“I received a phone call from an attorney who said that O.J. [Simpson] was ready to confess,” Judith Regan, the producer and publisher of his book If I Did It, said in the upcoming special, O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession?. “And, actually, I thought it was kind of a scam, and didn’t believe him, and I thought that this guy was a lunatic. But I took his number and said I’d call him back.” Judith claims that O.J. was ready to spill the tea over his role in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. However, before ReganBooks could publish a single word, he had one condition.
“He didn’t want to call the book, I Did It,” Judith said. “He wanted to put an If in front of it so he would have deniability with his children. He couldn’t face his children and he couldn’t tell them that he had done it. And that was the way it was portrayed to me. That was his only condition.” To no one’s surprise, OJ publishing a book called If I Did It caused quite a backlash, and the book was actually cancelled after it was announced in November 2006. Judith would be fired from HaperCollins, the parent company of ReganBooks, after this controversy. Plus, her interview — which was supposed to air 12 years ago — was shelved.
By June 2007, copies had leaked online. Two months later, in August 2007, a Florida bankruptcy court awarded the rights to the book to the Goldman family. In 1997, a judge awarded Ron’s relatives $33.5 million in a wrongful death lawsuit filed against O.J., so the profits from the sale of the book would help satisfy this debt. The family retitled the book if I Did It: Confessions Of The Killer, and this version was published through Beaufort Books.
FOX will air Judith’s interview with OJ in O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession? on March 11 at 8-10 PM, with limited interruptions. In addition to her, the panel will include Simpson murder case prosecutor Christopher Darden, Nicole Brown Simpson family rep Eve Shakti Chen, anti-domestic violence advocate Rita Smith and retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente, per Deadline. Soledad O’Brien hosts the two-hour program. They will weigh in on this “wide-ranging, no-holds-bared interview with Judith” from 2006, where he gave his hypothetical account of what may have gone down that night in 1994. However, according to Judith, it’s not entirely hypothetical.