O.J. Accepts Miniseries

By Stephen M. Silverman

07/01/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

O.J. Simpson is now accepting of the current CBS miniseries "American Tragedy," despite his earlier legal efforts to prevent its airing. "My lawyers were very upset about it, and from a legal point of view I thought it was wrong, and that's the only reason I went into the lawsuit," the former gridiron star, 53, told Los Angeles CBS affiliate KCBS-TV. In his suit, which a judge threw out of court, Simpson claimed that Lawrence Schiller, whom O.J. had hired to write a book telling his side of the story of the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, violated privacy agreements that the two had. CBS is advertising the Schiller-produced miniseries, which debuted on Sunday and continues tomorrow, as the movie that O.J. Simpson didn't want the public to see. As it is, Sunday's premiere episode attracted 12.5 million viewers, so the movie trailed well behind ABC's new rendition of the Helen Keller-Annie Sullivan story, "The Miracle Worker," which averaged 17.4 million viewers, according to estimated preliminary ratings from Nielsen.