Nov. 5, 2007
No Friends, Not Even In Low Places

By STEVE FRIESS
Newsweek

The last time O. J. Simpson was in Las Vegas, he spent his first night at the stylish Palms hotel-casino, and his last in the county jail. He's scheduled to return to Sin City this week for a pretrial hearing on his armed-robbery charges, and this time he might have trouble finding a good place to lay his head.

The Palms—usually celebrity-friendly—has already told Simpson he's not welcome, and the town's two biggest resort corporations, Harrah's and MGM Mirage, with 60,000 rooms combined, are also unwilling to host the ex-NFL star and exonerated murder suspect. "We would be unable to accept a hotel reservation from [him] because of the operational challenges that the crush of media would likely present," says MGM Mirage's Alan Feldman, an executive vice president.

Harrah's veep Michael Weaver says that the decision to allow a celebrity to check in "depends on whether or not there is any positive public relations to be obtained by it." In this case, Weaver says, the answer is a pretty firm "no."

A spokeswoman for Station Casinos, which owns the Palace Station, where O.J. allegedly burst into a room with a group of armed friends to grab memorabilia he claims was his, says she's also not rolling out a welcome mat for the Juice—though she didn't say the hotel chain would outright deny him. (A Station hotel did put up Michael Jackson the night of his 2003 arrest on sex-abuse charges.) Wynn Las Vegas declined to comment, but Steve Wynn, the mogul whose name is on the resort, threw out Britney Spears earlier this year for unruly behavior.

Simpson's lawyers didn't return calls for comment. If all else fails, maybe O.J. can bunk with friends—if he's got any left in town. The last time he visited, they all ended up in jail.

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