How I Did It: Judith Regan Remembers the Day O.J. Simpson (Almost) Confessed

No one ever really gets away with murder.

If O.J. Simpson had played football in the ’60s for Bay Shore High School and taken Harold Anderson’s humanities class, he would have known this. 

Mr. Anderson would have lovingly encouraged O.J. to play less football and read more Shakespeare, which may have led to a better outcome for O.J. in the long run. O.J. could run fast, but Shakespeare and Mr. Anderson would have made it crystal clear to him that no matter how fast you run, you can’t hide, because there are ghosts and consequences. I am thinking, in particular, of that popular out, damn spot couple who had it all, Mr. and Mrs. Lady Macbeth. 

Ghosts and consequences became amply apparent to me on that fall day in 2006, when O.J. came to confess.

We all have our own styles of confession. When I was a very nice young Catholic girl who obeyed and did not commit sins, I was forced to sit in a booth and whisper my sins to a priest behind a screen. This was called going to confession. At the age of 8, I did not have much to say, so I made up elaborate sins for the priest, which I think he considered a sin because he gave me a mile-long list of prayers to say as penance. Now, I love to confess and confess to everyone all day long. In fact, this is my confession.

I am not sure O.J. — one who loved not wisely and not well — ever had to confess before. But he was there, on that fall day in 2006, in this Miami warehouse, to do so. Sorta. Kinda.

We were in Miami to tape a four-hour, two-night TV special for Fox. Five cameras were set up around two closely placed chairs, and the entire crew was ready to go.

O.J. was nervous and having second thoughts when I first saw him in his dressing room. And he was sweating. A lot. He wanted to do the interview. Then he didn’t. He paced around a bit. Then he announced that he wanted to leave. Like most men, and maybe more women, at least in romance novels, O.J. wanted to be wanted. He liked playing games, and he wanted me to dance the jig to make him stay. Playing this little game was nerve-racking but no biggie.

I told him he looked amazing, which narcissists fall for 100 percent of the time, and we volleyed for a bit. Ping-pong. Lite stuff. Again, no biggie. Finally, I stated with a smile: Why don’t you just come out, and we’ll sit in the chairs and talk about your incredible, amazing, awe-inspiring career as a football player. After that, leave. Or stay. Whatever you want. Let’s just go and see what happens. Ah, life!

That did the trick. 

(Let’s Just Go and See What Happens is the opening number in my musical adaptation of these events.)

O.J.’s interview was the first time he had agreed to talk about the night of the murders on camera. The pressure was on. On top of all that, I had a fever and a bad case of bronchitis that had turned into pneumonia. My mother spent years telling me that if she hadn’t been so tough on me, I never would have turned out the way I did. In this instance, she was correct, as I was deeply focused on making this happen. Or else. Or else, what? I do not know.

All I knew was that I could not have him walk out. I wasn’t desperate, though. I was just carefully considering my every move. One misstep and bam! You’re dead.

People often ask me, how did you land O.J. in the first place? Simple. I answered the phone. 

Months before, a lawyer claiming to represent O.J. called out of the blue and said, “O.J. is ready to confess … under one condition.”

I was running ReganBooks, a publishing company I’d sold to HarperCollins, where I’d published a litany of best-sellers, such as the soon-to-be-a-major motion picture Wicked, by Gregory Maguire; I Know This Much Is True, by Wally Lamb; and other notables including Howard Stern, Beyoncé, Michael Moore, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jenna Jameson. 

The lawyer told me that O.J. would agree to reveal his story in book form, but only if the book was titled If I Did It. That was O.J.’s one condition. There had to be an “If” in front of “I Did It.” Simpson would explain what he did, what happened, if he had done it. The “If” was a must, said the lawyer, so O.J. could have deniability with his children.

What?

“How could he ever admit to such a thing?” the attorney said. “He could never face them and say, ‘I did it! I killed your mother.’ ” But if he framed his story with an “If” — if he relied on that simple two-letter word — then he could tell us that he did it. 

Huh?

This was the only way he’d confess. The only way!

