Remember when Hollywood thought it could make a movie star out of O.J. Simpson? That was in the late 1970s, around the time that the San Francisco native was trying to transform himself from a star NFL running back into a beloved Hertz pitchman, sports analyst and all-around entertainment personality, with the help of his good friend, lawyer and businessman Robert Kardashian.
Now in late 2025, one of Simpson’s 1970s movie projects offers a strange parallel to the bonkers theory that Kim Kardashian, one of Robert Kardashian’s infamous daughters, is pushing on their family’s reality TV show.
On Thursday’s episode of “The Kardashians,” Kim Kardashian revealed that she doesn’t believe that the 1969 moon landing really happened, People reported. She goes to great lengths to convince actor Sarah Paulson, her co-star in the new TV series “All’s Fair,” to also doubt the moon landing by insisting that one of the Apollo 11 astronauts, Buzz Aldrin, admitted that he never went to the moon.
“I’ve seen a few videos (of) Buzz Aldrin talking about how it didn’t happen. He says it all the time now, in interviews,” Kardashian claims.
Aldrin, in fact, never said the moon landing was faked, according to FullFact.org. Over the years, his comments in interviews, including the 2015 interview that Kardashian appears to be referencing, have been misconstrued, edited in misleading ways, or falsely reported by people wanting to push conspiracy theories about the moon landing. Since 2015, Aldrin has given several interviews in which he recounts his journey to the moon.
On her show, Kim Kardashian also repeats other popular moon landing conspiracy theories that have been debunked.
“There’s no gravity on the moon — why is the flag blowing?” she said, according to People. “The shoes that they have in the museum that they wore on the moon (have) a different (foot) print than the photos. Why are there no stars?”
It’s easy to imagine that Kim Kardashian could have been primed to question the moon landing if she ever watched “Capricorn One,” a 1978 conspiracy thriller starring Simpson. He was her late father’s once-close friend and the man she once called “Uncle O.J.” and his movie came out two years before she was born.
In that film, Simpson, who died in 2024, played one of three astronauts forced by NASA to fake a landing on Mars after something goes wrong with the spacecraft before lift-off. The astronauts — Simpson, James Brolin and Sam Waterston — are told that they have to appear in fake footage of a Mars landing so that NASA’s funding won’t be cut and so that private contractors won’t lose billions in profits. The head of NASA threatens the astronauts’ families if the men don’t go along with the scheme.
“Capricorn One” got mixed reviews and didn’t do much to advance Simpson’s movie star aspirations. At one point, he was considered for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s role in “The Terminator,” according to the former California governor but director James Cameron and the producers thought he was “too nice” for the role.
Simpson’s next attempt to revive his acting career occurred in 1994, when he filmed a TV pilot for “Frogmen,” an “A Team”-like adventure series. But NBC scrapped the project after Simpson was arrested and charged in the June 1994 murders of his ex-wife wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
For years before the murders, Robert Kardashian and his wife, the future Kris Jenner, were very close with and O.J. and Nicole Brown Simpson, according to Biography.com. The couples and their children often vacationed together, with Kim Kardashian and her siblings, Kourtney, Khloe and Robert, referring to the Simpsons as “Uncle O.J.” and “Auntie Nicole.” Both couples also went through divorce at the same time: the Kardashians in 1991 and the Simpsons in 1992. Following the divorce, Kris Jenner stayed close friends with Nicole Brown Simpson.
Robert Kardashian became the first, “accidental celebrity” in the Kardashian family after police began to zero in on Simpson as a suspect, and he was cast as his friend’s first legal representative and spokesperson, according to Slate. On the day that Simpson led police on his infamous slow-speed Bronco chase along the freeways of Los Angeles, Robert Kardashian read his friend’s “suicide note.”
Robert Kardashian then became a member of Simpson’s legal team but many suspect he began to doubt his friend’s innocence during his televised, months-long trial. Robert Kardashian looked “almost stricken” when the not guilty verdict was read, Slate said. But he never spoke out against Simpson before his death in 2003.
Kim Kardashian has never said much about her own feelings about “Uncle O.J.”, expect to say in 2020 that his murder trial “tore my family apart,” according to People. Her mother believed that Simpson murdered her friend, while her father publicly stood by him. Her father also brought her and her sister, Kourney, then 14 and 15, to the trial without informing her mother.
“My mom was extremely vocal on her feelings — she believed that her friend was murdered by him and that was really traumatizing for her,” Kim Kardashian said.