If I Did It Read online

  O.J. Simpson

  United States

  If I Did It

  2006, EN

  If I Did It is a book by O.J. Simpson, in which he puts forth a hypothetical description of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Simpson was tried and acquitted of the murders in a criminal trial (People v. Simpson) but later found financially liable in a civil trial.

  Table of contents

  1: The Luckiest Guy in the World

  2: So Happy Together

  3: Period of Confusion

  4: The Two Nicoles

  5: Things Fall Apart

  6: The Night in Question

  7: The Interrogation

  8: The Fight of My Life

  1

  The Luckiest Guy in the World

  I’m going to tell you a story you’ve never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. It takes place on the night of June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murder of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night because I know the facts better than anyone. I know the players. I’ve seen the evidence. I’ve heard the theories. And, of course, I’ve read all the stories: That I did it. That I did it but I don’t know I did it. That I can no longer tell fact from fiction. That I wake up in the middle of the night, consumed by guilt, screaming.

  Man, they even had me wondering, What if I did it? Well, sit back, people. The things I know, and the things I believe, you can’t even imagine. And I’m going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know – that’s not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong.

  First, though, for those of you who don’t know me, my name is Orenthal James Simpson – ‘O.J.’ to most people. Many years ago, a lifetime ago, really, I was a pretty good football player. I set a few NCAA records, won the Heisman trophy, and was named the American Football Conference’s Most Valuable Player three times. When I retired from football, in 1978, I went to work for NBC, as a football analyst, and in the years ahead I was inducted into both the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

  I did a little acting, too, and for a number of years I was a pitchman for Hertz, the rental car people. Some of you might remember me from the television spots: I was always running late, pressed for time, leaping over fences and cars and piles of luggage to catch my flight. If you don’t see the irony in that, you will.

  All of that was a long time ago, though, a lifetime ago, as I said – all of that was before the fall. And as I sit here now, trying to tell my story, I’m having a tough time knowing where to begin. Still, I’ve heard it said that all stories are basically love stories, and my story is no exception. This is a love story, too. And, like a lot of love stories, it doesn’t have a happy ending.

  Let me take you back a few years, to the summer of 1977. I was married then, to my first wife, Marguerite, and we were about to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary, but it was not a good time for us. Marguerite and I had been on shaky ground for a number of years, and at one point had actually separated, but we reconciled for the sake of our two kids, Arnelle, then nine, and Jason, seven. A few months into it, though, while Marguerite and I were in the middle of dinner, she set down her fork and gave me a hard look.

  “What?” I asked.

  “This isn’t working,” she said. “And I’m five months pregnant.” I knew the marriage wasn’t working, but the news of the pregnancy was a real shock.

  We finished dinner in silence – we were at the house on Rockingham, in Brentwood – and after dinner went to bed, still silent. I lay there in the dark, thinking about the unborn baby. I knew Marguerite would never consider an abortion, and it made for a very strange situation: The youngest Simpson would be joining a family that had already fallen apart.

  In the morning, I told Marguerite that I was going to go to the mountains for a night or two, to think things through, and I packed a small bag and took off.

  On my way out of town, I stopped at a Beverly Hills jewelry store to pick out an anniversary present for her – we’d been married a decade earlier, on June 24, 1967 – then paid for it and left. As I made my way down the street, heading back to my car, I ran into a guy I knew, and we went off to have breakfast at The Daisy, a couple of blocks away. We found a quiet, corner table, and our young waitress came over. She was a stunner: Blonde, slim, and brighteyed, with a smile that could knock a man over.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Nicole.”

  “Nicole what?”

  “Nicole Brown.”

  “How come I’ve never seen you before?”

  “I just started here,” she said, laughing.

  She was from Dana Point, she told me, about an hour south of Los Angeles, and she’d come up for the summer to make a few bucks.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “I just turned eighteen last month,” she said. “On May 19.”

  “I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” I said.

