No shit.
“Well, I just want you to know,” he went on, “I was a good soldier for this thing, and I’m not going to throw you under the bus.”
I asked him what he meant by that, and he said, “You know that chapter was mostly you.”
“Excuse me?”
It had been like pulling teeth, admittedly, in the beginning, anyway, but he’d gone back and reread the manuscript three times, asking for changes. If there was anything in there he hadn’t agreed with, or that I’d gotten wrong, which happens, I had given him ample opportunity to address it. It was his book, not mine.
“Remember when we first sat down?” he said. “And I told you I thought the book was going to be fiction?”
“Are you taping me?” I said.
“Taping you! Why would I do that?! It’s illegal.”
He was taping me. He was already beginning to distance himself from the project, and he was setting me up to take the fall. I understood. Sort of. It was over. There was nothing left for him. No absolution, and certainly no more money.
“I treated it as fiction,” he said. “I purposefully didn’t correct some of the mistakes, because if the time comes that I have to defend myself, I can say, ‘Hey look, it can’t be me because that couldn’t have happened.’” He mentioned the business about removing his shoes, but not the socks. And the fact that he would have had to scale a ten-foot chain-link fence to get from his tennis court to the guesthouse. And he said nobody had ever seen him on a golf course with a knit-cap and gloves. I had asked him about every single one of those things, and his answers, however oblique, had found their way into the manuscript.
I stayed calm, but I reminded him that it was his book, that I’d given him plenty of opportunities to review it, and that I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that I had made things up.
“You’re right,” he said. “We worked together. It was a collaborative effort. But I don’t know any ‘Charlie.’”
Now I was getting angry. “Don’t you remember how it began?” I said. “You told me you couldn’t have done this alone.”
“I never said that!” he bellowed. “I said, ‘At least two people did this!’”
Now he was flat-out lying, but I didn’t feel like arguing, so I backed off. Within minutes, his tone had changed. “I’d like to think that during our experience together I never gave you any indication that I did it,” he said, measuring his words. It seemed as if he was reading from a prepared script. “I tried to make it clear every chance I had that I didn’t do this.”
Yes, he sure did.
“I called you today because I loved working with you,” he continued. “I thought you were a good guy. I hope that no matter how you went into this project, you came out of it thinking better of me.”
He went on to tell me that his eldest daughter, Arnelle, had been part of the negotiations from the start, and that he had told his youngest daughter, Sydney, that he had done the book to help secure her financial future. “The book was very cathartic for me,” he added. “I thought it would enlighten people who didn’t understand my relationship with Nicole.” He then admitted that the shell company—the one that had allegedly been established by and for his kids—had helped him pay down his mortgage and settle his accounts with the I.R.S.
Great, I thought.
He ended the conversation with, “I got nothing but respect for you.”
I could see what was coming. O.J. was going to put as many miles as he could between himself and the book, and he was going to use me to help him do it. Maybe that had been the plan all along.
Sure enough, the next morning he told the world that the book was a work of fiction, created largely by the ghostwriter. And it got better. “When I saw what [the ghostwriter] wrote, I said, ‘Maybe you did it, because they’re saying that chapter contains things only the killer would know.’ I don’t know these things.”
The phone wouldn’t stop ringing, but I didn’t feel any burning need to talk to the press, or to defend myself. They wrote about me anyway, and got many of the details wrong. It was true, for example, that I’d met Judith Regan at The National Enquirer, but we had gone our separate ways—she to build an empire, me to write screenplays—and we lost touch. Many years later, however, long after she’d become a publishing powerhouse, she began to call me, urging me to get into the book business, but I was busy writing scripts, and I didn’t write my first book for her until 2001. As it turned out, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the process. I enjoyed the people (or most of them, anyway). And I liked the feel of a book in my hand. It had a lot more substance than an unproduced screenplay.
The reporters kept calling, and I kept politely declining their requests for interviews. I had been a real reporter once myself, before I sold my soul, briefly, to The National Enquirer, so I knew they were just trying to do their jobs. Then Jeffrey Toobin from The New Yorker reached me. He had interviewed me a decade earlier, after I testified at O.J.’s trial, but I begged off, telling him I had nothing say, and that if I said anything at all it was off the record. He begged me for one line, and I gave it to him: “I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a reporter in this country who, given the opportunity to sit down and take a confession from O.J. Simpson, no matter how oblique, would have refused to do so.” But even as I said it, I regretted it. It sounded like an apology, and I had nothing to apologize for. Still, it was only one quote—he certainly couldn’t build a story around one quote, right? We made a little small talk, still off the record, and said goodbye, and the next day, to my great surprise, a young woman called from the magazine’s fact-checking department. I refuted everything but that one line, but they ran a lengthy story anyway. Toobin had taken his decade-old interview with me and made it sound as if we’d just had the nicest, most pleasant conversation, and weren’t we just marvelously amusing? I called him to complain, and I left messages for his boss, but my calls were never returned.
