“Killed them all, of course.”
OK, so we don’t quite get a Bob-Durst-at-the-urinal confession out of new Peacock documentary series OJ’s Accomplice, but directors Ari Mark (Amy Bradley Is Missing) and Sumit David (Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy) captured an interesting hot-mic moment of their own during production.
The two-part docuseries resurfaces the somewhat forgotten alternative theory that O.J. Simpson was aided by another man in the 1994 slayings of the former football star’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. (Simpson was acquitted in the double homicide, but counterpoint: be serious.) The front-running suspect in that alt theory is now Joey Ippolito, a former drug smuggler and friend of Simpson’s. Simpson and Ippolito are both deceased.
One of the key characters — and “characters” is definitely the right term for the participants in this particular project — in OJ’s Accomplice is Charlie Ehrlich, another friend of Simpson’s and another ex-con. Ehrlich sat for Ample Entertainment’s cameras at the strip club he manages, The Peppermint Hippo. As the conversation wrapped, David told Ehrlich that production would need to “get some B-roll,” and then both men headed to the bar. Ehrlich was still mic’d up — and now loosened up.
“You didn’t bring it up, so I’m not going to bring it up,” Ehrlich, who was still wearing a microphone pack and within camera’s frame, said to David from his stool.
And then he definitely brought it up.
“But yeah. I was very good friends with his brother Lou (Ippolito),” Ehrlich continued. “Do you know what Lou told me? He told me that a month before Joey died, he took him to Italy — took Joe to Italy. Joe admitted that he was involved [in the Simpson/Goldman murders].”
The Hollywood Reporter asked Mark if Ehrlich was aware that his audio was still being captured.
“He knew he was mic’d up,” Mark told The Hollywood Reporter. “What happens quite often is, you know, folks are mic’d up and get comfortable. I don’t think he had forgotten that he was mic’d up necessarily, but I think he probably started speaking more casually.”
Mark says he also believes Ehrlich knew the cameras were still rolling.
David was not the first person to whom Ehrlich relayed Lou Ippolito’s story. For starters, Mark said Lou Ippolito told production the same story — just not on camera. (Ample Entertainment did capture some footage of Lou Ippolito, but he asked them to not use it, Mark told THR.)
But Ehrlich also has a big mouth, if you didn’t get that sense by now.
“It was like a deathbed admission. Louie told Charlie, Charlie told me,” Ehrlich’s friend Joe Spitaleri says in a separate OJ’s Accomplice interview. “I was scared to bring it up because Charlie asked me not to.”
Charlie broke his own rule, so.
Simpson in court in 1994.
POOL-/AFP/Getty Images
Not everyone is looking forward to OJ’s Accomplice, which premieres both of its episodes Sunday morning on Peacock.
In an email sent earlier this month to THR (and other news outlets), Joey Ippolito’s widow Nicole Ippolito ripped OJ’s Accomplice as a “woefully misguided project.”
“Actual vetted facts prove this to be another hoax feeding off of the those who are not here to defend themselves,” Nicole Ippolito wrote, calling the docuseries’ sources “scam artists” and “drug addicts” participating as a “money grab.”
Mark tells THR Ehrlich was only paid for the rights for archival photographs and materials, which is a standard arrangement for documentaries. He was not paid for an interview.
THR attempted to reach Nicole Ippolito for comment.
At the time of Nicole Ippolito’s protest, OJ’s Accomplice was set for a December release. This past Tuesday, plans were changed.
“We wanted to make sure this documentary remained a part of the timely news cycle conversation,” a Peacock rep told THR, referring (primarily) to a New York Times article that covers the same theory using much of the same source material.
The timing of the article wasn’t great for OJ’s Accomplice, though it does lend some credence to its newsworthiness. THR asked Mark if getting scooped like that was “a bummer.”
“Look, I mean, I’m always juggling my ego against the success of a show, and I’ve definitely over the years gotten pretty used to — and I’m saying this not with bitterness — but gotten pretty used to not getting credited for some hard work,” he said. “It’s not a new thing for me. So, you know, I think the bummer was not being able to piggyback the way that I would like off the credibility that the New York Times brings to this.”
Mark says he helped with the NYT piece. He would have appreciated a bit more cooperation on a coordinated release.
THR asked Mark what he personally believes happened on the evening of June 12, 1994. He definitely believes Simpson was the main guy who committed the murders, which Mark feels were more “premeditated” than most people think. For any “objective” person, he added, it is more “logical” than not to believe that Simpson had a helper on the scene.
OJ’s Accomplice is now available to stream on Peacock.