  She smiled that bright smile again. “Me, too,” she said.

  After breakfast, I made the two-hour drive to Lake Arrowhead, and I spent the night up there thinking about my failing marriage, and trying not to think about the gorgeous young waitress who had served me breakfast. When I got back from the mountains, I went home, having resolved absolutely nothing, and a few nights later I went back to The Daisy. Nicole was there, and I took her aside. “I want you to know that I’m married, but that my marriage is ending,” I said. “So, you know – I’m still technically a ‘married man’. I don’t know if that bothers you, but if it does I’m just letting you know that things are going to change soon.”

  “Is that the truth?” she asked.

  “It’s the truth,” I said.

  Later that same night, I stopped by her apartment, on Wilshire Boulevard, and took her to a party. By the end of the evening, I was hooked.

  That was in June 1977. For the next month, I saw her almost every single day, until it was time to leave for football. I missed her, and I spoke to her constantly. I also spoke to Marguerite, of course, to see how the kids were doing, and to make sure the pregnancy was going okay, but I was pretty confused. I had a wife back home, with a third kid on the way, and I was already falling in love with another woman.

  I came home in time for the delivery of the baby, but split almost immediately after to rejoin the Buffalo Bills, the team I was playing with back then. When football season ended, I returned to L.A. and took a room at the Westwood Marquis, and I found myself pretty much living two lives – one with Marguerite, as an estranged husband and father of three, and the other with Nicole, my new love. I spent most of my time with Nicole, of course, at the hotel or at her little apartment, and from time to time – when I was called away on business – she’d hit the road with me.

  Eventualy, I met Nicole’s family – two sisters, Denise and Dominique, who were living in New York back then; a third sister, Tanya; and their mother, Juditha, who lived in Dana Point with her husband, Lou. I didn’t meet Lou till later, but that was only because the situation never presented itself. He knew about me, of course, and I don’t think he had any objections, and if he did nobody shared them with me.

  Nicole also met my kids, but I waited an entire year before I made the introductions. I was a little wary, for obvious reasons, but Nicole took to them as if they were her own. They liked her, too. Before long, the kids wouldn’t go anywhere with me unless Nicole was part of it.

  I’ve got to tell you: Life was pretty good. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.

  The following year, I moved out of the Westwood Marquis and into the Hollywood Hills home of my old friend Robert K
ardashian, and I asked Nicole to move in with me. I think everyone saw us as the perfect couple, including Nicole, but as the months turned into years she began to drop not-so-subtle hints about getting married. I kept trying to put her off, of course, because I’d failed at marriage once, and because I’d seen plenty of other couples fail, but Nicole kept pushing. This led to a number of heated arguments, and from time to time I was sure we were finished, but we survived – mostly because Nicole had faith in us. She believed that our relationship was special, and that we could beat the odds, and pretty soon she had me believing it, too. In 1979, my divorce from Marguerite became final, and Marguerite moved out of the Rockingham house. I was making arrangements to put the place on the market, but Nicole talked me out of it. “This is a beautiful place,” she said. “All it needs is a little fixing up.”

  She walked me through the house, room to room, telling me what we could change, and how it would look, and it was obvious that she had an eye for that kind of thing. She ended up redesigning and redecorating the whole place, top to bottom, and it turned out so well that I encouraged her to become a licensed interior decorator. Within a year, she was working professionally.

  She was happy. Sort of. The fact is, we still weren’t married, and I couldn’t go a week without hearing about it: Didn’t I love her? Didn’t we have a future? Couldn’t we have children now, while she was still young enough to enjoy them? These little discussions often ended in arguments, and I absolutely dreaded them. Nicole had a real temper on her, and I’d seen her get physical when she was angry, so sometimes I just left the house and waited for the storm to blow over.

