The O.J. manuscript hits the web

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The Hollywood gossip website TMZ.com posted a link Tuesday afternoon to the entire manuscript of O.J. Simpson’s “If I Did It” — one day after the family of Ronald Goldman won the rights to the book in federal court. According to Wired.com, the link had been removed by the middle of the day, after TMZ received “a takedown notice from a trustee overseeing the bankruptcy case of Simpson — but not before hundreds, if not thousands, of people likely downloaded it and passed it on to friends.” TMZ has left a pair of excerpts from the book’s notorious final chapter, in which Simpson describes (sort of) the murders of Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson as if they were a fever dream.

It’s hard to say what’s more disturbing: the account itself, a kind of peekaboo tease in which Simpson claims that “something went horribly wrong,” although he “can’t tell you exactly how”; TMZ’s breathless self-promotion (even now, the page is tagged with a red banner declaring “Exclusive”); or the swirl of legal machinations that continues to surround this case, obscuring any sense of right and wrong. But in the end, what may be most telling is the way this episode leaves one less with a feeling of outrage than of exhaustion, the desire to see the whole sordid Simpson saga finally put behind us once and for all.

David L. Ulin