Judith Regan is the book publisher who
worked for Rupert Murdoch and who he fired in a publicity storm two
years ago. For most of her career, Judith has been, at least among the
meek and meeker of the book industry, a media phenomenon. The pitch
of her anger, the grossness of her language, the crudeness of her
sexual exploits and the volubility with which she talked about them,
along with the huge sales, high profile, and great toxicity of some
of her authors—most notably Rush Limbaugh—kept her in the gossip
columns, and on the lips of the Manhattan media class, for 15 years.
But she’s been quiet since Rupert sacked her—except for
the occasional reports about her lawsuit against News Corp.
(the lawyers she hired to file the suit sued her when she didn’t
pay them). “What’s happened to Judith?” has been the fading
question.
Well, she’s back, as of yesterday,
in the Daily News gossip pages attacking me. (The Daily News is a
lesser gossip venue than Murdoch’s New York Post, but Judith has
lost her gossip privileges at the Post, where she is persona non grata
because of her fight with Murdoch.) Judith’s vociferous complaint
is that she appears in an uncomplimentary light in my book about
Murdoch.
I would disagree with this. I believe all her force, moxie,
and operatic nature, are given due acknowledgement. The more curious
media point has to do with the way people who have existed in the
media can see themselves in a way that is so dramatically different
from the reputations that they have helped cultivate. According to
George Rush, the Daily News’ gossip columnist, Judith raged to him
that I was the vulgar and exploitive party, while she herself is a
humanitarian, busy, since her exit from News Corp., educating the
children of Africa.
Her additional point is that I have
been, she says, obsessed with her for 30 years. Certainly I have
often written about her. I first mentioned her in print—long before
she became notorious—in a magazine article in 1976. Subsequent to
that, she made a cameo in my first book. In 1999, I wrote a column
about her in New York magazine. Then, another column about her in
Vanity Fair in 2007. And now, she appears in my current book.
She
told George Rush that I am particularly obsessed with her sex life.
And while quite a sex life it’s been, I have been even more
interested in her media life, and the ways in which it’s possible
to make a fine living in the media as a train wreck. Indeed, I have
written about her often—more gleefully, I’d say, than
obsessively—for the same reason that she has gotten herself so
often into the press. She’s a great character: malevolent, absurd,
ridiculous, vengeful, comical, and successful to boot. She’s a
figure of our time. It’s been my good fortune as a writer to have
first met her in college and to have followed her since.
Her further point is the she’s going
to sue me—one of her frequent techniques for attention and
vengeance. Indeed, she named me in the suit she filed against News
Corp. after she was fired. That suit maintained that News Corp. had
ousted her because, through her affair with New York City police
commissioner, Bernard Kerik, she had gotten dirt on Rudy Giuliani,
and hence News Corp. was trying to shut her up so she wouldn’t
damage Giuliani’s presidential aspirations (fyi: from my interviews
with Murdoch, I know that, in fact, he’s had no interest whatsoever
in Giuliani’s political future).
I was an aside: she claimed that
my portrait of her in Vanity Fair was the result of a deal I’d made
with Murdoch—if I’d make fun of Judith, in return, Rupert would
give me unfettered access for a biography. Although it might seem
that, since her last lawyers are suing her for their fee, she might
have problems getting other lawyers to launch yet another suit
against me, I’m game. These will be some juicy depositions. I know
the questions to ask. It’s a writer’s dream.
As for Roger Ailes, who, in the Daily
News denies the account I offer in the book that he went on a date
with Judith and that it was the scariest three hours of his life:
Well…hmmm. He told me this in Michael’s restaurant during a lunch
he and I had together in the fall of 2003. Judith was also in the
restaurant and she had a waiter bring over a note to Roger, which
seemed to annoy him, provoking his story about the date and other
details of his animus toward her.
He does not deny that they had
dinner—but says now it wasn’t a date. Given that they did have a
dinner, that he has more reason to prevaricate than I do (who would
want to confess to having a date with someone who now refers to him
as “Humpty Dumpty”), that he is wounded because I say in my book
that Rupert Murdoch has grown increasingly uncomfortable with Fox
News, and that he has made his reputation and fortune by shading and
spinning the facts to his advantage, who you gonna believe?
