| “The mindless attacks against me for interviewing O.J. Simpson and getting what I believed was his confession were vicious, personal and unrelenting,” former HarperCollins exec Judith Regan says in the December issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “I was harshly criticized for a book no one had read and an interview no one had seen. People lost all perspective.”
That hypothetical (in more ways than one) book and interview on the former football great accused of killing his wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, was nothing but trouble for Regan from the moment it hit the ink. A year ago she announced the book, “If I Did It,” in which Simpson was to “speculate” on how he would have committed the murders. But a public outcry overwhelmed HarperCollins, and the project was dropped. Regan, who built a successful career on celeb biographies, was fired soon after.
“People were afraid to come to my defense,” Regan told the magazine’s Amy DuBois Barnett for a three-page spread that includes photog David Turner’s interpretation of her in white Grecian gown with arrows sticking out of her body. “They betrayed me right and left.”
Regan describes the upheaval and the phoenix rising. “Within days of being fired, I realized I needed a new kind of courage – not the kind it takes to stand up and speak, but the kind it takes to sit down and listen, as Winston Churchill once said."
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