FishbowlNY continues its first-look hold on the tussle between New York and Nicole Brown Simpson’s family over just who was in attendance at a meeting where News Corp. reps offered somebody money not to complain so loudly about O.J. Simpson‘s If I Did It. A spokesperson for the magazine says the article “reflects the facts as we know them.”
“News Corp. executives present at the meeting in Indianapolis say that one of the lawyers there was representing the Brown family in the negotiation,” the statement continues. “The Brown family maintains that that is not the case… While Vanessa Grigoriadis called the Brown’s lawyer for comment 24 hours before final closing, we are sorry we were not able to represent the Browns’ position fully in the article.”
The Browns aren’t the only ones to question the veracity of the stories Grigoriadis passes along from HarperCollins sources, by the way: Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace openly derided the claims of a Harper executive that nobody at the company but Judith had any idea what was in the book. “Even though orders had been solicited, a higher-than-initially-expected print run of approximately 400,000 copies had been set, and by the time the book was cancelled four days later on November 20, those books were printed and at least some of them had shipped,” Cader scornfully recaps, “News Corp. is selling… the story that as late as Thursday, November 16 they couldn’t get anything to read. And it’s Judith’s fault, of course.” Of course! But then, as Cader also observed, and we’ve been saying for a while, many of the leaks coming out of Harper just don’t make sense.