The trophy O.J. Simpson won for battering NFL defenses back in 1972 is being melted down to benefit battered women today.

After purchasing Simpson's 1972 American Football Conference Player of the Year trophy for $4,000 at auction, organizers of this weekend's International Gem and Jewelry Show in Houston plan to use its melted metal to make a number of small, angel-shaped pins.

The pins will be given to those who can prove they've donated $100 or more to battered women's causes.

Simpson, of course, has become pretty much the antihero poster boy for abused women's causes in recent years.

In case you've been sequestered on a jury for the past five years, O.J. was acquitted in the ultra-high-profile, June 1994 murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Subsequently, a civil court jury found him liable for the deaths in 1997, awarding the victims' families $33.5 million--a verdict that forced the 1968 Heisman Trophy winner to auction off many of his prized possessions.

Further adding to Simpson's unsavory reputation with the opposite sex: a 1989 no-contest plea on charges of beating Brown.

Besides the notoriety that has come along recently with the five-year anniversary of the double-murder June 12, Simpson's name was back in the headlines two weeks ago when a Minnesota woman begged her 23-year-old daughter to leave the golf-lovin' former Hertz pitchman.

Simpson is living with Christie Prody, a cocktail waitress and beauty school student he met several years ago when--according to Prody's mother, Cathy Bellmore--the young Minnesotan was sightseeing at the former football star's now-demolished Rockingham Estate.