More than a decade ago, O.J. Simpson described the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in shocking detail during a series of secret 2006 meetings for his supposedly hypothetical book, If I Did It. As part of a package deal, he participated in a wide-ranging, no-holds-barred interview to promote the chilling tome — which took years and years to finally air. According to resurfaced reports, the fallen sports star, now 70, earned a pretty penny for his pseudo-confession.
In October 2006, The National Enquirer reported that O.J. was paid $3.5 million. Though he was acquitted of Nicole and Ron’s murders, O.J. was found liable for their deaths in a 1997 civil trial and was ordered to pay the Brown and Goldman families $33.5 million in damages. In July 2007, a federal bankruptcy judge awarded 90 percent of the proceeds from If I Did It to the Goldman family — and the remaining 10 percent went to O.J.’s creditors.
Portions of O.J.’s previously shelved interview aired on Fox’s special O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession? on Sunday, March 11. In it, the former athlete talked about “grabbing the knife” the night of Nicole and Ron’s gruesome murders. “It’s not easy to discuss,” he said. ”This is hypothetical. I remember I grabbed the knife, I do remember that portion. Where are the bloody clothes? So somebody had to get rid of the bloody clothes. We’ve all seen the grisly pictures, after. So yeah, I think everything was covered, would have to be covered in blood…It was horrible. It was absolutely horrible.”
O.J.’s publisher Judith Regan revealed that she was given the impression that he was ready to take responsibility for the brutal deaths of his ex-wife and her friend. “He said he was willing to do it and the only condition that he had is that he didn’t want to call the book I Did It. He wanted to put an ‘if’ in front of it, so that he would have deniability with his children,” she said of O.J., who shared daughter Sydney, now 32, and Justin, now 29, with Nicole. “He couldn’t face his children and he couldn’t tell them that he had done it. And that was the way it was portrayed to me. That was his only condition.”