“What father,” I ventured to ask, “would write a book and then go public to recount a tale of murdering the mother of his children … to protect his children?” 

Obviously, it made no sense. It was inane, profoundly twisted and insane. 

I told him I would think about it and get back to him, profoundly twisted and insane being my childhood norm.

Enter Rupert Murdoch, known throughout the land — or at least to a professor I know who described him to me just yesterday as “the perpetrator of evil on a galactic scale, wreaking havoc on the world, destroying the lives of an unaccountable number of people.” (My response: “I am not sure how that happened since he mumbles in a very thick Aussie accent and is hard to understand.”)

After the weird phone call from O.J.’s lawyer, I explained the whole enchilada over dinner with the boss of bosses, whose empire included Fox News, HarperCollins and my imprint ReganBooks. We were joined that evening by Tom Perkins, the now-deceased (RIP!) billionaire, Kleiner Perkins partner, News Corporation board member and author of the often-unread Sex and the Single Zillionaire; and Tom’s ex-wife, the very charming romance author Danielle Steele. 

Are you impressed that a girl from humble origins was at this table? I was.

It was the night of Tom Perkins’ book party. Tom was convinced that he could write a best-selling romance novel, which, incidentally, he could not and did not. But he wanted to prove he could to his ex-wife, the most successful romance author in the history of the world. (Shakespeare, included, probably.)

At dinner, I told Murdoch it was a twisted idea to even consider publishing such a book. It was completely crazy. But of course, we should do it.

“This might be the only way to get O.J. in a chair,” I said, “talking about what happened on the night of the murders. A skilled interviewer could get him to expose the truth, no matter how he tells the story. On camera!”

Murdoch, born with a nose for a great story and a superhuman business gut, unequivocally and politely (he has great manners) said yes. Green light!

The lawyers hammered out the deal. The proceeds from the book would go to a trust for Simpson’s two children. I chose ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves to work with O.J. As it happens, Pablo was also Nicole [Brown Simpson]’s neighbor who testified at Simpson’s trial about hearing the “plaintive wail” of Nicole’s dog shortly after the murders occurred. That didn’t seem to bother O.J., who was well aware that Pablo was well aware. As part of his contract, O.J. agreed to do one major TV interview — I wanted his confession on videotape so he could not deny it.

We kept the project under wraps but shared the manuscript in an ironclad confidentiality agreement with Barbara Walters. She was champing at the bit to do the interview. Champing! ABC said yes, and she was ready to go. Every major journalist wanted that scoop, but a few were happy to badmouth it when they didn’t get it, envy being one of the key motivating features of bad characters in great literature. 

The deal with Walters was done, but then, boom, out of the blue, she canceled and disappeared without a trace. 

I remember the first time I had lunch with Barbara. Babs. I loved her. She was funny, personable and, I believed, truly empathetic. I thought she was the shit. Then she told me about her adopted, estranged daughter. “I was busy traveling all the time and very career-oriented, and back then, we just didn’t know that you had to spend time with your children. We just didn’t know.”

You know that emoji with the huge eyes staring out? Imagine that now.

Anyway, Fox stepped in, desperately needing something big for sweeps, and days later, instead of Babs, I found myself sitting in this warehouse in Florida with very lovely hair and makeup done, my stiletto heels pointed toward Him, that top-notch five-camera crew encircling us. Everyone in the room had signed confidentiality agreements. 

Other than the Fox executives and a handful of the tech crew, no one else on the set knew who “The Big Get” was. Many were hoping that Britney Spears, who was starting to fall apart at that time, would come waltzing in. People get much higher ratings when they fall apart. Instead, in sauntered O.J., dressed in a blazer and a soft baby-blue golf shirt. He was nervous but jovial. The room was a different story. Cut to: Sudden mood shift. Immediate, immeasurable, deadly silence. 

I sat inches from O.J., the interview began, and I quickly realized that all I had to do was remain still, look into his eyes and listen without judgment or expression. Sure, I was judging him, but from his point of view, I was interested, intrigued and even captivated by him.