  Finally, in 1983, we got engaged. We had a big party, and Nicole seemed very happy, but it didn’t last. Within a few weeks she was pushing me to set a date for the wedding. “I’m tired of being your girlfriend,” she kept saying. “I want to get married and have children. I’ve been helping you raise your own kids all this time, and I love them, but I think it’d be nice to have a few of our own.”

  The woman had a point, but I just wasn’t ready to commit, and it wore her down.

  One night in 1984, we were in the middle of another argument, and I went outside to get away from her. There was a tether ball hanging from one of the trees, and a baseball bat lying nearby, and I picked up the bat and took a few hard swings at the ball. Nicole came out of the house and watched me for a few moments, still angry, glaring, and I crossed into the driveway, sat on the hood of her convertible Mercedes, and glared right back. I still had the bat in my hand, and I remember flipping it into the air and accidentally hitting one of the rims.

  “You going to pay for that?” she snapped.

  “Yeah,” I snapped back, then took the bat and whacked the hood. “And I guess I’ll pay for that, too, since it’s my car – and since I pay for everything around here.”

  She shook her head, disgusted with me, and went into the house, and I wandered back into the yard and took a few more swings at the tether ball. It was crazy. It seemed all we did lately was argue. People say a lot of marriages get into trouble at the sevenyear mark, and we weren’t married, but we’d been together seven years, and maybe that was the problem.

  As I was trying to make sense of this, a Westec patrol car pulled up to the gate. Nicole came out of the house to meet it, and I realized it wasn’t there by accident. The guy got out of the patrol car and addressed us from beyond the gate. “We folks having a problem here?”

  “He just hit my car,” Nicole said. She turned to look at me, still glaring, her arms folded across her chest.

  “You want to file a complaint?”

  Nicole was still staring at me, but I could see she was feeling a little foolish.

  “Ma’am?”

  She turned to face the guy and apologized for summoning him, and he got back into his patrol car and left. Nicole looked at me again. I smiled and she smiled. A few weeks later, we set a date for the marriage.

  We got married on February 2, 1985, right there at the Rockingham house. We had a private ceremony in the late afternoon, with close friends and family, and followed it up with a seven-course dinner for three hundred people. We had put a big tent over the tennis court, and hired a band, and people danced into the morning hours. Just before dawn, we had a second sitdown meal, kind of breakfast-themed. We didn’t think there’d be more than a hundred people left at the party, but most everyone was having such a good time that they had refused to go home.

  Nicole and I went to bed long after the sun came up. We were happy. Maybe marriage is just a piece of paper, but it carries a lot of weight.

  A few days later, we flew down to Manzanilla, Mexico, for our honeymoon. We stayed in a beautiful place called Las Hadas and made love three times a day. That’s why we were there, right? To give Nicole a family of her own.

  Six weeks after we got back to L.A., Nicole found out that she was pregnant. She was so happy she was glowing – she looked lit up from inside. She read just about every book ever written on pregnancy and motherhood, then went back and reread the ones she liked, underlining the parts she found most interesting. I don’t remember her being sick once, or even feeling sick, and she was never even in a bad mood, which was kind of weird, given all the cliches about raging hormones and stuff. But I wasn’t complaining.

  Throughout the entire pregnancy, the only big issue – for her, not for me – was food. She became obsessed about her weight, and when her friends were around she was very vocal about the subject. “A woman doesn’t need to gain more than twenty-four pounds in the course of the nine months,” she’d say, repeating it tirelessly. I guess she thought she was a big pregnancy expert or something, having read all those books, but things didn’t turn out exactly as she’d planned. She gained twice that, if not more, and pretty soon decided to stop weighing herself altogether. That was a relief, to be honest. I had no problem with the weight. My kid was in there. I thought my kid deserved a nice big home.

  On October 17, we were in the hospital for the birth of our first child, Sydney Brooke. Nicole was over the moon. She cried when we took her home, but I guess all new mothers cry. I don’t know if it’s from being happy or from being terrified; I figure it’s probably a combination of the two.

