Former publishing idiot savant Judith Regan is suing the News Corporation for $100,000,000 for smearing her personal reputation in her recent firing at head of ReganBooks division at Harper Collins. The Harper Collins publishing house is a wholly owned subsidiary of the News Corporation which is wholly owned by the uncontested master blaster of the fake newz: Rupert Murdoch.
Ms. Regan is alleging that an unnamed party or parties at News Corporation offered her hush money to conceal her tryst with Rudy Giuliani’s longtime sidekick Bernie Kerik from Justice Department investigators. When Ms Regan refused the hush money and flipped on Bernie to federal prosecutors, Ms Regan alleges the order to dismiss her came from the top of News Corporation’s food chain. The termination order for Ms Regan may have even been the sultan of schlock newz himself, Rupert Murdoch. Rupert claims to personally authorize the firings of all division heads, so what gives? Is Rupert involved in offering a hush money payment to Ms. Regan to obstruct justice in an ongoing federal investigation?
Ms. Regan achieved notoriety of for her unerring instincts in signing on big ticket authors to Harper Collins until she tempted fate by providing to a $600,000 advance to OJ Simpson by laundering the advance into a bogus trust fund in the name of Simpson’s adult children designed specifically as a conduit to conceal Simpson’s income from the California court ordered lien on all of his assets and income, as compensation to the families of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown for Simpson’s involvement in their wrongful deaths.
In the wake of her firing, Judith Regan told friends she was escorted out by a sheriff, when in fact the guards waited for her while employees scurried down the back stairs with some of her personal effects. "They sent men with guns to the office!" she told friends. "Well, you know, darling, I would go out in style." Ms. Regan's description of her firing was typical of the swashbuckling bravado of Judith Regan, the self styled Xenia the warrior woman of the far right.
Regan used the Xenia alpha female prototype to cultivate her own personality cult of doting acolytes at Harper Collins. The GOP no shortage of fatherly Stalinist authority figures to keep the death march of the Republican lemmings on a straight course toward the Cliffs of Dover. Judith Regan deserves credit for breaking the glass ceiling and making it possible for a fatherly female Stalinist authority figure to steer the pack of rodents to their own demise.
Judith Regan has to be the hands down winner of the award for Best Over-the -Top Performance by a Right Wing Woman. Not even Anne Coulter could touch Judith Regan's histrionic performance as conservative publishing house b*tch from hell.
Regan was a lowly stenographer at Harper Collins who caught the attention of Mr. Murdoch by tirelessly promoting the writing aspirations of radio host Rush Limbaugh, early on. Even if Limbaugh's books were shameless sub literate drivel and right wing propaganda, Rush's own personality cult of right wing acolytes had a gluttonous appetite for his infinite supply of hateful commentary. Rush confirmed devolutionary theory by becoming Harper Collins' bestselling author.
Ms. Regan was rewarded for her role in signing Mr. Limbaugh to Harper Collins. At the time of her firing Regan was the overlord of her own division of Harper Collins called ReganBooks. Ms. Regan had been known to frequently scream, "I have the biggest cock in the building" from behind her desk. [Whatever... anything you say, Ms. Regan].
Ms. Regan certainly wasn't your father's Republican wife. She was a post-feminist wild ass riot grrrrrrl in a world of Republican bad boyz.
Ms Regan had her own pony tailed, heavily tattooed live-in trophy boyfriend Jeff Stone a "wardrobe consultant" and neo-author of the Chic Simple books on how like a fashionista on a paltry clothing budget of less than $50,000. Stone is also noted for prattling on about golden vaginas and the towering granite obelisk of male sexuality, to any audience willing to suffer though one of his bizarre and intellectually baffling lectures on the hardness factor in male sexuality.
Ms. Reagan's circle of Republican friends seemed be to be in the grip of a contagious and malevolent virus that was feasting on the brains of Manhattan's vanguard conservative intelligentsia. The conscious linear, logical, results oriented regions of the Republican brain had been devoured by this virus and the right wing mind was becoming one big nerve center of screaming primal insatiable perversion and exotic sexual fetishes. Was this virus the triumph of the insidious lust of the Freudian id over the suppressed desires of the Republican conscious mind?
Ms. Grigoriandis writes
A few years ago, after I wrote a story for this magazine on the then-burgeoning Internet-dating scene, timid young editors from ReganBooks began to call to ask if I wanted to write books on various topics, such as the man with the biggest penis in the world. Um, no. Regan asked me to lunch, and we instantly bonded.
