O.J. Laid Bare

Aug. 7, 2006 — -- What would possess O.J. Simpson to allow a man who goes by the professional name "Spiderboy" to accumulate nearly 80 hours of candid, behind-the-scenes, reality show style video between 2001 and 2005 of Simpson cavorting at night clubs with young ladies, railing against Oprah Winfrey and giving cagey answers to a radio DJ about whether he used cocaine after he retired from football?

The answer, according to the independent TV producer and promoter who goes by the name Spiderboy and shot the Simpson video is "image rehabilitation." Juice was unavailable for comment. Or at least, calls to his attorney Yale Galanter were not immediately returned.

Spiderboy's given name is Mark Norman Pardo, and he says he approached O.J. in 2001, back, when Pardo says Simpson "didn't have a lot of options."

"I put him out on the road and filmed the reaction," Pardo says. "I started filming everything: the hotels, the airports, the airplane; I just kept the camera rolling."

The past 12 years have been rough on O.J. from a PR perspective. There was the double murder trial, the civil trial, and then the custody battle. The Florida road rage incident didn't help matters and the search of his Miami home in 2001 on suspicion that it might house a drug ring made matters even worse. O.J. Could probably use an image overhaul.

But viewing the end product of four years of filming with Spiderboy may leave O.J. questioning his decision. Spiderboy has unveiled a new website, www.judgeoj.com, to incrementally roll out the video for free and "show the general public a side of OJ Simpson he has carefully tried to conceal for years."

Pardo says the video will allow Americans to see the real O.J. And he wants visitors to the site to watch the video and then vote on whether they think O.J. is guilty or not, regardless of the fact that he says none of the video offers new evidence in the 1994 double murder of Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

"There is no higher court in the land than the court of public opinion. Here there are no lawyers to haggle between morality and legality, no high priced defense attorneys to use legal loopholes to get their rich clientele acquitted over zealous prosecutors manipulating the system in their favor , just a nation of well-informed people who become the jurors and judges who make their own decisions based on the evidence presented to them," it reads.

Technically speaking, O.J. has already been judged. Twice.

Simpson was acquitted of the murders in 1995, but held financially responsible in a civil case in 1997 and ordered to pay more than $33.5 million in damages to the families of Brown Simpson and Goldman.

Since then Simpson has lived in Florida. In 2000, he won custody of the two children he and Brown Simpson had together.

Spiderboy says that despite the incendiary nature of the website, he "isn't allowed" to have an opinion about O.J.

Pardo says he kept the digital tapes in a safe deposit box and when it got full sometime last year he knew it was time to do something with the tape.

Though the Web site promises there eventually will be 80 hours of uncut video that show the hidden persona of O.J., at this point there are only three live video clips on the site, each less than 20 seconds long. In one, Simpson tells a radio DJ he has not used cocaine recently, but won't comment on what he did earlier in life. Simpson tells the DJ she can take from that what she will.

Even those three clips are under high demand. Pardo said the site almost crashed on Sunday and he could not release more of the video yet because of "bandwidth issues."

Pardo also said he fully expects he'll be sued by Simpson and that the two are "not really speaking that much anymore."

In another clip, Simpson is outside at a roadside bus stop waiting for a bus lamenting his lot in life, confined to public transportation. In the third, Simpton talks to Pardo in the back of a limousine about the lack of accountability for Chris Furman, who Simpson's defense team famously painted as a racist for, among other things, his use of the "N word." But Simpson says the actual word.

Clips provided to news networks show Simpson at an Atlanta nightclub suggestively dancing with young women.

Rumblings that the footage would be turned into a reality show in 2003 drew threats of lawsuit from Simpson's attorney Yale Galanter, according to Pardo.

At the time, Galanter said there could be no show because Simpson had not signed off on the production of a reality show with the footage. So the TV show never actually happened and neither did the lawsuit.

O.J. and Spiderboy were back on the road soon after.

Spiderboy said O.J. got so used to him that Simpson "forgot the camera was running 90 percent of the time."

It was also in the wake of the possible unauthorized reality show that Marvel Comics sued Pardo for naming his company Spiderboy, which they said infringed on a copyright they had to spin the Spiderman character off into Spiderboy, although they never utilitzed the idea.

Pardo says the video is telling, but the real treasure trove of his time with Simpson are the stories that don't make it on-camera. After keeping www.judgeoj.com live for a month, Pardo plans to write a book he'll call "Promoting a Nightmare," and which he says will chronicle his travels with Simpson. The website caps off the research for this effort.

"I need an end for my book," Pardo says. "I need to see what the public thinks about him."