Why “If I Did It” Should Never Have Been Written

As a civil rights attor­ney, I coun­sel folks who have been sub­jected to injus­tice about their rights and the reme­dies the legal sys­tem can pro­vide them. Fre­quently, they have suf­fered emo­tional dis­tress and asso­ci­ated phys­i­cal symp­toms and mal­adies as a result of the con­duct to which they have been sub­jected. I cau­tion them not to expect too much from the legal sys­tem. It can­not, for instance, undo the psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal dam­age inflicted upon them. Courts can order injunc­tive relief, an order direct­ing the party who vio­lated the law to refrain from doing so in the future, but the pri­mary rem­edy avail­able via a civil pro­ceed­ing is money which I refer to as a “legal spanking.”

Sadly, even a $38 mil­lion “legal spank­ing,” the amount O.J. Simp­son owes the fam­ily of Ron Gold­man, will not bring him or Nicole Brown Simp­son back to life or alle­vi­ate the pain that their fam­i­lies have lived with each and every minute since they were sav­agely butchered in 1994.

And “If I Did It: Con­fes­sions of the Killer,” O.J. Simpson’s ghost­writ­ten hypo­thet­i­cal account of how he mur­dered Gold­man and the mother of two of his chil­dren, should never have been writ­ten or pub­lished by the Gold­mans or any­one else. Simp­son bragged to the Asso­ci­ated Press that he agreed to the ghost­writ­ing arrange­ment “to earn ‘blood money’ for his chil­dren.” That rea­son alone should have been suf­fi­cient to stop any rep­utable writer in his/her tracks. After all, Simpson’s chil­dren by Nicole Brown Simp­son are adults — his daugh­ter, Syd­ney, is 21 years old and her younger brother, Justin, is 19. Both were edu­cated at a pri­vate acad­emy where tuition runs as much as $22,000 per year. Simp­son has no oblig­a­tion, of course, to sup­port his adult chil­dren. So who really stood to gain finan­cially from the book, aside from the ghost­writer? Simp­son, the man who has vowed openly never to sat­isfy the out­stand­ing judgment.

Patt Mor­ri­son observed that

the book fits Karl Marx’s use­ful obser­va­tion about his­tory: first act tragedy, sec­ond act farce.

What can it be but farce that the book’s ghost­writer was a wit­ness at the mur­der trial, Pablo F. Fen­jves, a Brent­wood neigh­bor of Nicole Brown’s whose writerly tes­ti­mony of Kato the dog’s “plain­tive wail” earned Simpson’s scorn a dozen years later when the two men sat down to work on this book?

In addi­tion to being only the lat­est chap­ter in the bizarre spec­ta­cle that Simpson’s life has become, the book’s release and attain­ment of best seller sta­tus marks, in my opin­ion, a water­shed moment in our history.

Ghost­writer Pablo J. Fen­jves says the oppor­tu­nity to write the book was “too com­pelling to pass up.” Fen­jves main­tains that he has always believed Simp­son is guilty, but wanted to lis­ten to him con­fess. Hired by Judith Regan when the orig­i­nal plan to draft and pub­lish it was imple­mented, Fen­jves, who calls him­self a for­mer jour­nal­ist, insists that Simp­son read the man­u­script three times and signed off on it before it was cleared for pub­li­ca­tion. Simp­son now con­tends that many of the details in the book are inac­cu­rate, includ­ing some that he claims now to have delib­er­ately falsified.

To his credit, “I think what Fred Gold­man said on ‘Oprah’ was, was really dead on,” Fen­jves said. “He said, basi­cally, ‘If one woman in an abu­sive rela­tion­ship reads this book and gets out, it will have been worth it.’ And I 100 per­cent agree with him.”

I think that Fen­jves has dis­graced him­self and other writ­ers with his par­tic­i­pa­tion in this project. It is an embar­rass­ment, a mock­ery and an indi­ca­tion of how celebrity-obsessed and, in some ways, depraved our cul­ture has become.

One writer posits that Simp­son has become “a sort of Rorschach test for the nation” because how we react to him and his actions reveals a great deal about how we feel, ulti­mately, about our­selves. If that is true, I assert that how we react to Fen­jves’ par­tic­i­pa­tion in the project says just as much, if not more, about our moral centers.

I find sev­eral aspects of Fen­jves’ con­duct appalling. Sure, although Fen­jves knew from the out­set that Simp­son was going to con­fess to crimes for which he had already been acquit­ted and could not, under any cir­cum­stances, be retried, crim­i­nal defen­dants do not bear the bur­den of proof, of course; the pros­e­cu­tion must prove its case and the Los Ange­les County Dis­trict Attorney’s team failed to do so. And many writ­ers have assisted con­victed crim­i­nals to write their mem­oirs, includ­ing details about the crimes they com­mit­ted. I am unaware, how­ever, of any sit­u­a­tion like this one, i.e., any instance in which an indi­vid­ual who escaped pun­ish­ment has con­fessed to their crimes they were accused of com­mit­ting from behind the veneer of hypo­thet­i­cal guilt.

