The executor of O.J. Simpson’s estate has vowed to fight any attempt to collect the more than $30-million wrongful death judgment won by the families of Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
“It’s my hope that the Goldmans get zero, nothing,” attorney Malcolm LaVergne told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday. “Them specifically. And I will do everything in my capacity as the executor or personal representative to try and ensure that they get nothing.”
LaVergne, Simpson’s longtime lawyer, was named executor of a trust created in January to hold all of the former college and NFL star’s property, according to the Review-Journal. Simpson died Wednesday of prostate cancer.
LaVergne, who did not return a call to his office on Saturday by the Times, told the Review-Journal that he specifically wants the Goldman family to get nothing in part because of their actions involving Simpson’s planned book, “If I Did It.”
A federal bankruptcy judge gave the rights to the book to Goldman’s family in 2007. It was later published with the subtitle “Confessions of the Killer.” Forbes reported Saturday that the book had reached the top of two of Amazon’s bestseller lists days after Simpson’s death.
Simpson had paid only a small fraction of the 1997 judgment, which has grown to more than $114 million with interest, according to Goldman family lawyer David Cook.
Simpson was charged with killing Goldman and Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson. But he was acquitted in 1995 in a drama-filled and widely broadcast criminal trial that enthralled the nation.
The Brown and Goldman families then brought a civil suit against Simpson. In 1997, a jury in Santa Monica found him liable for the deaths, and he was ordered to pay the families more than $30 million in damages. Simpson responded by giving up his Brentwood estate and moving to Florida, in large part to evade paying the civil judgment.
Goldman’s family members responded to Simpson’s death as “a mixed bag of complicated emotions” on Thursday.
“For three decades we tirelessly pursued justice for Ron and Nicole, and despite a civil judgment and his confession in ‘If I Did It,’ the hope for true accountability has ended,” Ron’s sister Kim Goldman and father, Fred Goldman, wrote in a joint statement.
Cook, their attorney, said that Simpson “died without penance.”
The Associated Press reported Saturday that the will lists Simpson’s four children and notes that any beneficiary who seeks to challenge provisions of the will “shall receive, free of trust, one dollar ($1.00) and no more in lieu of any claimed interest in this will or its assets.”
