Simpson’s lost murder ‘confession’ resurfaces
LOS ANGELES — In 2006, O.J. Simpson sat down for a wide-ranging, no-holdsbarred interview in which he gave a gripping “hypothetical” account of the brutal murder of his ex-wife and her friend.
For over a decade, the tapes of the infamous exchange with radio host and publisher Judith Regan were considered lost but have re-emerged, says Fox, which is finally airing the footage on Sunday.
The former football star, 70, offers a detailed and disturbing version of what might have happened on June 12, 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were found stabbed to death.
Under the pretext that his account is fictional, he describes grabbing a knife as he confronted his ex-wife at her home in Los Angeles but says he then blacked out and remembers only seeing everything “covered in blood”.
Simpson was subsequently found liable for the deaths in a 1997 civil suit and ordered to pay damages of $33.5 million.
Nine years later, Harper Collins — owned by Fox’s parent company — announced the publication of If I Did It, in which Simpson would describe how the real murderer would have committed the killings.
The publishing giant canceled amid a public backlash and the rights switched to the Goldman family, who published their own version in 2007 with their added comments.
They used a new cover that hugely reduced the size of the “If” compared with the other words and added Confessions of the Killer to the title.
The interview with Regan, who had been overseeing the book’s publication, was supposed to promote sales but the victims’ families objected and it was mothballed.
It is not clear how the tapes were suddenly discovered after all these years, leading CNN to suggest they may have been kept back as a “counterprogramming stunt” to undermine ABC’s American Idol premiere.
Terry Wrong, executive producer of the two-hour special, suggested “forgotten”, “ignored” or “relegated” might be better ways to describe the material than “lost” but added that they “weren’t in anybody’s consciousness” when their existence was first flagged up.
AFP has seen the original raw footage of the interview, in which Regan asks Simpson — “knowing that it’s hypothetical” — to walk her through what “might have happened” on the night of the murders.