NBC's Friday night special, "Best-Sellers: Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them: The Relationship" doesn't really have anything to do with the O.J. Simpson case. But Susan Forward, the author and psychologist behind the best seller, believes she has special insight into the Simpson marriage. And ever since Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found murdered, she's been talking about it to anyone who'll listen.

"Nicole came to see me because her attorney read the book and she read it also. She said, `This is the story of my marriage,' " says Forward, who was on the phone from Los Angeles to promote the special, airing from 8 to 10 p.m. on WMAQ-Channel 5. "She was extremely distressed, extremely distraught, but the problem was she wasn't ready to hear what she needed to."

Forward met with Simpson twice in 1992.

"The last time I saw her, I knew in my gut that I wasn't going to see her again," says Forward, who told her story to the Los Angeles police, the Los Angeles media and national press - including the National Enquirer.

"They (the Enquirer) offered me money for an exclusive, but I turned them down," says Forward. "But I did an interview because I want this story out there to save women. . . . Anyway, what instrument reaches blue-collar women better than the Enquirer? These are people who read that and watch television talk shows. I'm not embarrassed at all."

Forward, an outspoken woman who approaches her subject with Messianic zeal, says that she herself suffered through a marriage with an angry, abusive man who belittled her and her work.

"I married a very charming, gorgeous, charismatic man who had tremendous issues around dependent young women," says Forward, a televi sion and movie actress in the '60s. "In the beginning it was OK, but when I went back to school he started to yell and scream and slam doors. . . . As I started to get successful, the abuse started to escalate."

Forward went on to found the Susan Forward Therapy Center, host a daily talk-radio show that lasted for six years and write five books, including Betrayal of Innocence, Toxic Parents, Obsessive Love and Money Demons. In Friday's special, based on her latest book, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, she wants to convey the idea that a man can be abusive without ever laying a hand on his wife.

"I'm not talking about somebody who has a bad mood once in a while," says Forward. "I'm talking about someone who uses his anger in very demeaning, belittling, frightening ways on an ongoing basis and grinds down his partner to where she loses her confidence, her esteem, herself."

In the case of O.J. and Nicole Simpson, Forward says Nicole was trapped in a dangerous relationship but was not ready to break completely free.

"She was pretty alone. She was not getting a lot of support from her family," says Forward. "She was a naive, very simple girl without any skills at all other than her looks. He was her whole life, and as with any abusive man, he stripped her of anything she cared about. He was the center of her universe."

Forward, who defines emotional abuse as "any behavior that is designed to intimidate and control another human being," says the special combines drama and "reality," borrowing elements from talk shows, newsmagazines, soap operas and TV movies. And although Forward, who will host the show with actress Lindsay Wagner, and NBC both say it was in the works long before Nicole Simpson was murdered, the high-profile case gives the program an extra measure of gravity - as well as an extra public relations boost.

Meanwhile, Forward is gratified that the media are suddenly paying attention to the problem of abusive relationships.

"We've never had such a concentrated effort before as we have because of this case," says Forward. "That's the good that came out of it. I'm just terribly, terribly sad that this woman had to be a martyr to this cause."