from Newsweek.com
After all of it — the scuttled Fox special, the recalled books, the firing of Judith Regan, and all the coverage in newspapers, magazines, newscasts, talk shows and blogs — after all that, Newsweek emerged with the scoop, the first to publish the clutch details from OJ Simpson's hypothetically-hypothetical confessional, If I Did It, Here's How It Happened.The key chapter, "The Night In Question," was obtained by Newsweek from a source who "asked not to be identified because of the ongoing controversy." Newsweek's Mark Miller , who covered the OJ case a decade ago, describes it as "a seeming confession in Simpson's own voice," though of course the excerpt stops short of explicitly admitting anything.
Miller notes that the most striking thing about the chapter is "how closely it tracks with the evidence in the case--and how clearly Simpson invokes the classic language of a wife abuser. In his crude, expletive-laced account, Simpson suggests Nicole all but drove him to kill her." It also suggests that Ron Goldman really did come by to return a pair of glasses. According to Miller, it ties up some key evidentiary questions, like what happened to his bloody clothes and the murder weapon and how he managed to subdue two people at once; Miller also reveals that Simpson claimed to have had an accomplice, a mysterious man named "Charlie" who was present for the murders and escape (though the account, as Miller tells it, does not dovetail with the presence of a fourth person).
It's sort of mystifying, frankly, why Simpson, who claims to want to shield his children from the sordid detais, would have written such a thing. It's no mystery, however, why Newsweek ran the story; within hours of the its release online this a.m., it jumped to the top of both Newsweek's and MSNBC's most-popular lists (we'll see how it does at the newsstand; the coverline atop the banner has no accompanying photo, and reads sort of ambiguously, "Did OJ confess?" with no mention of the book or the exclusive access. A show of restraint there, perhaps, in a nod to the cover story, and the aesthetics of the cover as a whole). It's a huge scoop in a story that, despite the public outcry, continues to pique the public's curiosity (and indeed, the insta-popularity of the Newsweek piece yet again proves Judith Regan's nose for a hit). Though Newsweek editor Jon Meacham claims in his editor's note that there was some debate about whether or not to run with the exclusive, like the Saddam hanging photos, it seemed inevitable that the story would surface ("Truth will out," as Meacham tells us Shakespeare told us). Who knows, of course, if "If I Did It" is the truth, but at this point, it sure seems closer than a certain 1995 verdict.
