I felt a little dirty when I checked O.J. Simpson’s “[If] I Did It” from the library, but I just had to see how this weird, “non-confession confession” played out.
This was the manuscript that Harper Collins was going to publish, but withdrew after public outrage. The text was repeatedly checked over and approved by the killer himself, so it truly reflects his warped view on the whole affair.
He comes across as whiny, narcissistic and completely out of touch. He paints himself as an earnest guy trying to be mature with his increasingly crazy estranged wife — he never laid a finger on her, etc. etc. She was getting out of control, he was worried about the kids…
He yammers on like this forever, until we get to the “night in question”, where he does indeed confess, but only after declaring that the description was “hypothetical”. He makes the jump from concerned goodguy to psychotic knife-murderer with jarring celerity; it’s obvious he left out many of the details that led to the brutal slashing. He leaves out the actual physical details of the massacre, claiming that he blacked out. He awakened from this lost time to discover he was covered in blood and holding the weapon… the corpses laid out horrifically near him.
Simpson claims that he was accompanied by someone (called “Charles”), that he couldn’t have done it alone. But “Charles”‘s weird, last-minute appearance in the narrative feels completely grafted; I suspect he is an invention of O.J.’s designed to deflect blame. (The ghostwriter felt the same way.)
Throughout the whole creepy story, O.J. is more worried about his image than his kids, and pathetically tries to elicit sympathy from the reader. He fumes over tiny inaccuracies in press reports and rails throughout about how wrong they all got it — they were calling him a serial abuser! Can you imagine that?!? Hey, I may have beheaded my wife, but the police were only called to the house TWICE, not six times…! It was this last inaccuracy that gave him the courage to put down the gun and not shoot himself during his Bronco escape. He wanted to fight to salvage his reputation, presumably so his kids will have the *precise* stats for his wife beating career.
He ends the book breezily, in essence saying (I paraphrase, of course) “hey, crimes of passion, eh? Funny old world, funny relationships, me and Nicole were one of the funniest…” He wants you to know he really loved that woman he killed.
As for the man he killed, he seemed pretty indifferent. Wrong place, wrong time — shit happens!
I felt less dirty after reading the foreword by the Goldman family, which describes their 15 year fight to get O.J. to pay up the $38 million he owes from the wrongful death suit. The Goldmans were able to prevent Simpson from profiting from the book; the proceeds go to their foundation rather than to a shady legal entity set up by O.J..
So read the book without guilt, or check it out from the library if you feel uncomfortable “monetizing” sensational crimes (I felt that way about “Disco Bloodbath” — something of a cottage industry sprung up around that ugliness).
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