O.J Simpson has confessed to Oprah Winfrey that he murdered his former wife, it has been reported. The talk show host made headlines recently saying that one of her regrets was never having got the shamed former sportsman to confess to the killing. And it appears her wish may well have come true with reports Simpson has already told one of her producers in an interview from jail that he knifed ex-wife Nicole in self-defence - a confession he will now repeat to the talk show queen during a spectacular televised sit down interview.
Revealing all? Oprah is said to be lining up an historic interview with Simpson
The chat, which would be held in prison, would be a huge coup for Oprah, whose network, OWN, has suffered a massive hit in ratings recently.
Simpson is currently serving a nine-year sentence at Nevada’s Lovelock Correctional Centre, after he was convicted of robbery and kidnapping in Las Vegas in October 2008 after a botched heist to retrieve his memorabilia he said was stolen by dealers.
Coup: Will Oprah finally get the confession from O.J. Simpson that she is said to have been pining for?
He was famously acquitted in October 1995 of the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman despite huge amounts of evidence against him. According to the National Enquirer, the interview is set to be filmed after Simpson confessed he killed the pair in self-defence to a producer from inside prison. 'Oprah has been in touch with O.J. for the past year,' a source told the magazine. She contacted him in prison to explore the possibility that he might give her an interview. 'He has always been a big fan of hers, but for a long time he was reluctant to say he did the crime or give the details of how it happened.' According to the insider, Simpson recently decided to go through with the confession after he was contacted again by one of Oprah's producers. 'He told the producer: "Tell Oprah that yes, I did it. I killed Nicole, but it was in self-defence. She pulled a knife on me and I had to defend myself",' the insider was quoted as saying. He reportedly then went on to give a full account of what happened on the night of the murders on June 12 1994.
Confession? O.J. Simpson and his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, when they were a couple in 1993
Murdered: Ronald Goldman was an American waiter and an aspiring model
The former couple had got into an argument after Nicole was said to have snubber Simpson when he interrupted a meal she was having at a restaurant with their children. 'O.J. said he went home and kept getting angrier and angrier and worked himself into an absolute rage,' the source told the Enquirer.
Family: Simpson, pictured with Nicole and their children, Sydney Brook and Justin
Simpson allegedly told the producer he 'didn't like the way she treated me in front of the kids at the restaurant. I didn't like that she was routinely having guys have sex with her at her condo with the kids there. 'I went over there to give her a piece of my mind,' he was quoted as saying. When he arrived and no one answered at the house, he started pounding the door and shouting, according to the report. The door allegedly then swung open and Nicole was standing there with a kitchen knife in her hand. 'O.J. told the producer, "she was yelling go away! Go away! And waving the knife around at me. At one point she was lunging at me with the knife and I was just trying to talk to her. Nicole stepped out of the apartment - slashing the knife in the air. '"I was in such a rage that something just snapped. I couldn't take her constant taunting of me with other men or her using drugs and drinking while my kids were living with her. I went beserk. '"Before I knew what I was doing I took the knife away from Nicole and started slashing at her. I cut her over and over again until she was lifeless. I was shocked at my own anger - I had killed the woman I had loved for so long.."'
Evidence: A glove that was found at Simpson's home - originally said to have been the pair to another which was bloodied from the violent murders
Weapon: A German-made 15-inch knife similar to one originally said to have been sold to Simpson five weeks before the murders
He allegedly went on to tell the producer he also knifed Ron Goldman in self-defence as he tried to attack Simpson when he turned up at the home soon after and spotted Nicole's body on the floor. The shamed former sportsman was acquitted on October 3, 1995 of stabbing to death his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman after perhaps the most famous trial in modern history. After the bodies were found in a pool of blood on her driveway in Los Angeles driveway, Simpson, who has until now maintained he did not commit the murders, began a bizarre slowspeed car chase with police.
Custody: Simpson's original mugshot
Almost 100million people are thought to have watched the events live on television as the sports star held a gun to his head while being driven by a friend. He was allegedly headed for the Mexican border with $5,000 dollars and his passport when he was tracked by authorities. Eventually, 27 police cars trailed him until he surrendered on his mansion's driveway an hour and a half later. Despite huge amounts of evidence against Simpson, including bloodstains in his car, a glove holding DNA from the three, a sockengrained with traces of his victims' blood on his bedroom carpet and tapes of a terrified Nicole begging police for help as Simpson hit her - he was acquitted of the murders. If the confession is made to Oprah on television, Simpson will not, however, suffer legal consequences.
Under the law of double jeopardy, a second trial is forbidden following an acquittal.
With the prospect of another Michael Phelps Olympic gold rush still two years away, at the 2012 London Games, and the rubber suits that rewrote swimming's record books now banned, the sport's biggest news this year is of a seamier variety.
