“I’m afraid he’s going to kill me!”

That’s what Nicole Simpson told her therapist Susan Forward about her terrifying fear of O.J. Simpson.

And just days before the football great’s ex-wife was brutally murdered, she spurned O.J.’s pleas for a reconciliation and echoed the same fear to a friend:

“I’m really afraid one day he’ll go too far and kill me!”

“O.J. constantly battered her,” said Forward, the therapist who counseled Nicole when she was going through her divorce from the star in 1992.

“She was terrified of him. He constantly threatened her life. She told me, ‘O.J. is so insanely possessive and jealous that there’s no telling what he might do. He gets so angry I know he could kill me someday.'”

Nicole was a typical battered wife – and O.J., 46, had a “classic case of obsession,” said Forward, author of the book “Obsessive Love: When It Hurts Too Much To Let Go.”

“After they separated, O.J. kept pursuing her,” Forward told The ENQUIRER… She was living in terror. he was always accusing her of seeing other men. If she went to a gas station to get gas for her car; O.J. would demand to know if she was seeing the gas station attendant and there’d be a big fight!

“When she was seeing me, Nicole still had a lot of loving feelings for O.J. She kept seeking the love of the man who beat her.

“Nicole would lie curled up on my couch in a fetal position, crying, with no make-up, torn jeans and stringy hair. She looked like a helpless waif.

“She was trembling in fear when she told me, ‘I’m trying to get my life together. But it’s on my mind every minute – what is O.J. going to do next?'”

The couple’s fighting brought the police to their door several times while they they were married, said Forward.

The couple split in early 1992 and their divorce became final soon after

But in recent months, the two had grown increasingly close… “O.J. and Nicole were really trying to make things work,” her friend disclosed. “They were spending a great deal of time together, alone and with their children, and it seemed they were heading toward remarriage.

“Nicole loved O.J. and the kids so much. She really wanted her family whole again. But the past kept creeping back into her mind. She told me, ‘I won’t let him hurt me again.’

But shortly before her death, Nicole made up her mind once and for all that the relationship wouldn’t work – and told O.J. she’d decided she could never reconcile with him, said an insider.

Just a little over two weeks before her grisly murder; she told a pal, ‘I wish I could work things out. But to tell you the truth, O.J. still scares me to death. For God’s sake, he’s threatened to kill me.’

The National Enquirer (June 28 1994)