The book tour was possibly the strangest ever launched: A murder victim’s family promoting a work written by the acquitted suspect about how he would have done the killing — you know, if he’d wanted to.
But truth was always stranger than fiction for those captured in OJ Simpson’s dark, shadowy orbit.
And Ron Goldman’s family learned that the hard way 17 years ago, when they traveled to London to push a book that supposedly contained OJ’s version of what happened that fateful night of June 12, 1994, according to The Guardian.
Simpson — whose family announced that he died Wednesday of cancer at the age of 76 — had been banned in 2006 from publishing the eyebrow-raising book, in which he laid out how he — hypothetically — would have murdered ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and Goldman, 25, in one of the most sensational killings of the last century.
But Goldman’s family won the right to print the bizarre “confession,” which Simpson wrote to earn cash for his two kids by Nicole, The Guardian said.
Public outrage over the plot had torpedoed the book before it could land.
But Goldman’s father, Fred, and his sister, Kim, worried that another publisher would pick up OJ’s account of the gruesome stabbings in Brentwood, California.
So they decided to do something about it, Fred told The Guardian.
“By that stage, we had read the manuscript and realized it wasn’t the ‘how-to’ book that we feared — but a confession,” Kim added.
By that time, the former Buffalo Bills running back had already lost a civil suit that found him liable for willfully and wrongfully causing the pair’s deaths.
But he’d never paid the $33.5 million that he owed to the victims’ families.
So the Goldmans moved to seize his book deal like it was any other asset, The Guardian said.
“The killer moved to Florida to avoid paying the money he owed us,” Kim told the outlet at the time, referring to OJ.
“Florida is very friendly to debtors: his house is safeguarded from our claims, as are his pensions,” she continued. “He declared himself bankrupt to avoid paying us. We couldn’t get any money from him — not that we wanted the money for ourselves, you understand, we just wanted him to suffer — until the prospect of us buying up the rights to his book became a possibility.”
In June 2007, a bankruptcy court gave the copyright to the Goldmans so Simpson couldn’t profit from it, the outlet said.
“Ron Goldman will own Simpson’s name, likeness, signature and story and will hawk it to satisfy this terrible judgment,” David Cook, the family lawyer, said after the ruling. “Justice has arrived in Miami.”
Kim echoed similar thoughts in the book’s preface, which she wrote.
“He had worked hard on this book, and thought he would retire off of it, and we took it right out from under him,” she wrote. “He had escaped our reach for nearly 11 years, but not this time.”
Simpson’s name was stricken from the piece he authored, replaced by a credit to the Goldman family, The Guardian said.
And they changed the look of the book’s title.
It had originally been named, “If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened.” But the Goldmans faded the word “if” to make it barely legible, while the words “I did it” were printed in bright pink, the outlet added.
They also tacked on a subtitle: “Why OJ Simpson’s Confession Must Not Remain a Secret.”
The Goldmans said they weren’t going to profit from the book, which goes into creepily detailed accounts of what “might” have led up to the pair’s savage killing.
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“He wrote it as a cynical exercise to make money,” Fred told the outlet. “We’re publishing it to turn his words against him, to show to anybody who’s sitting on the fence about this case that he was responsible for the murder of Ron and Nicole.”
Ironically, 10% of the sales were slated to go to OJ to help lessen his bankruptcy burden — Kim said it was a tenet of the agreement.
The remaining proceeds were to go to charity — including foundations set up in both victims’ names that were meant to help victims of domestic violence.
“I do personally feel that I would let Ron down if I didn’t pursue this,” his dad told The Guardian.
“Ron deserved justice, and he deserved to live. We couldn’t get justice in the criminal trial, so this is the best we can do.”