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The OJ story gets weirder

By Brian | August 14, 2007 | Share on Facebook

Back in November, I blogged about a book OJ Simpson was writing called If I Did It, in which he described how he would have gone about murdering his ex-wife and her boyfriend, if he had, in fact, committed the crime.

Well, as it turns out, this very strange story was only just starting to get strange. Fasten your seat belts, this is a doozy:

It seems HarperCollins, the would-be publishers of this book, gave OJ a $630,000 advance for the book. Simpson then went and setup a shell corporation to keep the money away from the Goldman and Brown families (who are supposed to receive a portion of his earnings as part of the civil suit they won after the murders).

Last month, a Florida judge awarded the rights of the (completed) manuscript to the Goldman family. Let’s review that again: a judge awarded the right to sell the book describing how OJ Simpson would have killed Ron Goldman to the surviving family of Ron Goldman, who had decried the entire project as “immoral” when it first happened. But wait, you say, maybe by winning legal rights to the manuscript, their goal is simply to ensure that no one ever publishes such trash? No such luck:

The Goldmans are responsible for the costs of getting the book out there, but will be entitled to 90 percent of any proceeds, with the remaining 10 percent being split among the Brown family and the bankruptcy trustee that took charge of Simpson’s bogus enterprise, Lorraine Brooke Associates.

After they won the book rights, the Goldmans’ attorney said they were planning to change the name of the ghostwritten tome to Confessions of a Double Murderer and market it as a confessional.

“The family and publisher have pledged to leave Simpson’s manuscript entirely intact, but they will also add key commentary,” [a spokesman for the publisher] said in a statement. “The Goldmans, the publisher and [the Goldman’s literary agent, Sharlene Martin] will all contribute portions of sales proceeds to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice.”

So Ron Goldman’s family is now going to profit from his murder, by publishing what they call a confessional, when the author says it isn’t, even though the whole thing was ghost-written to begin with.

Here’s the capper – OJ Simpson is outraged:

Simpson claimed in a streamed online interview that he only agreed to include one chapter about the murders after his original publisher, Judith Regan, swore that it would be labeled as purely hypothetical.

“I find it sort of hypocritical that they talked everybody in America to boycott the book: It was ‘immoral,’ it was ‘blood money,'” he said, referring to the Goldmans’ acquisition of the publishing rights. “But we now see it wasn’t ‘blood money’ if they got the money.”

Not that OJ has the moral high ground here, but I gotta say – in this case, the man’s got a point.

Topics: The World Wide Weird | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “The OJ story gets weirder”

  1. Joe Shepard says at August 14th, 2007 at 12:16 pm :
    I am no fan or admirer of O.J. Simpson, but do I detect the stench of hyprocricy here?? When OJ was going to publish the book, Goldman called it “blood money”, “money made from the death of his son”. Now, he is going to publish the book–and nary a word about “blood money”, etc. Goldmans actions and attitudes have far exceeded anything that could be labeled as “grief”–rather now, it is a matter of greed.

  2. Brian says at August 14th, 2007 at 3:29 pm :
    Absolutely, Joe. As I said in the post, I’m no fan of him either, but in this case, the man’s got a point.