Celebrity attorney F Lee Bailey dead at 87 japantoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from japantoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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F. Lee Bailey, the prominent defense attorney who represented many high-profile clients, including O.J. Simpson, died Thursday at age 87. His death was confirmed to CNN by Jennifer Sisson, a manager at Bailey’s consulting firm.
Sisson described Bailey as “a great man.”
Bailey was part of the so-called “dream team” of famous local and national lawyers, including civil rights attorney Johnnie Cochran, defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, and DNA expert Barry Scheck, defending Simpson at his 1995 murder trial. Simpson was acquitted of killing Nicole Brown Simpson, his former wife, and waiter Ronald Goldman in 1994.
“I lost a great one. F Lee Bailey you will be missed,” Simpson tweeted Thursday, along with a video of himself talking about the lawyer, who he described of “one of the great lawyers of our time.”
“The legal profession is a business with a tremendous collection of egos,” Bailey said an in interview with U.S. News and World Report in September 1981. “Few people who are not strong egotistically gravitate to it.”
Some of Bailey’s other high-profile clients included Dr. Samuel Sheppard accused of killing his wife and Capt. Ernest Medina, charged in connection with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.
“I have never known a greater intellect than that possessed by F. Lee Bailey,” said J. Albert Johnson, Bailey’s longtime legal partner and childhood friend.
Bailey, an avid pilot, best-selling author and television show host, was a member of the legal “dream team” that defended Simpson, the former star NFL running back and actor acquitted on charges that he killed his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, in 1995.