Book publisher Judith Regan is opening up about the phone call during which she claims O.J. Simpson’s lawyer said the former superstar athlete murdered ex-wife Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.
TMZ obtained an exclusive preview of Fox’s two-hour special OJ Simpson: The Lost Confession?, airing Sunday, March 11, and in the clip, Regan sat down with the show’s host, Soledad O’Brien, to talk about her interaction with the ex-football star’s attorney.
Regan, who was set to publish Simpson’s book If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer in 2007 (it was not distributed due to outrage at the time), spoke of the day she was contacted by an attorney who said Simpson was ready to give his side of the story about what happened the night Brown Simpson and Goldman were murdered in 1994.
“Well, I received a call from an attorney who said that O.J. was ready to confess,” she says in the clip. “And actually, I thought it was some kind of a scam and didn’t believe him and I thought this guy’s a lunatic, but I took his number and said I’d call him back.”
“The next day I called him back and he said he was willing to do it and the only condition that he had was that he didn’t want to call the book ‘I Did It,’” she continues telling O’Brien. “He wanted to put an ‘If’ in front of it so that he would have deniability with his children.”
Regan added: “He couldn’t face his children and he couldn’t tell them that he had done it. That was the way it was portrayed to me.”
Regan also did a 2006 interview with Simpson, which was done in conjunction with the book, but Fox backed out of airing and publishing both at the time, and Regan was fired. Fox will now be adding footage of her interview to the new special, which shows Simpson speculating about what might have happened the night his ex-wife and her friend were murdered.
The former football player was acquitted of the two murders after a highly publicized trial in 1995. In 2008, he was convicted of kidnapping and armed robbery after stealing sports memorabilia. Simpson was granted an early release from a Nevada prison in October 2017 after serving nine years.
OJ Simpson: The Lost Confession? airs on Fox on Sunday, March 11, at 8 p.m. ET.