USA Swimming, the organization that fields the Olympic swim team, has been hit with a firestorm of allegations that it has done little to prevent or punish coaches accused of sexually abusing underage female swimmers.
The latest came Wednesday, when 28-year-old Jancy Thompson appeared at a news conference announcing she has filed a lawsuit alleging her former coach at a Northern California swim club committed a range of offenses, from unlawful sexual touching and harassment to molestation and sexual abuse, over a five-year period beginning when she was 15. USA Swimming is named as a defendant, along with coach Norm Havercroft. Attempts to reach Havercroft were not successful.
LAWSUIT: California coach, USA Swimming sued
"I am here today in hopes that USA Swimming will retain new leadership and clean up its program — get rid of abusive swim coaches and create a safe environment for young swimmers," she said.
Like the Thompson case, all of the incidents alleged in the five lawsuits pending against USA Swimming involve club-level coaches and athletes. Only one Olympian, 1972 Olympic medley champion Deena Deardurff Schmidt, has made any claims — saying at a March news conference that in the 1960s her coach repeatedly molested her — and she is not a plaintiff in any suit.
Nevertheless, swimming's problems have put the U.S. organizations that govern Olympic sports on alert, spurring them to unprecedented discussion and action on an issue that affects them all because of the hundreds of thousands of coaches and young athletes they oversee but one that they admit has been difficult to openly address before.
"What's happened recently has sensitized people to the fact that they may have issues in their own sport that they didn't know or didn't think about in the past," says Scott Blackmun, chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Lynn Johnson, who filed a lawsuit against USA Swimming in April, says his Kansas City firm has received calls in recent months alleging sexual misconduct by coaches training athletes in four other Olympic sports. No lawsuits have been filed.
"This is not just USA Swimming," Johnson says.
USA Gymnastics has been shadowed by the long-running case of gymnastics coach Steven Infante, who in May was found guilty of child rape and molestation, crimes he committed against underage female athletes in Connecticut and Massachusetts beginning in the early 1990s. USA Gymnastics revoked Infante's membership in 1998.
Putting an even finer point on the issue right now are the inaugural Youth Olympic Games, which open Saturday in Singapore. The USOC sent 82 athletes, ages 14-18, to the Games, designed to boost Olympic enthusiasm and participation among younger fans and athletes worldwide.
Nina Kemppel, an Olympic cross-country skier in charge of a USOC task force investigating the best ways to ensure safe training environments, including protections against sexual abuse of athletes, says her group's work "certainly is a good proactive measure to be taking with the Youth Olympics" premiering.
Robert Allard, Thompson's lawyer, says it is "beyond shocking" that an organization such as USA Swimming, the umbrella organization for swim clubs across the country with more than 300,000 members, did not have better protection, reporting or response procedures in place before this.
"It's mind boggling to me," he says. "The more I look into this, the more appalled I am that little, if anything, has been done to protect children."
'Reluctance to actually confront the issue'
USA Swimming executive director Chuck Wielgus, who agreed to be interviewed only via e-mail, notes that his organization has had a code of conduct for all members, including coaches, which "expressly prohibits physical or sexual abuse," in place since the late 1990s. He also says USA Swimming was one of the first Olympic sports governing bodies to implement background screening of coaches, starting in 2006.
Background screening beyond fingerprint checks has been available only in recent years, says Sally Johnson, executive director of the National Council of Youth Sports, of which USA Swimming is a member. The NCYS began working with the FBI on a pilot program in 2003.
Mike Saltzstein, an international swimming referee who was a vice president at USA Swimming from 2000 to 2006, claims neither the code of conduct nor the background screening in place during those years was very effective, since action could be taken only if there were criminal convictions.
Saltzstein also says that a child-protection policy passed by USA Swimming's board in 2004 never was fully implemented. The policy, Wielgus responds, had a "very limited scope, that focused primarily on staff and volunteers traveling on national team trips."
"I think it was reluctance to actually confront the issue because it's not one that fits cleanly into the swimming model of being a very good sport, which it is," Saltzstein says.
"I think there's a resistance because you just don't want to find some of your own members guilty, if you will, of these problems."
Counters Wielgus, executive director since 1997, "We have never been reluctant to face challenges, and we are always looking to improve."
After the allegations and lawsuits, USA Swimming is working with the Child Welfare League of America to strengthen its policies and procedures.
"What they had in place was, in 20/20 hindsight, not adequate," says Linda Spears, CWLA vice president of policy and public affairs. "But I don't think it was uncommon."
Spears adds that the alleged incident rate of misconduct among swim coaches "is not out of line with what's normal in an environment where there are kids and grownups in these kinds of roles."
Other sports taking actions
The volley of allegations, though, has set other Olympic sports organizations in motion.
USA Diving has expanded its requirements for criminal background checks, and USA Track & Field has begun a coaches registry, which requires elite-level coaches to adhere to a code of conduct and pass biennial background checks to be credentialed for USATF competitions.