On November 21, 2006, Charles Krauthammer of Time magazine filed a story about the whole sordid debacle. “I would have let O.J. speak,” he wrote. “I thought the outrage was misdirected and misplaced … The real outrage is the trial that declared him not guilty: the judge, a fool and incompetent whose love of publicity turned the trial into a circus; the defense lawyers, not one of whom could have doubted the man’s guilt yet who cynically played on the jury’s ignorance and latent racism to win a disgraceful verdict; the prosecutors, total incompetents who bungled a gimmie, then shamelessly cashed in afterwards; the media that turned the brutal deaths of two innocents into TV’s first reality-show soap opera.”
Not long after, writing in The Huffington Post, Jeff Norman said the book’s cancellation was “nothing to cheer. No matter how much the relatives of murder victims engender sympathy, it is not the role of media professionals to censor or otherwise punish O.J.”
Newsweek actually managed to get a look at the critical chapter: “The narrative is as revolting as one might expect, but it’s also surprisingly revealing,” wrote the reporter, Marc Miller. “What emerges from the chapter is something new in the nearly 13-year Simpson saga: a seeming confession in Simpson’s own voice … In his crude, expletive-laced account, Simpson suggests Nicole all but drove him to kill her. He describes her as the ‘enemy.’ She is taunting him with her sexual dalliances, he says, and carrying on inappropriately in front of their two children.”
William Tucker, writing in The American Spectator, praised the enterprise as “a remarkable public service.” He went on: “Police will tell you suspects constantly come in either wanting to match wits with the cops or wanting to get something off their chest… . Confession is good for the soul. The Catholic Church has known this for centuries. Thus it isn’t at all surprising after all these years to find O.J. finally coming clean. Sure he couches his confession in a this-is-how-I-would-have-done-it mode. Police often suggest this themselves as a prelude to an actual confession. And sure he posits a mysterious ‘friend’ who supposedly accompanied him
every step of the way. Guilty people often do that, too. James Earl Ray, in confessing to Congress of killing Martin Luther King, insisted a mysterious ‘Raul’ had accompanied him the whole time. There was no such person.”
By then, of course, it was too late, and the fallout continued. Judith Regan was fired—for reasons that reportedly had nothing to do with the book—and my phone kept ringing. But suddenly it wasn’t just reporters anymore. Friends and friends of friends and people I didn’t even know were calling to ask if they could get a copy of the book. I even heard from a Federal judge who offered to come by the house and read it in my living room, saying he was absolutely incensed by News Corp.’s decision to kill it, which was nothing short of censorship. His comments brought to mind the famous line, generally attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
After Fred Goldman won the rights to the book, O.J. came out swinging again, doing everything in his power to discredit the book, and to further distance himself from the project.
“We got to that chapter, and I said, ‘Hey, I can’t participate in that,’” O.J. told a reporter, suggesting that he’d been largely passive throughout the process.
The next day, reluctantly, I set the record straight. “O.J. read the book, his book, several times. I made every change he asked for, and he signed off on it … (I)f there are errors in the book, it’s because O.J. didn’t correct them, or worse, he fed them to me. But that’s fine, too. It’s his book. Self-delusion is a wonderful thing.”
You’ve read the story. This is the book. Judge for yourself.
PABLO F. FENJVES
Los Angeles, California
August 15, 2007
IF I DID IT
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is an exact replication
of the original If I Did It manuscript.
1.
THE LUCKIEST GUY IN THE WORLD
I’M GOING TO tell you a story you’ve never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. It takes place on the night of June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murder of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night, because I know the facts better than anyone. I know the players. I’ve seen the evidence. I’ve heard the theories. And, of course, I’ve read all the stories: That I did it. That I did it but I don’t know I did it. That I can no longer tell fact from fiction. That I wake up in the middle of the night, consumed by guilt, screaming.
Man, they even had me wondering, What if I did it?
Well, sit back, people. The things I know, and the things I believe, you can’t even imagine. And I’m going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know—that’s not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong.
First, though, for those of you who don’t me, my name is Orenthal James Simpson—“O.J.” to most people. Many years ago, a lifetime ago, really, I was a pretty good football player. I set a few NCAA records, won the Heisman trophy, and was named the American Football Conference’s Most Valuable Player three times. When I retired from football, in 1978, I went to work for NBC, as a football analyst, and in the years ahead I was inducted into both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
I did a little acting, too, and for a number of years I was a pitchman for Hertz, the rental car people. Some of you might remember me from the television spots: I was always running late, pressed for time, leaping over fences and cars and piles of luggage to catch my flight. If you don’t see the irony in that, you will.
All of that was a long time ago, though, a lifetime ago, as I said—all of that was before the fall. And as I sit here now, trying to tell my story, I’m having a tough time knowing where to begin. Still, I’ve heard it said that all stories are basically love stories, and my story is no exception. This is a love story, too. And, like a lot of love stories, it doesn’t have a happy ending.
