Some people are natural born liars. They don’t even know they are lying. OJ Simpson was one of them. I interviewed him for my 1998 BBC documentary series.
At 2am, on the top floor of our Hyatt hotel in Los Angeles after a manic 17 hours’ filming, I asked him for the final time whether he was involved in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. I was sure we could get him to confess. But he simply turned to the camera, said “no” and gave a rueful smile.
Simpson had already metaphorically damned himself at every opportunity, however, by insinuating during our programme that he had, in fact, killed them. I’m not sure what he even believed in his own mind at that point. By the late Nineties I think that Simpson had reached the stage where he believed his own lies. I’m sure if he had taken a lie detector test then, he would have passed it.
Over the last couple of days, one clip in particular from my interview with Simpson has resurfaced on social media following his death.
After I’d returned to my room at the Hyatt, following an odd day’s filming during which he asked our driver to take us around his old Brentwood neighbourhood in a Ford Bronco, remarkably similar to the vehicle watched by 95 million viewers during his televised police car chase, he said he had a surprise for me.
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There was a knock at the door. It was Simpson, making stabbing motions with a banana held above his head while screeching, in the vein of the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
I wasn’t scared, I just thought he was insane. I also immediately thought that this was very good television.
Our producer, who was outside my room with him, said Simpson was originally looking for a knife because that would have been a funnier joke, but he had to settle for a banana instead. I could have been the first person to be killed by fruit.
Afterwards, I spoke to his agent, Mike Gilbert, who had accompanied us during filming. Both he and Simpson were masters of doublespeak. They would try to confuse me by talking in riddles.
After the stabbing incident, Gilbert told me that “OJ is a real kidder” and he often liked to imitate films. I said: “Oh, like Psycho?” He tried to tell me he was re-enacting a scene from Cats. There wasn’t even a Cats movie out at the time! So both of them were kind of loony.
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On another occasion, Gilbert told me that he “knew the truth”. He later released a book claiming that Simpson had confessed to killing his ex-wife.
On our first night in Los Angeles, we went out for dinner with Simpson and his sister. He was very funny in the beginning. I immediately thought, “Ah, here is someone who can play ball with me.” But I quickly realised that when you ask him a question, he scrambles it. He goes off on tangents. So many tangents that by the time he is finished with his answer, you’re utterly confused.
During the dinner, out of nowhere, he asked if we wanted to know what his favourite poem was. He went into the poem about Lizzie Borden, who was tried and acquitted of killing her father and stepmother in Massachusetts in 1892: “Lizzie Borden took an axe/ And gave her mother forty whacks/ When she saw what she had done/ She gave her father forty-one”.
At the restaurant, there was a whole queue of girls lining up to go home with him. And he had quite the appetite for that. His sister told the girls to get lost. I couldn’t imagine why there were so many people who wanted to sleep with a man regarded as a murderer. But it clearly happened a lot.
He was very sexualised, telling me that his dreams in prison were of a sexual nature, or how hitting a golf ball well was almost “erotic”. But he also told me how he would never let a man massage him in case he became aroused. I couldn’t figure him out at all.
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When we took a walk around Venice Beach, there were people who wanted his autograph or to give him a hug, while others held up signs calling him a “killer”. One woman shook his hand because she had “never shaken hands with a murderer”. He was delighted with it.
I think that’s why he seemed so excited about doing the interview. Fame is fame. And, by then, he was losing his fame a little bit. And after the civil case, he didn’t have much money. So, you know, he would do anything to get back in the public eye.
It was his idea to drive past the scene of the murders; his idea to drive past his old mansion which we had seen plastered over the television news and his idea to shout “asshole” outside of the property of one of the prosecutors in the case. We were all a little shocked.
And he would keep reminding me that I looked like the lead prosecutor in the criminal trial, Marcia Clark, which I do. So he would play on that. He was playing the same defence he played to the real Marcia Clark.
Back on the top floor of the Hyatt after our long day together, when I decided to confront him one last time, I was hoping we had tired him out and worn him down. I tried to get him onside. He was complaining about how unfair the past few years had been. I said: “You’re innocent. You’re free. What’s the problem?”
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I wanted him to think we’re pals. I don’t usually manipulate people, but with him, I was lying as much as he was. But he didn’t crack, and denied his involvement.
The last time I spoke to him was, I think, on April 1, 1998, shortly after we had finished filming. He called me up here in London and said: “Hi, it’s OJ. I did it.” Then he said, “April fool’s’” and hung up.
As told to Glen Keogh. I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was, by Ruby Wax, is out in paperback now
