EXCLUSIVE The doctor who helped get O.J. Simpson acquitted of double murder in 1995 is in hot water today. Contestants from “The Biggest Loser” on NBC are accusing Dr. Rob Huizenga of doling out over the counter drugs to help them lose massive amounts of weight.
In an excellent NY Post story by Maureen Callahan, Dr. H– as he is called– is cited by former contestants for contributing to their weight gain after the show, physical and mental illness.
Huizenga denied the charges to the Post. But what the Post doesn’t realize is that Rob Huizenga is the doctor hired by Robert Shapiro to help O.J. Simpson after the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman in 1994. (He’s also the doctor Charlie Sheen says he’s using for his HIV treatment.)
Huizenga was then an expert in steroid addiction who’d published a book about working with the L.A. Raiders including tales of NFL football players who struggled with drugs.
I wrote about him extensively during the Simpson trial in New York magazine. But Marcia Clark and her team of geniuses never asked Huizenga about Simpson and steroids when he was on the stand.
Ten years later, I interviewed Huizenga about the Simpson trial. He told me that since no one asked him while he was on the stand, he certainly wasn’t offering any information. He concluded: “Some guilty people are set free.”
Here’s the full text from my 2004 story:
“My take, and what I say now, is that Simpson was innocent in the trial,” Huizenga told me, referring to the criminal trial in which a jury acquitted Simpson. A civil jury later held him responsible for the murders. “That doesn’t mean he did or didn’t do it. Let’s face it, the evidence is completely suspicious. Some guilty people are set free.”
Huizenga saw Simpson once on the morning of June 15 at Shapiro’s request. “Shapiro said to me, ‘Take every test. Let the chips fall where they may.’” The doctor saw Simpson again on June 17, two hours before the infamous Bronco chase commenced, and later in prison. At the time, the notoriety was scary, he said. “I got hundreds of letters saying ‘You’ll die for representing this man’ — which I didn’t — to ‘You’re the best person in the world.’ It was eye opening.”
But what was most alarming, Huizenga told me, was how prosecutors treated him. His direct questioning by the state was from Deputy District Attorney Brian Kelberg, who worked for Marcia Clark.
“I told them that Simpson appeared to be limping when he came into my office. Instead of asking me about that, they said, ‘He wasn’t limping, you’re lying, we have tape of him from two months before.’ It’s odd that the prosecutors didn’t even bother to ask about the sequelae,” he said, tossing some much-needed Latin into our conversation. In other words: Clark’s team never asked why Simpson had been limping, or what would have brought him to that point.
Huizenga is not wrong to question that moment in his testimony 10 years later. On the stand he told Kelberg that Simpson walked into his office three days after the murders “like Tarzan’s grandfather.” Instead of exploring how Simpson could have come to be in that condition, Kelberg replied: “…perhaps Mr. Simpson was faking a limp in your office?”
“They assumed I was lying,” Huizenga said to me. “They didn’t ask me if it was possible that he’d been in the greatest fight of his life just a few days before.”
“I was dumbfounded by their approach,” Huizenga said. “And they’ve become celebrities since then.” He continued: “But they were set on a course. They wanted to prove I was stupid instead of saying, ‘You’re an honest person, what happened here?’”
Huizenga testified in the trial that he tested Simpson for several drugs, among them anabolic steroids. All the tests came back negative. The FBI lab had tested Simpson a couple of days earlier for the same drugs, without the steroid component. During the trial, a Harvard forensic psychiatrist with a connection to the case conjectured to me that Simpson might have killed his ex-wife Nicole and Ron Goldman in some kind of steroid rage. Huizenga says now that it’s unlikely based on the tests.
“Of course, the original tests had much higher detectable limits. We set ours much lower. Look at all the pictures that were taken. They were all from my office. All the cuts on his hands, none of that would have been known without us. They” — he said, referring to the police and FBI — “did a terrible job.”