A while into the interview, after casually chatting about football, he wanted to take a break. He leaned toward me and quietly said, “When you came here today, you didn’t think you’d like me, but I changed your mind, didn’t I?”

He thought I liked him! He thought he was winning me over! 

He started talking in hypothetical terms, but as time went by, he felt more and more that he had charmed me and I understood him. Then, it was no longer if he did it. It was, I do remember this, and I did do that. 

Mainly, he just wanted to explain. That was O.J.’s big thing. Mansplaining. He thought that if he could explain what she did to him, how she tormented him, then I would understand. Everyone would understand. It was all about him. He was the real victim. It was Nicole who did him wrong. 

I sorted through the lexicon of Shakespearean villains in my brain to find anything that resembled this kind of character. Iago, Macbeth, Richard III, Claudius, Edmund, Shylock. Nope.

O.J. and Nicole were divorced. Nicole was living her life, having escaped her ex’s constant emotional ax, coupled with his ginormous fists. She was dating. She was finding peace. She was doing well without him. O.J. cheated in the marriage. He beat, tormented and terrorized her. In front of the children. The children he claimed to want to protect. 

The night of the murders, June 12, 1994, terrorizing her was his plan. He had done it before. He enjoyed just going over there to scare her, he explained, as if peering through her windows in the dark with a knife was a perfectly normal thing. 

He had just flown home from New York to attend his daughter Sydney’s dance recital. He’d gone home angry after the recital, he said, because someone there had told him that Nicole was throwing sex- and drug-fueled parties at her home. Now, after trying to let off a little steam by chipping golf balls, he was going over to Nicole’s South Bundy Drive home in Brentwood to set her straight. 

He had to set her straight because, look at how she dressed at the recital! How dare she! 

“It was almost like she was trying to be a teenager again,” he said, “dating all these much younger guys … wearing the shortest, tightest thing she was wearing … sometimes you think something is inappropriate.”

And no, he wasn’t going to dinner with the family because he had not even been invited. 

What kind of a woman would leave her terrifying, violent ex off that invite list! The nerve!

He heard she was living a fast life. 

He had to do something about it.

He was concerned for his children!

His children, who had endured and witnessed his violence and terrifying temper. 

His children, who were in the house the night he was going over there to set their mother straight, to scare her, to, in the end, nearly cut her head off. Those children? He was concerned for them?

I read his every move as he sat a foot from my pointed stiletto, and he read me. If I encroached on his frightening descriptions by judging them for a moment with the slight narrowing of my eyes or the subtle cock of my head, he would know. He’d slow down and become more aware of what he was saying. He could read every square inch of my face and body language, so I did what I trained myself to do when my violent mother went nuts.

I didn’t flinch.

I am the queen of not flinching. Thanks, Mom.

When I didn’t flinch, he just spilled.

“I grabbed the knife — I do remember that.”

He was stone-cold when he remembered the knife. He remembered grabbing that knife. Yes, he did!  

“As things got heated, I just remember Nicole fell and hurt herself, and this guy (Ron Goldman) kind of got into a karate thing. And I said, ‘Well, you think you can kick my ass?’ And I remember I grabbed the knife. … And to be honest, after that, I don’t remember, except I’m standing there and there’s all kind of stuff around and …”

“What kind of stuff?” I asked.

“Blood,” he said. He had never seen so much blood in his life.

“I don’t think any two people could be murdered the way they were without everybody being covered in blood,” he went on.

“It was horrible — absolutely horrible.”

When he said it was “horrible, absolutely horrible,” he was telling the truth. Ironically, it was the only moment in the interview that he acknowledged the extent of the heartbreaking horror.

Everyone in the room was mortified by his frightening characterizations, his bizarre, inappropriate laugh, and the description of himself as the victim in every story of him battering and humiliating her. Many of us could not believe what we were hearing. 

This was in 2006, when horrifying was still shocking.

Sure, he was appalled that people thought of him as a murderer, but what really irked him is that they thought of him as a batterer! 

