As Resnick Faces Trial by Tabloid, Her Message Is Likely to Be Lost

Faye Resnick nervously awaits tabloid hell.

In the city where tabloid journalism still reigns, New York’s fiercest and most unmannerly snoopers probably will engulf Resnick when, as is likely, she meets face to face with O.J. Simpson, the man she insists killed her friend Nicole Brown Simpson.

The occasion may come today when she gives a deposition in a New York law office for the wrongful death lawsuits filed against Simpson by Nicole Simpson’s survivors and the family of the other victim, Ron Goldman. Her lawyer has told her Simpson will attend.

“Oh my God,” she said when I asked her how she felt about it Friday. But, she said, “I can’t worry about O.J. Simpson. It increases my level of fear but I can’t let this man get in the way of justice.”

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I can already imagine the scene: Cameras, microphones and hysterically screaming reporters will engulf her outside the law office. Tabloids will offer huge amounts of money to hotel maids for the contents of her garbage cans. Bribes will be offered for information from cabbies, waiters, drugstore clerks, friends, enemies and anyone else linked to Resnick.

Of course, it was Resnick herself who helped touch off the storm.

Resnick was a friend of Nicole Brown Simpson, one of a group of fast-lane Brentwooders who divided much of their time among luxurious vacations, the gym, the newest restaurant and the caffe latte at Starbucks.

Her association with Nicole Simpson was enough to put her in the case. But she vaulted to stardom when she wrote the most lurid book to come out of the Simpson case, “Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted.”

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It was a tell-all account of life among the Brentwood set, with details of drug use and promiscuous sex. Resnick told of her own drug addiction. She said Nicole had many affairs. “Men were her drug of choice,” she wrote.

She also said Simpson abused Nicole. “I truly believed that O.J. Simpson had murdered Nicole,” she wrote. “It was as preordained as the path of the sun across the sky.”

Since his acquittal, Simpson has fought back, pointing the finger at Resnick.

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Pressured by reporters to make good on his promise to find the killer, Simpson said: “The answers to these murders are in the world of Faye Resnick.” In other words, the chase is over. All the cops have to do is check out Resnick, her friends and the drug dealers who serviced the Brentwood set.

I talked to her about the book.

Looking back on it, she said she has “many regrets” about writing “Private Diary.”

“It exposed Nicole’s private life, as well as mine,” she said, “and no one likes to do that. But one of our problems in society is that we want to keep our closets closed, and we don’t address the core issues and the core issue in this case is domestic abuse.

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“Yes, we did go on a lot of vacations, we lived a very opulent life, but there were a lot of times of seriousness,” she said. One activity was working on a friend’s campaign for the Beverly Hills Board of Education. Another was helping at a skid row mission for women financed by Anne Douglas, wife of actor Kirk Douglas.

“I came there to help in any way possible,” she said. “We had these group meetings, to let them know that you might have a drug problem but . . . there was light at the end of the tunnel.”

The torrid “Private Diary” reached many people who don’t ordinarily buy books, she said, “because it was written that way. What they got in the end was a very deep message that you don’t deserve this [an abusive relationship]. Get out of this,” she said.

But because of the drugs-and-sex stories, she said, “people don’t quite take my message seriously, which is disheartening. I have been maligned by the media, by the O.J. camp. Everything good in my life has been taken away.”

Resnick expects the deposition process to make things worse. “They will expose all the details of my intimate life,” she said. “Everything in a deposition is made public. It’s disheartening. You can’t win in a deposition. Nobody can.”

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Resnick has a new book out, called “Shattered: In the Eye of the Storm.” It is an account of her experiences with the media horde, and how she felt it ignored her message about domestic abuse and ridiculed her story.

“ ‘Shattered’ is a very important book,” she told me. Its message is that “you don’t have to succumb to the pressure of intimidation tactics. You don’t have to stay with dysfunction.”

But you can bet that message will be ignored or trivialized in the next few days by a media horde in pursuit of the Manhattan faceoff of Resnick and Simpson.