Posted by: Keir
So O. J. Simpson did it. No, not that. Obviously he didn’t do that–he was acquitted. I’m referring to the fact that, as previously posited, O. J. Simpson has indeed written a memoir (or had someone write one for him) in which he will explain how he would have killed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, had he actually been the person who killed them. The New York Times reports that ReganBooks will release the book, If I Did It, on November 30.
Even better, there will be two one-hour TV specials, titled, “O. J. Simpson: If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened,” broadcast on Fox (what, PBS has better things to do?) on November 27 and 29. Judith Regan herself conducted the interviews and produced the TV specials. In the Washington Post, in “The TV Column,” Lisa de Moraes quotes an anonymous Hollywood executive who calls Judith Regan a “sick genius.”
Personally, I think that all these imagination exercises are likely to help O. J. on his continued quest to find the real killer. After all, to catch a killer, you have to think like one.
November 15th, 2006 at 11:44 am
O. J. is taking a page out of Ted Bundy’s book here. While on death row, Bundy told two writers how he would have done it, though he also contended that he didn’t. Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth’s “The Only Living Witness” (1989)recounts the whole Bundy saga, with plenty of space given to Ted’s first-person commentary. “Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer” reprints just the transcripts of the interviews. I doubt if O. J. is much of a reader, but I bet Judith Regan did her research.
November 15th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Two things:
1. Did you see the cover? The “If” is white, and then the “I DID IT” is in blood-red lettering. So that’s nice.
2. Richard Powers won the National Book Award! Hooray, America! Yay! Now, onto Stockholm!
-John
November 16th, 2006 at 9:25 am
[…] As reported last night by our New York correspondent, John Green, Richard Powers has won the National Book Award for fiction. Well deserved, in this humble blogger’s opinion. The full list: […]
April 16th, 2008 at 8:46 am
[…] In “If They Did It“–boy, we’re really wearing that out, aren’t we?–Rebecca Dana offers more postmortem on O. J. Simpson’s now canceled book and interview. Among the many details (some of them interesting, some of them arguable, such as Dana’s assertion that Barbara Walters is a “journalist”): Ms. Regan arranged a phone call between Ms. Walters and the book’s ghostwriter, Pablo Fenjves, a former co-worker of Ms. Regan’s at The National Enquirer who was also a witness for the prosecution in Mr. Simpson’s criminal trial—it was he who recalled the “plaintive wail†of what might have been Nicole Brown Simpson’s Akita on the day of her murder. […]