In Britain, Simpson Blasts Police, Media Hints At Future Lawsuits On London Talk Show

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 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 refuted any suggestion of wrongdoing, suggesting at one point that his wife may have been the victim of a drug murder.

“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 replied.

After listening to Simpson attack the police and witnesses who he said lied about him under oath, Finnigan asked him if he feels 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 his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman as an act of despair.

“For 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.