Over the course of the five-hour interview, O.J. did not show one speck of remorse, regard or empathy for the mother of the children he claimed to want to protect. Nor did he care one bit that he had murdered an innocent young man who was doing a kind deed by returning a pair of glasses.

In those five hours, he continuously blamed Nicole for ruining his life. He took her life, and by taking it, his life was ruined. Therefore, it was all her fault. 

I asked him if he had any thoughts when he stood beside Nicole’s casket at the funeral, and this is what he said: “If you’re angry with a person, upon their death — when they die — it’s not like … anger disappears, right?”

When the interview was over, very little was said in that room. Many of us were shell-shocked into silence.

Little did I know, as I walked out of the interview, that I was about to get my own battering. The promos that were being cut while I was doing the interview had been sent to Fox News, and its fearless leader, Commandant Roger Ailes, was whipping up a controversy against me. He was busy double-double toil and trouble stirring the brew with his crew, as I had not dutifully obeyed his every wish and command (and was under zero obligation to). I had once refused the sorority rush to join The Fox News Twirlers After School Program, so for that and my refusal to practice his favorite Dark Arts Darts Game in the basement of the Fox News Palace, he chose to put a hit on me inside and outside the ranks.

His favorite thing in the world was to ask women to twirl, followed by asking his hosts to twirl by giving them talking notes (remember, I once lived among Them when I hosted my own show). And his numero uno twirl-for-me-girl note of that week to his hosts was to Kill the Be-atch. 

C’est moi! 

The Goldmans, who lost their beloved son and brother Ron, were understandably angry and enraged at the thought of O.J. having any kind of say, so they joined the chorus and turned that anger on me, calling for the cancellation of the horrible non-confession book (the book that they would soon get the rights to and publish as a confession), the TV interview and me. 

Nicole’s devoted sister Denise, whose book proposal for “Nicole’s Diaries” I was forced to cancel when our legal department realized she didn’t inherit the rights — Nicole’s minor children and therefore O.J. controlled them — was also enraged and jumped in to demand the project’s cancellation. 

No one had yet seen the interview or read the book, but all of these folks took to the media, demanding that I be instantly torched.

Weeks later, News Corp blinked, and just like that, I was fired. I learned of this when The New York Times called me for comment. No one at News Corp or HarperCollins had the guts or good manners to call to tell me themselves.

As things became progressively more absurd, News Corp wrote a legal letter claiming that it had destroyed the tapes. Yeah, right. As News Corp soon learned, however, I had a contract stipulating that it had no right to fire me without cause. OOPS!

The truth is, I had done nothing wrong. Murdoch had given the green light to the O.J. project, and all of Fox’s top executives were on board. Before the cock crowed three times, the rats jumped ship, but what remained was the truth: They just did not have cause to fire me.

Soooooooo. 

What do you do when you don’t have cause? 

What happened, in my very humble opinion, is that a low-level functionary came to News Corp’s rescue. I call him The Weasel. But in my sketches for my musical of this moment, he more resembles an Aye-Aye, a gremlin-looking creature with skeletal, witchlike middle fingers used to pry insects and grubs from tree trunks. Nocturnal, their incisors continually grow, they have big ears, and are on many endangered lists in Madagascar, where some locals kill them because they believe they use those ginormous middle fingers to pierce infants’ hearts.

Anyway, the Aye-Aye-weasel accused me of making an antisemitic statement in a phone call I had with him, in which I supposedly objected to a “cabal” that had formed against me at News Corp consisting of a wine-guzzling New York Post Aussie attack dog editor-in-chief Col Allan, a Catholic Pope Rupert Murdoch, and Fox News Protestant Prince of Darkness Roger Ailes. Apparently I was antisemitic because I used the word “cabal.” [According to published reports at the time, the “cabal” Regan referred to included three other News Corp employees who were indeed Jewish].

Huh? Are you kidding me?

Aye-Aye should have hired one of my well-published novelists for much better material. For one thing, none of the above were Jewish. As I stated in my long legal complaint against them, he just totally made the shit up. 