  Nicole had nothing to be afraid of, though. Right from the start, she was a terrific mother, and in fact she was a little too terrific. She wouldn’t let anyone near Sydney. Not the housekeeper. Not her mother. Not even me at times. This was her baby, and her baby needed her and only her, and nothing anyone could say or do was going to change her mind. Only Nicole knew how to feed her baby. Only Nicole could bathe her. Only Nicole knew how to swaddle that little girl and hold her just right against her shoulder.

  It got to be a pain in the ass, frankly. I couldn’t get her to leave the house.

  “Why don’t you let your mother take care of her for one night?” I’d say. “She’s been volunteering from the day we got back from the hospital.”

  “No,” she’d say. “Sydney needs me.”

  It took months to get Nicole out of the house. We had gone from hitting all the best places in town and jetting around the world to ordering in every night. And the weird part is, I kind of liked it. At first, anyway. Then I started getting antsy, and then food became an issue again. Nicole was having a tough time losing the weight she’d gained during the pregnancy, and it was making her crazy. She would get out of the shower, look at herself in the mirror, and burst into tears.

  “So don’t look in the mirror,” I’d say.

  “That’s not what I need to hear!” she’d holler.

  “You know what? I’m sorry I said anything. But you’re the one that’s having a problem with your weight, not me.”

  It’s funny, because suddenly I’m remembering what Nicole’s mother told me on the very day we first met: “Don’t let Nicole gain weight,” she said. “She’s miserable when she gains weight.”

  Eventually, most of the weight came off, and she mellowed out. And eventually she
realized that Sydney could survive a night or two without her, and things slowly got back to normal. No, that’s wrong – they were better than normal. Motherhood had changed Nicole in wonderful ways. She was happier than she’d ever been, as if she’d found her place in the world, and every day she was more in love with Sydney. I think she also loved me a little more, too. After all, we’d created this little girl together. We were becoming a family.

  On August 6, 1988, our son, Justin Ryan, came along. When we took him home, I looked at my little family – my second family – and I felt strangely complete. I don’t know how else to put it. All I know is that whenever I looked at them – Nicole, Sydney and Justin – I felt that I understood what life was all about.

  I think we had pretty close to a storybook marriage. We had a few arguments, sure, like most couples, hut they never got out of hand. After Justin was born, though, Nicole started getting physical with me. She had that temper on her, as I said, and if something set her off she tended to come at me, fists and feet flying. Mostly I’d just try to get out of her way, but sometimes I had to hold her down till she got herself under control. So, yeah – we argued. And we could get pushy about it. And sometimes the arguments ended with Nicole in tears. But more often than not they ended in laughter. It was crazy: I can’t count the number of times she’d turn to me in the middle of a fight, pausing to catch her breath, and say, “O.J., what the hell were we arguing about, anyway?”

  Years later, during the trial, the prosecution tried to paint a picture of me as a violent, abusive husband. They said they’d found a safe-deposit box belonging to Nicole, and that it contained numerous handwritten allegations of abuse dating back to 1977. In the notes, Nicole reportedly said all sorts of ugly things about me: That I constantly told her she was fat; that when she got pregnant with Justin I said I didn’t want another kid; that I once locked her in our wine closet during an argument. I don’t know what all else I did, but the list was endless, and all of it was fiction. And if it’s true that those handwritten notes were from Nicole, and that they really were found in her safe-deposit box, and that she really was making those allegations, well – I still say it was fiction, still maintain that these incidents existed only in Nicole’s own mind. I honestly can’t make any sense of it. I’ve tried, though. At one point I wondered if she started working on those notes when the marriage began to go south. Maybe she thought she could use them against me if it ever came to divorce, which makes me wonder: Why didn’t she use them? I don’t know what she was thinking, frankly, but if any of those things happened I wasn’t around when they did. And, yeah, I know: It sounds cruel here, on the page, with Nicole gone and everything, unable to defend herself, but I said I would tell the truth, and that’s what I intend to do.