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Marguerite Whitley, the first wife of O.J. Simpson, met the former actor and athlete well before he became a household name or an NFL powerhouse. As Vogue noted in 2016, the two began dating in high school and married when they were 19 years old, one year before O.J. won the coveted Heisman trophy in 1968. The couple had three children together in the years following O.J.'s entrée into the world of professional sports, first as a Buffalo Bills, and later for the San Francisco 49ers, as well as his later forays on the big screen in movies like "The Towering Inferno."
All the while, Whitley kept herself out of the spotlight — a decision she made in her own right. Per Vogue, O.J. stated in a 1979 interview with People magazine that Whitley found her husband's fame to be a detriment to their marriage. "My wife is a private person, yet we can't walk down the street without causing a commotion," he said. Whitley and O.J. divorced that year, due in part to the pressures of O.J.'s celebrity, but also (and possibly primarily) because of the two-year affair the star had already carried on with a woman who would become his second wife: Nicole Brown Simpson.
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