Someone, somewhere in the bowels of this bizarre media cult, also hired detectives, tapped my phone, followed me, searched high and low for dirt, paid real dough in the sneakiest ways to anyone who could invent dirt on me (an ex-beau of 30 years ago in dementia and near death in an indigent nursing home for instance), then ran a carefully orchestrated smear campaign against me, stating unequivocally to anyone who would listen that this outrageous, false and embarrassingly unimaginative nonsense was the true cause of my firing. 

All went as planned for Goliath but for one tiny, itsy-bitsy detail. They all overlooked and never considered — as people who stoop this low never do — THE TEMP.

As it turned out, The Temp was actually the rarest of the rare: a moral, thoughtful, smart woman with a conscience, and when she read her morning paper after the weasel’s false and defamatory allegation made it onto the front page of many a worldwide publication, she did what every heroine of every story I have ever read-and-loved did: She called the reporter and told the truth: “Hi, that story you wrote about Judith Regan is false. I know because I heard that phone call.”

At first, she would not give him her name, but having an increasingly rare, elevated sense of indignation and an even greater sense of the injustice of it all, she called him back and did what heroines do: She spoke up and expressed her outrage at that lie.

“Sir, that just didn’t happen. I was the temp who was rolling calls that day, and I heard every word Ms. Regan said. She never said that. That is a lie.”

It was that simple. She was certain, and she spoke with certainty because she had told the truth.

She even had the movie-star name I would highly recommend you fabulous writers out there use for the greatest heroines of your stories: Carmen Del Toro. Carmen, The Bull.

There were others, too, who spoke up and were outraged. Nora Ephron, Charles Krauthammer. They were appalled by it all. In fact, long after all of this was said and done, I ran into Nora on the street in New York one day as she was coming out of Michael’s. No one knew she was ill, but she appeared frail. I stopped to thank her for defending me and asked her why she had when it was not the fashion of the day, to which she responded, “Because that is what you are supposed to do.”

In the end, their defamation of me ended up costing News Corp a pretty penny (according to The New York Times) and it had to publicly retract the big lie it spread. A News Corporation spokesman unabashedly issued the following statement: “After carefully considering the matter, we accept Ms. Regan’s position that she did not say anything that was antisemitic in nature, and further believe that Ms. Regan is not antisemitic.”

In the middle of the lawsuit, when they denied they had anything to do with The Smear and more or less in their own very wimpy way blamed the weasel, they kinda sorta floated the idea that they could sweeten the pot if they didn’t have to retract the weasel’s Big Fat Falsehood.

In honor of the most honest, decent man on the planet, my father, Leo Regan, and Saint Carmen Del Toro, I proudly and very politely said: “NO FUCKING WAY.”

After everyone left the lawsuit party and went back to their rooms, Weasel received an unheard-of promotion and the keys to a lovely, large section of real estate in the Kingdom high above the temps. But those keys must have stopped working after a number of years, as he resigned, never to be seen again by moi.

Roger Ailes had his head handed to him then also got The Boot, after which he fell and hit his head and dropped dead on a bathroom floor. 

This story has many more boots, Bad People who go to prison, etc., but I am saving them for my musical and posthumous memoir.

Everyone wants me to hate Rupert Murdoch, but sorry, everyone, I don’t. 

I just don’t. (That might be a song, too.)

I never spoke to Murdoch again after that fateful dinner, but I saw him years later, sitting alone in a restaurant. I actually wanted to saunter over and give him my best Wendy Williams How Ya Doin’? but decided against it.

Ultimately, he publicly admitted that he had approved the O.J. project, and I respected him for that. 

I also loved the Logan Roy character in Succession, especially the last season and that dynamo theme music, which is still the ringtone on my phone. Murdoch is currently etched as a shar-pei in my notebook. (That breed originated in China more than 2,000 years ago and is known as intelligent, reserved and suspicious. They meet perceived threats with tenacity and vigor. In my etching, they are engaged to a series of lovely ladies. By the way, I was very fond of well-mannered Anna and feisty Wendi, Rupert’s second and third wives. I have to say he has impeccable taste in women. I also think wife No. 4, Jerry Hall, was a great choice and was sorry when it ended.)