Some­body was going to write the book, it could be argued, so Fen­jves was sim­ply the writer who was lucky enough to be selected. Cer­tainly, if Fen­jves knew from the begin­ning that Simp­son was going to con­fess to hav­ing com­mit­ted the mur­ders, some might assert that there is value in memo­ri­al­iz­ing the truth, pre­serv­ing it for all time and, hope­fully, dis­si­pat­ing some of the pub­lic fas­ci­na­tion with Simpson.Those argu­ments col­lapse when scru­ti­nized: Reviews of the book uni­formly find it, just like Simp­son, devoid of clar­ity, details or “a con­science.” So Fen­jves is not excul­pated via a “greater good” or “pub­lic ser­vice” theory.

More impor­tantly, Fen­jves signed on to write the book before the Gold­mans acquired the pub­lish­ing rights which means that he agreed to write it, know­ing that Simp­son stood to profit from the venture.

And that is where, in my esti­ma­tion, Fen­jves crossed the line sep­a­rat­ing fas­ci­na­tion with and a desire to write about a con­tro­ver­sial or dif­fi­cult topic in con­for­mity with appro­pri­ate eth­i­cal and moral stan­dards into an entirely dif­fer­ent, smarmy zone of greed and desire-for-fame-inspired behav­ior. After all, the entire coun­try has observed Simp­son, dur­ing the 12 years since his acquit­tal, cavort­ing on Florida golf courses and enjoy­ing a lifestyle reserved for the well-to-do while claim­ing to be too impov­er­ished to sat­isfy even a small por­tion of the judg­ment against him won by the Gold­mans. Every time there is a cam­era near Simp­son, he is shown wav­ing, smil­ing, sign­ing auto­graphs. Accord­ing to the Gold­mans’ attor­ney, he lives in a home val­ued at more than $1 million.

There is no indi­ca­tion that Fen­jves lim­ited or con­di­tioned his involve­ment in the project using even one of the many means read­ily avail­able to ensure that his own work did not fur­ther empower Simp­son in his efforts to con­tinue thumb­ing his nose at the jus­tice sys­tem or the fam­i­lies of his vic­tims and evad­ing his finan­cial respon­si­bil­i­ties to the Gold­mans. Rea­son­able minds will dif­fer on this point with many argu­ing that a writer is hired merely to write and those types of con­straints are nei­ther expected nor required when a writer is engaged. Given the unique cir­cum­stances, I think those types of eth­i­cal checks and bal­ances should have been imple­mented and were, for that rea­son, man­dated in order to with­stand the inevitable analy­sis and crit­i­cism of the details.

There is also, of course, the mat­ter of Fen­jves’ involve­ment in the trial and his admis­sion that he went into the project thor­oughly con­vinced of Simpson’s guilt. Nei­ther of those fac­tors mat­ter in this instance, some will assert. Fen­jves was not called upon serve as a neu­tral, impar­tial inves­ti­ga­tor or reporter but was, rather, a ghost­writer, merely assigned to syn­the­size and pre­serve Simpson’s “hypo­thet­i­cal” account of the crimes. That argu­ment is a cop-out, of course, because a writer who approached the sub­ject with an open mind and no attach­ment to the events, no mat­ter how remote, could write with greater objec­tiv­ity, detach­ment and, ulti­mately, sen­si­tiv­ity to the con­flict­ing inter­ests at stake.

Finally, there is the mat­ter of the Gold­mans and their desire to attain jus­tice — in any form.

Mor­ri­son concludes:

If you still care about this case, if you think Simp­son is guilty and you want to help the Gold­mans, buy the book. If you think he got a raw deal and don’t want the Gold­mans to get a cent of your money, speed-read Chap­ter 6 at the book­store, or get it from the library.

Either way, your deci­sion is a moral one, def­i­nitely not a lit­er­ary one.

Buy­ing the book will not, ulti­mately, help the Gold­mans because the money they will make — and since the book was num­ber one on the best­seller lists last week and is cur­rently ranked as the fourth-best sell­ing on Ama­zon, they stand to make at least sev­eral mil­lion dol­lars — will not heal their bro­ken hearts or bring back their son and brother. Ulti­mately, the fact that the book exists at all demeans every­one asso­ci­ated with it, includ­ing the Gold­mans, ulti­mately tar­nish­ing the lega­cies and mem­o­ries of the victims.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Col­lo­quium on Writ­ing, Ezine Arti­cles

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