Joseph Perrulli says he ended a brief 1992 relationship with Nicole Brown Simpson because he could not live with the sense that O.J. Simpson was lurking everywhere in her life.
Perrulli, who first met Nicole in 1989 through their mutual friend Kris Jenner and reconnected with her while she was separated from Simpson, described an eerie, escalating pressure that pushed him away the day after a holiday when O.J. unexpectedly appeared at a family gathering.
The tipping point came on ordinary nights: Perrulli says he left Nicole’s rental in Brentwood with the unsettling urge to look over his shoulder, and that a neighbor told him O.J. had been secretly watching one of his dates. Nicole, Perrulli recalled, confided that Simpson would physically assault her — a revelation he says left him “woefully unprepared” to respond.
He also remembers being eased into the truth by Caitlyn Jenner, who told him Nicole was a wonderful woman and a devoted mother and that, aside from Simpson, she wasn’t caught up in the Beverly Hills scene. Still, Perrulli said the feeling of being watched, and the stories Nicole shared, convinced him he could not continue the relationship. "As hard as it was, I left the next day and decided to end the relationship," he told the interviewer.
Perrulli put the memories — letters, photographs and other keepsakes — into a briefcase and hid it away for decades. On June 16 he went public with those memories and announced he is turning the material into a book titled The Forgotten Briefcase, which he says is an attempt to restore the private woman he remembered to the record.
The most vivid image Perrulli offers is small and domestic: learning Nicole’s favorite restaurants, seeing her as a foodie with destination dishes across Los Angeles, and sensing a warmth and spirituality that, he says, was erased by the later, louder story about O.J. Simpson. “The story was always about O.J. Simpson,” Perrulli says now, explaining his decision to unseal the briefcase, “but I wanted to share the story of Nicole.”
Context: Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered with Ron Goldman more than three decades ago. Perrulli’s account does not alter that fact, but it adds a delayed, firsthand glimpse of the climate of fear he says surrounded her life in 1992 and of the private moments he witnessed between her and the people closest to her.
The friction in Perrulli’s recollection is plain: he insists Nicole was “a wonderful girl, great mother” — a description he says Caitlyn Jenner echoed — yet he also says the presence and alleged abuse by O.J. made the relationship feel unsafe. That contradiction explains both his immediate attraction and his swift departure.
Perrulli frames The Forgotten Briefcase as an act of salvage. He says that as he reassembled the letters and photos, he rediscovered Nicole — more spiritual and down-to-earth than the public image — and felt compelled to tell that side of her life. He adds that revisiting the material allowed him to see her “coming back to life” on the page.
What remains unresolved is exactly what new factual detail the briefcase contains about Nicole’s allegations and the household Perrulli describes. Perrulli says the book will foreground her humanity rather than revive the larger criminal narrative tied to O.J. Simpson, but he has not provided a release date or a full inventory of the contents. For now, readers will have to wait to learn whether the letters and pictures advance our understanding of what Nicole told Perrulli about abuse, or simply offer a more intimate portrait of the woman he once dated.
