Someone leaked parts of the transcript of O.J.’s controversial “If I Did It” interview with his would-be publisher, Judith Reagan, to The NY Times. The interview was never aired after outrage from the victims’ families and the public forced Fox to scrap it. OJ’s book was similarly canned, and Reagan was fired from her job at Harper Collins.
All of the details O.J. gave in the interview and book were laughably called “hypothetical” in a transparent attempt to maintain his innocence. O.J. received a hefty advance for the never-published book that would have seen him profit on “hypothetical” murder. The exact amount of the advance was not confirmed, although speculation is that it was around $1 million. O.J. said that he spent his book advance on bills, but a federal judge froze the money, saying it was owed to the victim’s families as part of a $33.5 million civil lawsuit they won against him. Neither his ex-wife Nicole Brown’s family or the family of her murdered friend Ronald Goldman has seen a dime.
In the transcript obtained by The NY Times, O.J. says there are details of the uh, murders by some random other person that he can’t remember. He does say that if he did do it, there was an accomplice that he calls Charlie. The guy came to him that night to tell him dirt about his ex-wife Nicole, probably that she was sleeping around, and he got all worked up and decided to confront her.
Charlie came with him to the scene, where Goldman happened to be by sheer bad luck and good samaritanship for returning Nicole’s sunglasses. Goldman tried to do karate on O.J. after Nicole “fell and hurt herself,” most likely after O.J. smacked her, and then O.J. used the knife that this guy Charlie brought to him from the car at the opportune moment.
After the deed was done, O.J. asked “Charlie” to get rid of the evidence for him:
Mr. Simpson introduces a new character to the well-known cast: a man identified only as Charlie, someone he had recently met and befriended, and who, in the hypothetical accounts, served as an unwilling accomplice to the murders.
Mr. Simpson says in the interview that Charlie came to his house that night and told him of troubling aspects of Ms. Simpson’s personal life, things Mr. Simpson said “had to stop.” The two drove to Ms. Simpson’s nearby home. He says that he always kept a ski hat in his car for chilly mornings on the golf course, along with a knife to deal with “crazies.” Mr. Simpson says he left the knife in the car, with Charlie.
As Mr. Simpson approached his ex-wife’s door, Mr. Goldman arrived, the two began exchanging angry words, and Ms. Simpson came out and joined the argument, Mr. Simpson says. After she “fell,” Mr. Goldman squared off against Mr. Simpson in a karate stance. Then Charlie showed up with the knife.
Mr. Simpson says he remembered grabbing the knife from Charlie. He says he then blacked out. His next memory is being covered in “blood and stuff.”
Asked by Ms. Regan to describe the bloody scene in greater detail, he at one point suggests that viewers read the book because he found it too difficult to discuss. Moments later, he speaks about it in a way that suggests he holds no more knowledge of the crime scene than anyone else who had watched the televised trials…
The transcript does not contain any remarks by Mr. Simpson about what happened to the bloody clothes or the knife he described in the interview. But in the manuscript Mr. Simpson wrote that he gave a bundle to Charlie with explicit instructions to “make sure it disappears … forever.”
At first I thought, “Oh ‘Charlie’ is Kato Kaelin,” but now I’m pretty sure he’s not. The reason I assumed that is because he’s the only guy I know connected to the case who was a friend of O.J. and Nicole and who saw O.J. that night.
O.J. said that the man who came to him with the news about Nicole was a “recent” friend, though. Nicole and Ron Goldman were murdered in June, 1994. Kaelin moved into the guest house at then-Nicole and O.J.’s mansion in mid January 1993, according to his testimony at Simpson’s trial. He ended up moving to the guest house behind O.J.’s Rockingham estate when Nicole and O.J. sold their place. He wasn’t a “recent” friend, and since Nicole is the one he was friends with first and who invited him to stay, it doesn’t seem like he would betray her by talking smack to O.J.
TMZ had a recent story that Kaelin said “What do you mean if?” when asked what he thought about O.J.’s book “If I did it.” There’s a book about Kaelin by a guy who interviewed him extensively and claims he knew how crazy jealous O.J. was, which does not jibe with his cleaned-up testimony at O.J.’s trial. The author says Kaelin tried to spare O.J. and be likeable on the witness stand, and didn’t talk about how whacked O.J. was. Kaelin denied O.J. was jealous in his cross examination, and basically said that O.J. didn’t talk about Nicole to him, wasn’t any different on the night of the murders, and that the only thing he heard was three “thumps” that night that he mistook at first for an earthquake, but was probably just O.J. turning on the air conditioning.
Regardless I don’t think Kato was the one at the scene, so who was there? Of course O.J., I mean the other murderer O.J. is channeling for his aborted book, is responsible, not the accomplice. That accomplice should be at least tried since O.J. already bought his way out of a life sentence.
Who was O.J.’s recent friend at the time who could have handed him the knife and disposed of it afterwards? They have stuff like this all the time on that “Cold Case” show. You can’t try a person twice for the same crime, but you can find the other person that’s responsible and bring them to justice.
Of course there might not have been another person there, and O.J. could be making Charlie up to make it seem like he was driven to double murder by forces beyond his control.
Update: Maybe O.J. isn’t clever enough to make up a person who wasn’t there. According to the evidence at his trial, the defense “noted that the genetic material of an unknown person was found in the steering wheel blood,” which they used as part of their conspiracy theory that O.J. was framed. There was also said to be “unexplained [foot] imprints” at the scene that didn’t match O.J.’s size 12 Bruno Maglis.
Who could this other guy have been that was with O.J.? Well, wasn’t his friend, fellow ex football player Al Cowlings, the one who drove him on that weird low speed chase in the Bronco that was all over television? Cowlings played high school football with O.J., though, so it wasn’t like he was a recent friend.
There was a guy called Christian Reichardt who testified on O.J.’s behalf that he spoke to him on the phone on the night of the murders and that he was calm and relaxed. Reichardt was the boyfriend of Nicole’s best friend Faye Resnick, and according to a Fox News article he was helping wean O.J. off steroids. (Steroid rage may have caused O.J. to freak out and murder his ex and her maybe-boyfriend.) Given that his name also starts with a “Ch,” it’s not so much of a stretch to assume that he could have been “Charlie.”
