A new documentary reveals one reason why the gloves didn’t fit O.J. Simpson

O.J. Simpson trying on the bloody gloves during his murder trial in 1995.Reuters/Sam Mircovich

Warning: This post contains spoilers for part four of the docuseries “O.J.: Made in America.”

It turns out that there are still untold stories from the “trial of the 20th century.”

The murder trial of O.J. Simpson was watched by tens of millions of people in 1995 and analyzed endlessly by the media, and just about every person involved, including Simpson, has written a book about it. Yet the new ESPN documentary “O.J.: Made in America” has revealed a key piece of information that even those who were intimately tied to the case didn’t know about until seeing it.

In part four of the documentary – airing on ESPN on Friday – Simpson’s former sports agent, Mike Gilbert, says in an interview that there was another reason why Simpson could not get the infamous bloody gloves fully on in court when prosecuting attorney Christopher Darden asked him to wear them.

Simpson, according to Gilbert, had stopped taking his arthritis medicine two weeks before, so his hands were swollen.

“That story was certainly new to me,” Jeffrey Toobin, who’s featured in the documentary and is the author of “The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson,” told Business Insider. “I never knew that and, as far as I’m aware, the story had never been out there before.”

The prosecution in the case previously argued that the gloves didn’t fit because they shrank from the blood on them and because Simpson was also wearing rubber gloves underneath the evidence gloves.

Gil Garcetti, who served as the Los Angeles district attorney at the time of the Simpson trial and is also featured in the documentary, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he also wasn’t aware of Simpson’s arthritis medicine until “I saw it on this film.”

Garcetti’s reaction was simply: “My God.”

When asked if he thought that the defense team for Simpson potentially crossed a line if it was indeed behind his not taking the medicine, Garcetti said, “No … I can’t really say it’s crossing the line. They did everything in their power. We were baited into perhaps even having him trying on the gloves in the first place. It was never supposed to happen.”

Part two of “O.J.: Made in America” airs on ESPN on June 17.