Simpson Interviewed on British TV

O.J. Simpson took his case to a British TV talk show Monday, lambasting the Los Angeles police and the American media, praising the loyalty of his dead ex-wife and threatening to sue his detractors.

In his first public remarks on an image-polishing visit to Britain after his acquittal on double-murder charges, Simpson appeared in a 15-minute segment of a live Granada Television show hosted by husband-and-wife team Richard Madely and Judy Finnigan.

He seemed relaxed and confident, at times talking about the case like a commentator at a football game but seldom answering a question directly enough to suit his hosts.

Cut short in many of his answers to more than a dozen questions by interviewers pressed for time, Simpson coolly rebutted any suggestion of wrongdoing, indicating at one point that his ex-wife may have been the victim of a drug murder.

During his trial, segments of the proceedings were shown on satellite television here, attracting an avid, if small, audience. In a country where “football” means soccer, Simpson is best known for his roles in the “Naked Gun” movies.

On his first major publicity swing since his October acquittal, Simpson traveled to Manchester in a private jet for his British television debut. He was paid a token one pound, about $1.50, by his TV hosts--who also paid about $25,000 in transportation, accommodation and security costs.

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Simpson got 15 minutes before the cameras instead of an originally scheduled 10 because actress Bo Derek, who was scheduled to follow him, refused to be on the same program. Singer Neil Diamond appeared as scheduled on the second half of the show.

“Why do you think that so many people find it so hard to believe you are innocent?” Finnigan asked as the interview began.

“I can’t really blame them. I think if I was exposed to what they were exposed to daily . . . the TV coverage . . . the reports were so, I felt, inaccurate, skewed, always generally to the negative,” Simpson said.

After listening to Simpson attack the police and witnesses who he said lied about him under oath, Finnigan asked him if he feels that he was the victim of a terrible mistake or a frame-up.

“A whole lot of people are going to be sued when I’m finished with this . . . especially against some of the tabloids,” he said.

Simpson described his televised police chase eight days after the June 12, 1994, murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman as an act of despair.

“For the first time in my life, I was suffering despair. My favorite person on Earth after my mother was brutally murdered. . . . I was in a lot of pain, and I just wanted the pain to stop,” he said.

Simpson maintained that he is not a violent person, or a jealous one. Pressed to talk about his ex-wife, Simpson said: “Nicole, I thought, her best attribute was her loyalty to me. I think she was what every man would want in that I never had to worry about her. . . . She was a tremendous mother, what every kid should have.”

Simpson has drawn a large following--and mixed reviews--from the British media since his arrival here Saturday on a flight from Los Angeles. There were police aplenty to shield him from a crowd of about 900 people, nearly two dozen camera crews and perhaps 100 reporters at Heathrow Airport. One woman screamed “Murderer!” but most jostled for autographs.

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The arrival set the tone for the five-day visit. “He is over-hyped, over-chaperoned and over here,” observed the Sunday Telegraph. There were crowds, security guards and police everywhere Simpson turned, invariably in the company of gadfly London public relations man Max Clifford.

Clifford, who scripted the visit, has represented jailed bond trader Nick Leeson and actor Hugh Grant after his Los Angeles encounter with prostitute Divine Brown. He is best known in Britain as an intermediary for women peddling kiss-and-tell stories about encounters with prominent members of the British establishment.

Simpson’s Sunday schedule took him for a chilly round of golf in Croydon, south of London. There, too, he signed autographs and dodged barbed questions from about 100 reporters and photographers. Sunday night, he dined with a friend, British director Michael Winner, who is best known for the “Death Wish” movies.

Tonight, Simpson appears at the Oxford Union, a debating society at Oxford University, whose guests over the years have ranged from Richard Nixon to Mother Teresa to soccer star Diego Maradona to Kermit the Frog.