Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has scrapped a new book and TV interview in which OJ Simpson offered a hypothetical account of how he would have killed his ex-wife and her friend.
In a dramatic reversal days after his News Corp announced plans for the book and a Fox television special, Mr Murdoch said he decided "this was an ill-considered project" and apologised for any harm caused.
OJ Simpson holds up his hands before the jury after putting on a new pair of gloves similar to the infamous 'bloody gloves' during his double-murder trial in Los Angeles in 1995
The book, titled If I Did Itand originally due to go on sale on November 30th, was touted as a first-hand account by the former football star picturing himself at the scene of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
All copies of the book are now to be pulped.
Announcement of the book deal and TV special last Tuesday sparked a outrage from members of the publishing community, as well as media commentators and relatives of the murder victims, who accused Mr Murdoch's media empire of seeking to cash in on tragedy.
The book was to have been preceded by a two-part, prime-time Fox television interview of Simpson conducted by his publisher, Judith Regan, whose Harpercollins imprint, like Fox, is a unit of News Corp.
Fox said the taped interview featured Simpson, who has always maintained his innocence, describing hypothetically how he would have carried out the killings had he been the one who committed the crime.
"I'm going to tell you a story you've never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it," Simpson wrote in press materials for the book.
Simpson was acquitted of murder charges in 1995
after a sensational criminal trial that was broadcast live on television worldwide.
Despite the acquittal, a civil court jury in 1997 found him liable for the deaths and awarded the victims' families $33.5 million in damages, which Simpson has vowed never to voluntarily pay. Little of the judgment has ever been collected.