Tom Perkins, the now sadly deceased News Corp board member who attended the dinner with Murdoch, took me to lunch at the New York Yacht Club shortly after my lawsuit was over and personally apologized for News Corp’s jihad against me. 

“I couldn’t contact you until it was over,“ he confessed, “but I was not comfortable with what happened.” Wow, the beautiful things multibazillionaires can afford to say. I was impressed. I then attended his 90th birthday party in his big, modern San Francisco penthouse, which was sinking quickly and deeply into the ground and tilting to one side.

And yes, the whole ugly mess was incited by the infamous chronic sexual harasser of all women who dared to walk before him: Roger Ailes. I once asked him why he hit on every woman who crossed his path, to which he responded: “Eventually, one of them says yes.”

Sexual harassment was the least of his sins in my book. I may dedicate an entire sketchbook to “The Sins of Roger Ailes” with my Elephant Seal etching of him on the cover. I think it would sell. (Elephant Seal males develop very prominent noses when they reach sexual maturity. Said nose plays a role in their mating and helps them generate intimidating roars that fend off the competition.)

Twelve years after my firing and victorious legal battle, the allegedly “destroyed” tapes of my O.J. interview magically rose from the ashes out of a Fox vault in some mysterious Hollywood-ish way, and voilà, O.J.’s confession finally aired as a special on Fox in March 2018. A few of the new executives there were, as younger people seem to be, supportive and understanding of what had happened to me.

This is amazing. We loved your interview so much. Oh my God. He confessed?!  

Yup. Twelve years ago. 

After the special aired, former Daily News columnist and book author Joanna Molloy left me this message after watching the interview: “Remind me never to play poker with you.”

An NCIS investigator asked who trained me and suggested I do law enforcement work as an interrogator. 

A former FBI agent said law enforcement should use the tapes to educate because “this interview was a profile of a textbook abuser.”

Shortly after the book and interview were announced, the Goldmans sued for the rights to the book, acknowledging that it was, in fact, a confession, and asked me to publish it. I couldn’t at that time as I had just been fired. They went on to have it published. It was an instant New York Times best-seller and, no surprise, is back on the best-seller list today in the wake of O.J.’s death.

Christopher Darden, one of the O.J. prosecutors whose book In Contempt I had published many years before, initially condemned me for the book and interview. Twelve years later, he finally saw the interview, stated emphatically that it was O.J.’s confession and apologized to me.

Last week, after the announcement of O.J.’s death, clips from my interview appeared in news outlets across the world. The New York Times story about the interview was the No. 1 trending piece in the paper, competing with the missile and drone strikes against Israel and the growing tension between India and China.

When I woke up on April 11, I received a zillion messages from people celebrating O.J.’s death. Many expected me to sing along. I can’t do that. My heroes Leo Regan and Saint Carmen Del Toro would not do that, and neither would I. I believe strongly, firmly and deeply in justice. (My name is Judy Justice in The Musical.) I do not believe in dancing on graves.

My thoughts on his death were as they have always been. O.J. brutally killed the loving mother of his children. He killed a lovely young man who was doing a good deed. He broke the hearts of his own children and the parents, siblings, friends and loved ones who were left behind. I hope his family donates his brain to measure the possibility of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease afflicting many former football players who suffered multiple concussions.

Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman are not forgotten. They were loving, caring souls whose memory should always be cherished.

O.J.’s story ended as all of our stories do: in death.

In life, we learn repeatedly what Mr. Anderson and Shakespeare taught me in the middle of my saddest high school days: that the stories of our vainglorious pursuits of fame, fortune, beauty and winning at any cost are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. 

This is the lesson of O.J.’s life: A man should be measured by what he gives, how he loves, who he forgives and whether or not he chooses to live with some measure of daily kindness and humility.

For Sydney and Justin, who were left behind in the house that night, for O.J.’s other children, and for the family and friends of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, we should always send them the hope that the memory of their loved ones is a blessing.

Judith Regan heads Regan Arts, a book publishing and production entity.