During the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the defense accused Fuhrman of being a racist and planting evidence. Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator for Fuhrman, stated in the Washington Post (August 22, 1995), "Fuhrman's life is in the toilet. He has no job, no future. People think he's a racist. His life is ruined. For What? Because he found a key piece of evidence."
During the trial, Fuhrman denied ever using the N-word for the previous ten years, yet the defense was able to find an audiotape contradicting that testimony. As a result, the prosecution was forced to label their main police witness as a "bad cop." With the jury absent on September 6, 1995, Fuhrman invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in Simpson trial. Fuhrman later plead no contest to a perjury charge and was sentenced to probation and fined $200.
After the trial, Fuhrman moved to Sandpoint, Idaho and wrote a book about the O. J. case, called Murder in Brentwood. For his next book, Murder in Greenwich, he investigated the then-unsolved 1975 murder of Martha Moxley and uncovered new evidence indicating that the murderer was Michael Skakel, a relative of the Kennedy family. This eventually resulted in Skakel's arrest and conviction for the murder.