As the Worm Turns

So the OJ book, If I Did It, will hit the shelves after all. Amazing.

Here's how it happened. Mr Goldman quickly overcame the disgust he expressed publicly last year and realised that the unpublished manuscript of If I Did It was an asset he could legitimately chase as part of Simpson's unpaid legal settlement. In other words, he decided the publicity the book would give Simpson might be less objectionable if the profits went into his pocket, rather than Simpson's. Mr Goldman went to a bankruptcy court to have the rights signed over to him and, in August, won his case. The new edition of If I Did It differs from the original in several key respects. Its authorship is attributed to "the Goldman family" instead of OJ Simpson and it includes new material by members of the Goldman family and the society crime writer, Dominick Dunne. The cover cleverly conceals the word "If" to the point of near-invisibility so, on first glance, the book appears to be called I Did It. The new subtitle, Confessions Of The Killer, rams home the point that Simpson is no longer toying with the idea of having killed his estranged wife and her lover. Rather, he really is confessing to the crime.

The whole thing is still pretty sick, but as a story of chutzpah being met with more chutzpah, Fred Goldman's style is pretty unique. An if a famous football player killed my son and walked, who am I to say that, given the chance, I wouldn't hijack his dumb book project?