O.J.’ BOMBSHELL CONFESSION’
O.J. Simpson finally talks about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman
It was an emphatic statement preceding one of the most sensational murder trials in American history. At his arraignment on July 22, 1994, O.J. Simpson — who stood accused of the brutal slayings of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and Ron Goldman, 25 — was asked how he pleaded. The former NFL star looked at the judge and responded clearly: “Absolutely 100 percent not guilty.” The jury eventually agreed, acquitting him of the murders in a 1995 verdict that sent shock waves across the country.
But more than a decade later, in a series of secret 2006 meetings in Miami, O.J. told a completely different story, which In Touch can now reveal. The fallen star, who was found liable for Nicole’s and Ron’s deaths in a 1997 civil trial and was ordered to pay the Brown and Goldman families $33.5 million in damages, had agreed to tell his side of the story in a book titled If I Did It, with the proceeds ostensibly going to his kids, according to writer Pablo Fenjves. (In a bizarre coincidence, Fenjves, a neighbor of Nicole’s, had testified in the criminal trial about her dog’s “plaintive wail” on the night of her murder.) “He wants to confess,” Fenjves writes in the prologue about what publisher Judith Regan told him when he was hired as O.J.’S ghostwriter. “This is the only way he’ll do it.” And in the book’s chilling, supposedly hypothetical narrative — as well as a “lost” interview with Regan that
was taped for Fox in 2006 and will finally air on the network on March 11 — O.J. described Nicole’s and Ron’s deaths in shocking detail. “It was like pulling teeth,” Fenjves writes of getting O.J. to open up about “The Night in Question,” which is the title of the book’s sixth chapter. “He said, ‘I’m not gonna tell you that I… cut my wife’s throat open and watched her eyes roll back in her head.’”
SICKENING DETAILS But that’s exactly what he did. “Now picture this — and keep in mind, this is hypothetical,” the book reads, launching into a first-person account of O.J.’S rage over Nicole’s hardpartying behavior in the wake of their 1992 divorce. On the night of June 12, 1994, O.J. explains, he was so fed up, he decided to go to her Brentwood, Calif., condo — along with a mystery friend he called “Charlie” — to “scare the s--- out of that girl.”
Once they arrived, O.J. says in the book, he put on a cap and gloves and grabbed a knife, which “Charlie” (some people believe that Charlie is O.J.’S subconscious self) snatched out of his hands before he stalked up to Nicole’s back gate. Just as O.J. began to get “steamed” upon seeing romantic candlelight in her window, Ron showed up, claiming he was returning glasses Nicole’s mom had left at his restaurant. Things escalated from there: The men argued; “Charlie” walked up holding the knife; Nicole came out and attacked O.J. “like a banshee.… I ducked and she lost her balance,” hitting her head on the stoop, he says. As she lay unmoving, Ron assumed a “karate stance” and began “bobbing and weaving.” O.J., still seeing red, grabbed the knife from “Charlie” and faced Ron.
After that, “something went horribly wrong and I know what happened, but I can’t tell you exactly how.… For a few moments I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, when I’d arrived, or even why I was there,” O.J. says, adding that he soon realized he was covered in blood, the knife was still in his hand — and Ron and Nicole “were lying in giant pools of blood. I had never seen so much blood in my life. It didn’t seem real.”
O.J. told a similar story in the on-camera interview with Regan — which was shelved after the book’s initial publication was halted — again reiterating that the story was “hypothetical.” The many minute details he provides in both retellings had Fenjves and others convinced he wasn’t just making it up, but when the book was finally released in 2007, O.J. suggested that the author had fabricated parts. (“I was offered a deal, I told them I didn’t do it,” O.J. said. “Their writer said, ‘How can we make this work?’”) But Fenjves points out that O.J. had every opportunity to make changes. “O.J. read the book, his book, several times… and he signed off on it.… If there are errors in the book, it’s because O.J. didn’t correct them. Or worse, he fed them to me. Self-delusion is a wonderful thing,” says Fenjves. “I… remember thinking that only a guilty man would have agreed to do such a crazy book, but of course that was just my opinion… the opinion of a man who had never doubted O.J.’S guilt.” ◼