Judge Orders O.J. Not to Spend Book Money
Posted on February 8, 2007
A judge has ordered O.J. Simpson not to spend any of the money he received for the book If I Did It, which was pulled from shelves by HarperCollins after a wave of negative publicity.
A Los Angeles judge Wednesday extended an injunction first issued last month prohibiting the former football star from spending any of the reported $1 million advance he received for his ill-fated book and TV special If I Did It, a hypothetical confessional about the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.The order will be in effect until February 20th, when there will be another hearing on the matter. O.J. claims that he's already spent all the money on bills and taxes and that there is nothing to give the Goldmans, which is not surprising. What a ill-fated project: it devastated the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson and cost HarperCollins a lot of money. It also got Judith Regan fired from HarperCollins. Whatever was she thinking when she signed O.J. to write a book about how he "hypothetically" committed the murders?Superior Court Judge Gerald Rosenberg broadened his Jan. 4 ruling, which originally only precluded Simpson from spending money from past book, movie or sports deals. It did not include keeping tabs on his If I Did It payout because the Goldman family had filed a separate federal lawsuit concerning the allocation of that money. However, the Goldmans' federal suit was rejected late last month over issues of jurisdiction, thereby clearing the way for the new order.
The extended ruling bars Simpson from "transferring, conveying, expending, liquidating, encumbering, hiding, concealing or otherwise disposing" of the $1.1 million he purportedly pocketed for If I Did It, though he is allowed to access money for "ordinary living expenses." Ron Goldman's father, Fred, made the injunction request as part of a state lawsuit filed in December, accusing Simpson of fraudulent conveyance�namely, setting up a bogus corporation, Lorraine Brooke Associates, to funnel the advance he received from would-be publisher ReganBooks. The Goldmans claim that the fake account was set up so that Simpson would not be forced to relinquish any money to make good on the $33.5 million wrongful-death judgment the Goldman and Brown families won against the sports star in 1997.