Inside the O.J. Simpson Book Battle

June 20, 2007 — -- One of the most bitter and bizarre legal battles over a book in recent memory is threatening to become even more complicated after the apparent leak of some of the bloodiest sections of O.J. Simpson's still-unpublished "If I Did It."

Attorneys for the family of murder victim Ron Goldman are demanding that the tabloid Web site TMZ.com be held in contempt for publishing the book's juiciest excerpts. Goldman's father alleges that they were released by Simpson's team in order to "diminish [the] value" of the book.

The families of Goldman and Nicole Brown-Simpson, Simpson's ex-wife, who was found murdered with Goldman, were granted the rights to the book just last week.

At an emergency hearing Wednesday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge A. Jay Cristol said he would schedule a hearing later on whether to hold TMZ in contempt and suggested that the company could eventually be held financially liable for any violation.

TMZ has not said how it "obtained'' a copy of the manuscript, but Simpson told The Associated Press Wednesday he had nothing to do with the posting of the manuscript.

Attorneys for TMZ say the company did nothing wrong and that the excerpts were only posted briefly — although excerpts remained on the Web site Wednesday afternoon.

The development followed a nine month, tit-for-tat legal chess game in which Goldman's family morphed from ardent opponent of the book's publication to its most vocal publicist. Simpson has traveled far from his original position on "If I Did It."

Simpson was found not guilty of the murders of his ex-wife and Goldman in 1995. A civil court jury later found him liable for their deaths in 1997, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages to the families of the victims. Both families claim they have seen virtually none of that money, which has ballooned with interest, according to lawyers for the families.

In the expletive-packed excerpts, Simpson writes of squaring off with Goldman while nearby, a bleeding, barely conscious Nicole Brown Simpson moans as her life drains away.

Throughout the narrative, Simpson writes that his thoughts are interrupted by a friend he calls "Charlie,'' who appears both to spur Simpson to the edge of violence, and then tries in vain to draw him back. Los Angeles authorities who prosecuted Simpson told a jury Simpson acted alone.

In another apparent excerpt of the book published on the Web site, Simpson writes of how he nearly committed suicide during the infamous white Bronco police chase, after which Simpson was arrested for the murders.

Last fall, when word got out that then HarperCollins publisher Judith Regan was set to go to press with the Simpson project, a press release was issued that promised "for the first time ever, a bone-chilling account of the night of the murders, in which Simpson pictures himself at the center of the action."

Simpson was initially quiet on the subject, but confirmed his cooperation. Naturally, he supported the book's release, along with a two-part television interview on Fox television. But he insisted the account was hypothetical and fictional.

Meanwhile, Goldman's father Fred, led a very public campaign to force Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, owners of HarperCollins, to cancel the project, claiming Simpson was profiting from the murder of his son, a claim Simpson denied repeatedly. Goldman and his family even launched a Web site called "dontpayoj.com." The site featured an online petition that was signed by tens of thousands, demanding that the book's publication be canceled.

Soon, simmering outrage at the notion of a book in which Simpson "imagines'' killing the pair grew, and both Simpson and his maverick publisher Regan came under harsh fire from within and outside the publishing industry.

"This is not about being heard,'' Sara Nelson, Publishers Weekly editor in chief, told The Associated Press at the time. "This is about trying to cash in, in a pathetic way, on some notoriety. That a person keeps wanting to bring this up seems almost nutty to me."

Within days Murdoch canceled the publication of the book and the television special, and apologized publicly to the families of the victims. Regan was dismissed from her post months later.

In mid-November last year, Regan publicly turned on Simpson, issuing a lengthy personal statement calling her most famous author a "killer" and claiming that she set up Simpson in a bid to get a confession out of him on behalf of battered women everywhere -- herself among them.

At that point, Simpson reportedly claimed that not only didn't he care whether the book was ever published, he also hoped it didn't sell well. He again denied that he had killed the pair and reiterated that the book was a fictional account of the killings, which, because Simpson was acquitted of murder, have technically never been solved.

While it may have seemed to the public that the controversy was over, the book battle raged on inside the law offices of Goldman's attorneys.

Those attorneys soon petitioned a California judge for the "reversionary rights'' to the book, claiming that the company that took payment from HarperCollins for the book project was a legal "surrogate" for Simpson himself. In March that judge agreed, and cleared the way for the Goldmans to auction off the book rights to the highest bidder. An auction date was set for April.

But before the auction could take place, lawyers for Simpson's daughter Arnelle and the company declared bankruptcy, in a move that sources close to the Simpson camp told ABC News was a bid to stop Goldman from auctioning the rights to the book.

Goldman and his legal team waited out the bankruptcy proceedings, and late last week they were awarded the rights to auction the book. A lawyer for Goldman told ABC News they would be contacting movie production companies and publishing houses worldwide in attempt to draw in the highest bidder they could find for the book.

Goldman has called his recent attempts to secure the rights to the book, publish it and keep the profits a "lesser of two evils'' tactic in his decade-long bid to make Simpson pay the multimillion dollar wrongful death award that the victims' families won in 1997.

But last fall, he was outraged at the thought of the book's publication.

"It's so morally reprehensible that it's hard to fathom," he told ABC News in November. "It's remarkable to me that a major network and a major publisher would get themselves involved with a murderer, and air and discuss how he would murder two people -- one of them being the mother of his children."

In the excerpts, many of which were previously published in a January Newsweek article, Simpson goes into chilling detail about the murders. Despite using the real names of the victims and portraying a scenario that crime experts have suggested fits relatively well with the known facts of the actual case, Simpson has insisted repeatedly and vehemently that the chapter is fictional.

Last week, the ABC News Law & Justice Unit reported exclusively that the idea for a book came from his eldest daughter Arnelle, and her friend, entertainment promoter Raffles Von Exel.