With American Crime Story ready to bring O.J. Simpson back into the mind of America, it’s interesting to look back at the Back in 2006, O.J. Simpson was still breathing free air and attempting to sell a new book to the public. The title was If I Did It and it was criticized almost immediately after its official announcement. Many felt that this was Simpson attempting to profit off of murders, especially the Brown and Goldman families. The Goldmans had taken Simpson to court and won a civil case that found him liable for the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown.
It is essentially a huge mess, but that’s the O.J. Simpson story. A great start that snowballed into a huge mess. And he seems to do what he can to make it worse, like the 2007 appearance on Market News First above. As The Washington Post reported at the time, Simpson was out to get his voice back. His book deal had been canceled and handed over to the Goldmans and the book had been edited. So this was apparently his chance. And it was a disaster:
Simpson used much of Tuesday’s interview broadcast on business news Web site Market News First to reiterate that he maintained many fans and supporters, a fact he accused the media of obscuring.
But he found little support from members of the call-in audience, whose derisive phoned-in questions he avoided answering at times.
One caller asked the former football player if he thought it was “a bigger feat to break 2,000 yards in one season or slice two necks in one night.”
Simpson seemed not to hear the question, which interviewer Delaney reinterpreted for him as, “What was your biggest accomplishment, basically, in football?”
And it just got worse from there. One of the funnier bits from the Washington Post article is how awkward the interview itself went, with silences and an almost amateur production:
On several occasions, Simpson and Delaney sat silent. At another point, he called toward an off-camera section of the studio, “Hey, please close that door, guys.”
It certainly wasn’t his weirdest post-murder media appearance. In a 1998 interview with Ruby Max for BBC television, Simpson came off as someone who really wanted everybody to truly believe he wasn’t guilty while still acting as guilty as possible. This gif captures every awkward moment of the interview in just one moment:
As an extra treat, here is a series of excerpts from the If I Did It audiobook set to the O.J. Simpson clips and shots from the television movie about the murders. Remember that this is a book that Simpson tried to publish.
(Via The Washington Post)
