7 Famous Athletes Who Committed Shocking Crimes 

Regarded as one of the greatest running backs in the history of professional football, the 11-year career of O. J. Simpson was overshadowed when he was accused of murdering his former wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman. 

Though Simpson was ultimately acquitted of the charges, the trial became one of the most publicized criminal trials in history, and has been widely dubbed “the trial of the century,” with many people believing that Simpson got away with murder — especially after he was found liable for the deaths in a subsequent civil suit. 

In 2007, Simpson was arrested again, this time for breaking into a Las Vegas hotel room to steal sports memorabilia (which he claimed had been stolen from him). He was sentenced to 33 years for armed robbery and kidnapping, though he was paroled in 2017. 

A two-time NBA All-Star, the career of “Fast Eddie” Johnson was plagued by cocaine addiction, and by some accounts he racked up more than a hundred arrests during and after his 10-year career, including several stints behind bars. 

In 2008, he was convicted of sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl. According to prosecutors, Johnson entered an apartment through an unlocked front door. Inside, the girl and her two brothers were home alone, watching television. 

Johnson then followed the girl to her room, “where he pushed a dresser against the door and then sexually molested her.” Johnson’s crime carried a sentence of life in prison, and he died behind bars in 2020.

In 1999, Venezuelan relief pitcher Ugueth Urbina led the National League in saves. He was a two-time MLB All-Star who played with the Florida Marlins when they won the World Series in 2003. 

However, his baseball career was cut short in 2005, when he was arrested in Venezuela. Several workers on his family’s ranch attested that Urbina and others “hit them repeatedly, struck them with machetes, doused them with gasoline and burned them during a torture session to determine who had stolen a pistol from Urbina’s farmhouse.” 

He was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for attempted murder, but was released after serving only about seven years of his sentence.

Jovan Belcher had been playing for the Kansas City Chiefs for three years on the night that he shot his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, to death in front of his own mother. Perkins was shot a total of nine times, including in the neck, chest, back, and hand. 

The couple’s three-month-old baby was in the next room. After shooting Perkins, Belcher drove to the Chiefs’ practice facility, where he confronted the team’s general manager and owner while holding a gun to his own head. As the police approached the scene, Belcher knelt down beside his own car and shot himself in the head. 

The Chiefs played the day after, and no formal mention of the murder-suicide was made during the game, although a moment of silence was observed for “victims of domestic violence and their families.”

Known as “Blade Runner” due to his prosthetic legs, Oscar Pistorius was one of only a handful of athletes to compete in both the Olympic and Paralympic Games, after both his legs were amputated below the knee when he was less than a year old. 

On Valentine’s Day in 2013, Pistorius shot his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, four times at his South African home, claiming that he mistook her for an intruder. He was initially found guilty of culpable homicide, a charge that was later upgraded to murder on appeal. 

The crime was the subject of an unauthorized TV movie in South Africa, two different four-part docuseries on Amazon Prime and ESPN, and several gags on the show Family Guy.

“You’ve really screwed up your life, didn’t you?” a U.S. District Judge asked former Los Angeles Rams cornerback Darryl Henley in 1997. Henley had been charged with smuggling cocaine, but in the process of that trial, he undertook an even more egregious crime: attempting to hire a hitman to kill both the presiding judge and Henley’s ex-girlfriend, a former cheerleader for the Rams and a key witness in his case. 

While being held in custody during his initial drug-trafficking trial, Henley paid off a guard to get access to a cellular phone, which he used to attempt to arrange the two murders-for-hire. He was ultimately sentenced to 41 years in prison, and will not be eligible for release until 2031. 

He is being held in “one of the country’s highest security facilities,” because “if ever there was a guy who needed to be locked down 24 hours a day, it’s Henley.”

A former professional kickboxer, Andrew Tate achieved greater fame as a “manosphere” influencer who has been dubbed “the king of toxic masculinity.” Partly due to his extremely public persona, his various legal troubles have often played out in the public eye, including his arrest in Romania after pizza boxes visible in a video he posted online in response to climate activist Greta Thunberg revealed his location to Romanian authorities. 

In Romania, Tate, his brother, and other accomplices have been charged with rape, human trafficking, trafficking a minor, money laundering, and other crimes. Tate is also being investigated in the UK, where 21 charges have been brought against him, including rape and human trafficking. 

In 2025, the Trump administration allegedly pressured Romanian officials to relax travel restrictions on Tate — who subsequently returned to the U.S., where he is also facing charges of assault and sexual abuse.

Featured images via Wikimedia.