OJ wasn't famous, he would be in jail right now," Rock said in his 1996 special Bring the Pain.
Exactly 13 years after his acquittal, Simpson was found guilty on 12 counts, including kidnapping, relating to an armed robbery of a Las Vegas memorabilia dealer in 2007.
He was sentenced in 2008 to 33 years in prison for the crimes but was released in 2017 on parole after serving almost nine years.
In his Twitter video, Simpson goes on to theorise that if he had been the one to slap Rock during a televised live broadcast, he would have been treated differently from Smith.
"After what happened to me in Las Vegas, if I would have done that in front of a million people watching around the world, they would've given me life without [parole]."
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed Smith will not face criminal charges for the slap as Rock has "declined to file a police report".
