If you haven't decided what to buy for Mother's Day yet, try stalling for a while – sooner or later you'll be able to buy her a copy of If I Did It, Here's How It Happened, where OJ Simpson graphically imagines the murders of his ex-wife and her chum.
"But wait," you're now saying to yourself, "all the copies of If I Did It, Here's How It Happened by OJ Simpson got pulped because the subject disgusted even Rupert Murdoch, right?" Well, yes, you're sort of right. But now a judge has chosen to auction the rights to If I Did It, Here's How It Happened and give all the money to the father of the man that OJ Simpson describes murdering in the book. It's a win-win situation for everyone. Except for OJ Simpson – who'll get the notoriety for the book but none of the money; the Goldman family – who are now essentially profiteering from the murder of their son; and Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman; – who are about to have their memories desecrated all over again. But, yeah, it's totally a win-win for everyone else.
The idea of If I Did It, Here's How It Happened by OJ Simpson is so fiendishly brilliant that we literally can't read anything that isn't If I Did It, Here's How It Happened by OJ Simpson any more. We tried to read some Tolstoy the other day and ended up angrily setting the book on fire and throwing it in a lake just because it wasn't about how OJ Simpson imagines that he'd have murdered his ex-wife and her friend if he'd have got the chance to do it (which he didn't, honest). But the good news is that now it looks like we'll be able to finally get our hands on a copy of If I Did It, Here's How It Happened by OJ Simpson.
If I Did It, Here's How It Happened had a rocky conception – some people actually thought that the idea of a man who'd been accused of murder writing a book about the imaginary murders of the people he'd stood trial for murdering was in bad taste, forcing Rupert Murdoch to destroy all the books and fire the woman who came up with the idea. And OJ Simpson didn't do too well out of If I Did It, Here's How It Happened, either; after admitting that his murder book was for nothing more than blood money, OJ Simpson then found himself getting sued by Fred Goldman – the father of murdered Ron Goldman, who was outraged that OJ Simpson was planning to make money from the death of his son, especially since OJ Simpson was found to be responsible for the murders in a civil trial and ordered to pay Fred Goldman $33,500,000. Keeping up?
Well, Fred Goldman seems to be a whole lot less outraged about If I Did It, Here's How It Happened now that a judge has decided that he's the one who's going to get rich from it, as Reuters reports:
A judge ordered on Tuesday that rights to O.J. Simpson's aborted book, "If I Did It," be sold at auction to help satisfy a civil judgment against the former football star — meaning the book could find its way into stores… Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Gerald Rosenberg's decision comes at the request of Ron Goldman's father, Fred Goldman, who expressed outrage at the original publication of "If I Did It" and now finds himself putting the manuscript back into circulation. "The Goldmans were horrified as to the content, but the real horror was that Simpson was profiting," Goldman's lawyer, David Cook, said. "O.J. is now on the block. On the right hand we get to sell the book, and on the left we get the money."
The OJ Simpson murder-book auction could take place sometime within the next month, it's been reported, and the assembled bidding newspaper, magazine and book publishers must be overjoyed that all the money raised in the sale of If I Did It, Here's How It Happened will be going to straight to Fred Goldman's 'This Won't Get My Son Back But – Hey – Now I've Got A Speedboat' fund.
On the other hand, though, buying the rights to If I Did It, Here's How It Happened by OJ Simpson does pose a risk to potential publishers – after all, who'd actually want to read that? Not because of taste issues or anything, you understand – but thanks to the leaked If I Did It chapter, everyone already knows how it would have happened if OJ Simpson did it. It would have happened with knives. Again, that's knives.
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