[Note: Ms. Grigoriandis is being facetious for those unacquainted with her biting satirical style of journalism].
Ms. Grigoriadis continues:
To a woman, there’s something enticing about Regan’s anti–plastic surgery, pro-sex feminist stance, mixed with a She-Devil-ish anger at the power men have in the world (even though she sometimes expresses it by saying that she’s going to eat their testicles).
She told me that I reminded her of herself when she was younger and that she could give me a great job, show me the ropes, take me on a tour—perhaps one day I would even become as powerful as her. "I used to be a writer, too, but I wanted to do more in the world—don’t you?" she asked. Yes! I told her I was worried about managing a career and a family, and it seemed like I could have only one or the other. You can do it all, she said—don’t let anyone trick you into thinking it’s a choice. Wow.
Aren’t you sick of playing by men’s rules, having male editors, writing about what men want you to write about? she asked. She was building her own gang, her own posse, to take on the publishing industry, and I was going to be her capo. We had to make our own group, she said, like the Jews.
Ms. Grigoriadis goes on to describe Judith Regan as a walking cartoon whose own fall from grace began long before signing O.J. Simpson to write If I Did It. Mr. Murdoch was apparently fed up with this sassy right wing vixen occupying the corner office who was screaming about her big cock was all day long, in the same manner of all the other male psychotics that Murdoch appointed to head up sub-divisions of News Corporation.
Ms. Regan had crossed the line with her Freudian references to her alleged phallus on the job. But Murdoch's primary agenda was silence this impertinent motor-mouthed Lillith from boasting about "nailing" Bernie Kerik, protégé of presidential hopeful and friend of Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani. Murdoch dispatched a team of "job coaches" collect evidence and exorcise the she-Devil from her corner office. Ms. Regan is now alleging that New Corporation offered to pay her hush money to present false testimony to Justice Department about the nature of her relationship with Kerik, which Ms. Regan claims to have turned down.
Journalist Ms. Grigoriadis claims that none other than Roger Ailes, president of another News Corporation division, Fox News, was the engineer of the Regan coup d'état at Harper Collins. And it wasn't the O.J. fiasco that put Ms. Regan in the cross-hairs of the Murdoch. The firing of Judith Regan was an act of political treachery plotted by Roger Ailes and authorized by Rupert Murdoch to destroy Ms. Regan's career for ratting out Kerik to federal prosecutors.
Ms. Grigoriadis wrote:
Many have suggested that Roger Ailes was the architect of this strategy, given the fact that a lot of the heat was coming from people within the News Corp. universe, notably from Ailes protégés like Bill O’Reilly. And a lot of it, in an organization filled with loose cannons, and looser lips, was simply piling on, not rational corporate behavior at all. The tale of the O.J. book, of a powerful publisher transgressing a simple and obvious moral line for profit, was perfect for Fox’s shrill commentators—even if it did happen to be about one of their own.
Coincidentally [or maybe not!] Roger Alies is the former Republican operative that whose notorious smears of Democratic presidential candidates [Willie Horton and the Dukakis Tank Boy ads] were the tactics appropriated by future Republican swift boaters everywhere. The fall of Judith Regan was all too typical of the high profile media pile-ups and hit jobs done on Democratic candidates by Roger Ailes in his heyday as a Republican operative. Ailes' fingerprints and DNA were all over the crime scene.
You have to laugh when disgruntled, borderline psychotic ex-Murdoch employee files a lawsuit alleging that she was smeared by a nameless News Corporation employee, who is obviously Roger Ailes.
I think the Regan flap is an excellent example of how the smear mongers of the far right have begun to cannibalize each other to in an orgy of recrimination in the final winter of their discontent over the failure of their patriarch, George W. Bush. The Montgomery Burns wannabes of the Republican right have begun to release the hounds on each other.
I hope Judith Regan wins her civil suit and Roger Ailes is sent to the slammer for tampering with a federal witness and Rupert Murdoch's American assets are frozen by the Justice Department before he's deported back to Australia as an undesirable alien. One can only dream of that kind of poetic justice.
As a footnote, Judith Regan got the Devil Wears Prada psycho-boss treatment from a former employee when Birdie Clark's well received first novel Because She Can hit shelves in February 2007. In the novel, publisher Vivian Grant is a thinly veiled caricature of Ms. Regan's Xenia warrior woman. The author not only presents a fictional account the L' Affaire d' Kerik, but mentions an additional "Vivian Grant" sexual tryst with an unidentified but prominent New York City politician who liked to dress in drag. Hmmm