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 Entertainment | Books | August 2007 
OJ Simpson Blames Ghost Author Over Murder Book
 Steve Gorman - Reuters
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Los Angeles - Former U.S. football star O.J. Simpson said on Tuesday his hypothetical account of killing his ex-wife in his aborted memoir "If I Did It" was crafted by a ghost writer and was full of errors.
Simpson discussed the book in an Internet interview streamed live on Tuesday by the Dallas-based Web site Market News First (www.MN1.com). Its publication was scrapped amid public outrage shortly before its release due late last year.
On Monday, after a long legal fight, rights to the book passed to the family of murder victim Ron Goldman, a friend of Nicole Brown Simpson who was murdered along with Simpson's ex-wife at her Los Angeles home in June 1994.
Simpson was acquitted of criminal charges in a sensational trial in 1995 but was found liable for the deaths two years later in a civil case.
Simpson said the book was composed by a ghost author, and that he reluctantly agreed to include a chapter containing a "night-of-the-crime" account as told by him only after the publishers agreed to clearly label it as hypothetical.
"Because I didn't do it. ... I will not justify the evidence they had...," he said. "We got to that chapter, and I said, 'Hey, I can't participate in that.'"
Simpson said he let the author ask him questions but otherwise played a passive role in describing the killings.
"I read what he wrote, and I saw all of these major holes, all of these impossible things," Simpson recalled.
"All of these other parts of the book I would correct, but I told myself, 'If I correct this, there are going to be people out there that say, 'Oh, look how accurate this is,' Right?"
Goldman's father, who originally opposed the book, now says he wants it published as he now views it as "an indictment of a wife-beater, of a murderer, written in his own words."
Simpson said he never thought the book would get published, and consented to it mostly because he needed the money.
The book was to have been published by Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But the book was shelved at the last minute. Murdoch apologized and all 400,000 copies were recalled and destroyed. |
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