Tanya Brown, Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister, voiced outrage at Chris Rock’s latest joke about her sister’s brutal murder.
According to Fox News, the 57-year-old comic allegedly said during Rock’s Sunday night performance in Phoenix that asking Simpson to “go back to the restaurant” where she left her eyeglasses before she was slain would be like asking him to attend the Academy Awards following the notorious Will Smith slap incident. “Nothing funny about his joke towards Jada as she suffers from a physical condition and nothing funny about equating an Oscar host invitation to a double homicide,” Tanya wrote on Instagram.
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“I always thought he was funny, but he crossed the line with this one,” the motivational speaker and life coach added.
“In other words, Y’all!!!! Stop using my sister, OJ and Ron as part of your cricking comedy act. There are families behind this tragedy!” she said of Rock drawing a parallel between the slap and Brown and Ron Goldman’s gruesome double homicide.
According to Fox News, during his stand-up routine, Rock informed the audience that he had turned down the opportunity to host the 2023 Oscars after Will Smith slapped him onstage during the 2022 event because of a joke the comic had made about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
Smith’s hair inspired a “G.I. Jane” joke from Rock. The actor from “The Nutty Professor” has alopecia, an autoimmune condition that results in hair loss.
At her Brentwood, California, home, Brown and her companion, Goldman was discovered dead from knife wounds in June 1997. O.J. Simpson, Brown’s spouse and a former NFL star, was accused of the double homicide but was ultimately found not guilty after a highly publicised trial.
“I don’t advocate violence but I guess this guy hasn’t learned his lesson,” he wrote. “I guess Will failed to slap any sense into him.”
“I know some people who are deeply hurt and offended by this joke. Lame as it is. I mean he has every right to say what he said but maybe if some of his jokes were more general in nature and not so specific as to mock specific people,” Darden’s post continues.
“Nicole was somebody’s mother bruh and Ron was a son and a brother, you know? Do you always have to make a joke at somebody else’s expense?”
Darden added, “Ain’t you learned nothing from the slap that was heard around the world?”
Rock’s murder joke provoked a lot of discussion on social media. Christopher Darden, one of the trial’s prosecutors, chimed in on a post he uploaded to his personal Instagram account, according to an Entertainment Tonight article.