Let me take you back a few years, to the summer of 1977. I was married then, to my first wife, Marguerite, and we were about to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, but it was not a good time for us. Marguerite and I had been on shaky ground for a number of years, and at one point had actually separated, but we reconciled for the sake of our two kids, Arnelle, then nine, and Jason, seven. A few months into it, though, while Marguerite and I were in the middle of dinner, she set down her fork and gave me a hard look.
“What?” I asked.
“This isn’t working,” she said. “And I’m five months’ pregnant.”
I knew the marriage wasn’t working, but the news of the pregnancy was a real shock.
We finished dinner in silence—we were at the house on Rockingham, in Brentwood—and after dinner went to bed, still silent. I lay there in the dark, thinking about the unborn baby. I knew Marguerite would never consider an abortion, and it made for a very strange situation: The youngest Simpson would be joining a family that had already fallen apart.
In the morning, I told Marguerite that I was going to go to the mountains for a night or two, to think things through, and I packed a small bag and took off.
On my way out of town, I stopped at a Beverly Hills jewelry store to pick out an anniversary present for her—we’d been married a decade earlier, on June 24, 1967—then paid for it and left. As I made my way down the street, heading back to my car, I ran into a guy I knew, and we went off to have breakfast at The Daisy, a couple of blocks away. We found a quiet, corner table, and our young waitress came over. She was a stunner: Blonde, slim, and bright-eyed, with a smile that could knock a man over.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Nicole.”
“Nicole what?”
“Nicole Brown.”
“How come I’ve never seen you before?”
“I just started here,” she said, laughing.
She was from Dana Point, she told me, about an hour south of Los Angeles, and she’d come up for the summer to make a few bucks.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“I just turned eighteen last month,” she said. “On May 19.”
“I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” I said.
She smiled that bright smile again. “Me, too,” she said.
After breakfast, I made the two-hour drive to Lake Arrowhead, and I spent the night up there, thinking about my failing marriage, and trying not to think about the gorgeous young waitress who had served me breakfast. When I got back from the mountains, I went home, having resolved absolutely nothing, and a few nights later I went back to The Daisy. Nicole was there, and I took her aside. “I want you to know that I’m married, but that my marriage is ending,” I said. “So, you know—I’m still technically a ‘married man.’ I don’t know if that bothers you, but if it does I’m just letting you know that things are going to change soon.”
“Is that the truth?” she asked.
“It’s the truth,” I said.
Later that same night, I stopped by her apartment, on Wilshire Boulevard, and took her to a party. By the end of the evening, I was hooked.
That was in June, 1977. For the next month, I saw her almost every single day, until it was time to leave for football. I missed her, and I spoke to her constantly. I also spoke to Marguerite, of course, to see how the kids were doing, and to make sure the pregnancy was going okay, but I was pretty confused. I had a wife back home, with a third kid on the way, and I was already falling in love with another woman.
I came home in time for the delivery of the baby, but split almost immediately after to rejoin the Buffalo Bills, the team I was playing with back then. When football season ended, I returned to L.A. and took a room at the Westwood Marquis, and I found myself pretty much living two lives—one with Marguerite, as an estranged husband and father of three, and the other with Nicole, my new love. I spent most of my time with Nicole, of course, at the hotel or at her little apartmen
t, and from time to time—when I was called away on business—she’d hit the road with me.
Eventually, I met Nicole’s family—two sisters, Denise and Dominque, who were living in New York back then; a third sister, Tanya; and their mother, Juditha, who lived in Dana Point with her husband, Lou. I didn’t meet Lou till later, but that was only because the situation never presented itself. He knew about me, of course, and I don’t think he had any objections, and if he did nobody shared them with me.
Nicole also met my kids, but I waited an entire year before I made the introductions. I was a little wary, for obvious reasons, but Nicole took to them as if they were her own. They liked her, too. Before long, the kids wouldn’t go anywhere with me unless Nicole was part of it.
I’ve got to tell you: Life was pretty good. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.
The following year, I moved out of the Westwood Marquis and into the Hollywood Hills home of my old friend Robert Kardashian, and I asked Nicole to move in with me. I think everyone saw us as the perfect couple, including Nicole, but as the months turned into years she began to drop not-so-subtle hints about getting married. I kept trying to put her off, of course, because I’d failed at marriage once, and because I’d seen plenty of other couples fail, but Nicole kept pushing. This led to a number of heated arguments, and from time to time I was sure we were finished, but we survived—mostly because Nicole had faith in us. She believed that our relationship was special, and that we could beat the odds, and pretty soon she had me believing it, too.
In 1979, my divorce from Marguerite became final, and Marguerite moved out of the Rockingham house. I was making arrangements to put the place on the market, but Nicole talked me out of it. “This is a beautiful place,” she said. “All it needs is a little fixing up.”
She walked me through the house, room to room, telling me what we could change, and how it would look, and it was obvious that she had an eye for that kind of thing. She ended up redesigning and redecorating the whole place, top to bottom, and it turned out so well that I encouraged her to become a licensed interior decorator. Within a year, she was working professionally.
If I Did It Page 6