The USATF measures were first proposed in 2006, in response to concerns about coaches dispensing performance-enhancing drugs. That same year, the organization began requiring background screening of youth-level coaches and volunteers — checks that now will be necessary for all coaches.
"Once the allegations and the findings came out at swimming, the board felt like we needed to accelerate" checks at the elite level, says Stephanie Hightower, USATF president and chairwoman.
The USOC in May put together the Kemppel-led task force, which is looking into safeguards against not only sexual abuse but also offenses such as bullying. The 10-member task force includes an FBI security consultant, a psychiatrist and a lawyer who have all worked on child-welfare cases.
"As an athlete myself, I didn't experience this directly," Kemppel says of sexual misconduct by coaches, "but I certainly saw incidents occur."
The group's findings, after approval by the USOC board, most likely this fall, will be used by the USOC and passed on to the national governing bodies of Olympic sports, such as USA Swimming and USATF, and other grass-roots sports organizations.
"Is it an issue that we probably needed to focus on whether or not the swimming thing happened? Yes, it was," Blackmun says.
The USOC, which doesn't control the various governing bodies in any way other than providing funding, can only suggest guidelines. Each sport will be responsible for putting safeguards in place and meting out punishments.
Of the Olympic sport organizations, USA Gymnastics is among the most progressive in having policies and procedures in place. It began keeping a list of banned coaches in the late 1980s. Criminal background checks began in 2007.
Even so, USA Gymnastics' "participant welfare policy," which includes very specific definitions of sexual abuse and mandates background screening for staff members and volunteers, wasn't adopted until June 2009.
"I don't think we were lax," says Steve Penny, USA Gymnastics president since 2005. "I just think that no one likes to talk about these issues. The unfortunate reality is these things do occur."
Alongside that reality is the difficulty that Olympic sport organizations, some of which have minimal staffing and get by on shoestring budgets, find in regulating every coach, staffer and volunteer working with every athlete, from youth to elite levels, across the country. In addition, background checks do not uncover behaviors such as bullying and sexual harassment or even sexual abuse unless there was a conviction.
"Realistically, you have to have the educational materials so that everybody surrounding the athlete or everybody in that sphere of influence understands the warning signs — so that it's not just left to the very end when they say, 'Why didn't the (governing body) do something?' " says Skip Gilbert, executive director of USA Triathlon and chairman of a group of Olympic sport executives.
Since the first lawsuit was filed in March, USA Swimming now publicly posts lists of coaches whose USA Swimming memberships have been revoked or suspended. It has adopted a policy to report all sexual-misconduct complaints involving a minor to law enforcement. The USA Swimming board will vote next month on proposals that expand background screening to all swim-club employees and volunteers.
USA Swimming will work to better educate all of its members, including parents, about preventing, identifying and reporting sexual abuse and might partner with an anonymous helpline for reporting incidents, according to Wielgus.
Creating a clearinghouse
Olympic sports leaders say an independent agency, similar to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, which handles the adjudication of all doping cases in the USA, could help to create consistent standards, track coaches who move from sport to sport and provide a central clearinghouse for complaints.
"We simply can't keep taking credit for gold medals and world records and yet not taking any accountability for what goes on to create those opportunities," says Saltzstein, the former USA Swimming vice president.
Sarah Ehekircher, who says she had a sexual relationship with her club swim coach for seven years beginning when she was 17, remembers feeling as if she had nowhere to turn during that time. She was rebuffed when she told a coach, she says.
"I do know as I got older and I was more conflicted with the relationship — because I didn't want to be with this man — when I was ready, there wasn't a place for me to go," says Ehekircher, 41. "It wasn't like I could call the USOC and say, 'Oh, blah, blah, blah.' "
Like others who have come forth with allegations and filed lawsuits, Ehekircher says she felt empowered to speak after a 14-year-old girl came forward last year with claims against veteran swim coach Andy King. King is serving a 40-year sentence after pleading no contest to 20 felony child molestation charges last September.
The International Investigations Unit arrests Aleksandar Cvetković after Bosnia files extradition request over suspicions that he was involved in 1995 mass murder.
He is suspected of "having personally taken part in the execution of more than 800 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys from the UN safe area", the Bosnian state prosecutor's office said in a statement.
According to evidence cited in the prosecutors' extradition request, Cvetkovic had "initiated the use of an M-84 machine-gun in order to speed up the killings".
Cvetkovic was arrested in Israel in January based on the Bosnian prosecutor’s claim that he participated in an eight-member firing squad involved in killing between 800 and 1,200 people at the Branjevo Military Agricultural Colony, about 20 miles northwest of Srebrenica. According to the Bosnian documentation, handcuffed and blindfolded Bosnian Muslim males were taken by buses to the Branjevo site during an operation lasting about 10 hours. When they left the buses, they were shot.
