How OJ Simpson Made the Modern World

I never thought I’d make an OJ Simpson story. Then I read If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer — and realized the whole saga is the blueprint for the world we live in today.

Here’s the short version. In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were stabbed to death. A criminal jury acquitted OJ; a civil jury then found him liable and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the families. He spent the next decade using every legal trick available to make sure the Goldmans never collected a dime.

Then, in 2006, he decided to make money off the murders directly. He took $1 million from a publisher to write a “hypothetical” account of how he would have done it. The Goldman family shamed HarperCollins into pulping 400,000 copies — then discovered the manuscript was a strange kind of intellectual property they could seize in bankruptcy court. So they published it themselves, forewords and all.

I read that book last week. It’s one of the strangest documents I’ve ever come across.

In this week’s video I’m going to dissect what was in the book because I think it shows that OJ wasn’t chasing money. He was chasing attention. And the slavish way that the country ate up his story explains everything about the the machinery of the social media world we live in today. The lesson of OJ Simpson was never don’t get caught. It was never stop being interesting.