Judge to Simpson: Hand Over Rolex
O.J. Simpson doesn’t have to give the shirt off his back to satisfy a $38 million wrongful-death judgment. But he does have to hand over an expensive Rolex wristwatch the family of murder victim Ron Goldman saw the former football superstar wearing on the Internet, a Los Angeles judge ruled today.
A blog that posted the Internet picture, TMZ.com, reported the ruling, along with the Associated Press and New York Daily News, among others. In an apparent reference to sports memorabilia allegedly stolen by Simpson and others last month from a Las Vegas casino hotel room, Superior Court Judge Gerald Rosenberg also said Simpson must surrender sports memorabilia if it’s his.
As discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post, TMZ.com previously publicized an audiotape of an alleged armed robbery victim referring to Simpson’s claimed offshore accounts—news that reportedly electrified a Goldman family attorney pursuing the largely uncollected judgment.
Simpson’s sports memorabilia probably isn’t worth that much, the International Herald Tribune reports.
“One of the things that experts like me have been baffled by is that, at least from what was reported to have been in that hotel room, I still haven’t heard which items would have justified all the trouble O.J. is in now,” Thomas O’Connell, editor of Sports Collectors Digest, tells the newspaper.
Simpson, 60, is facing 10 felony counts in the armed robbery case.
However, the Goldman family may recover more than many expected earlier, now that O.J. Simpson’s book, If I Did It, has become a best-seller. They own the rights to the ghostwritten account of Simpson’s hypothetical explanation of how he would have murdered his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Goldman, a male companion. Simpson reportedly calls the book fiction.
He was acquitted in 1995 of murder charges concerning the two killings but was subsequently found civilly liable.
