Rudys Pal Kerick Gave New York Harbor Defense Secrets to Arabs
\nFox Boss Roger Ailes Covered Up, Urged Publisher to Fib to FBI to Protect His Candidate Gulianis Reputation<\/p>\n
Bombshell Revelations As Judith Regan’s Lawsuit Against Rupert Murdoch Is Settled
\nFormer N.Y. Mayor Had Asked Bush to Nominate His – Disgraced Partner Kerick to Helm Homeland Security
\nREGAN HAD TAPED AILES COVERUP CONVERSATIONS
\nS.F. Lawyer, Private Eye In on Case<\/p>\n
An A r g o n a u t I n v e s t g a t I v e E s s a y
\nBy Warren Hinckle
\n@ 2008 argonaut360.com<\/p>\n
Rudy Giuliani, endorsing John MCain for president at the Ronald Regan Library on Wednesday, pledged he will campaign for McCain unless I’m in trouble.\u009d There was media speculation about what he meant. Heres the trouble:<\/p>\n
It was a perfect night on the West Side and the Princes party yacht was at the ready. New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerick glided up the gangplank with his date, the prominent publisher Judith Regan.
\nThe sky was a necklace of stars and Manhattan traffic was a distant growl against the soothing thrum of the yachts motors. Regan was in basic black and diamond earrings. The bald headed Kerick carried a briefcase. In it was a present for a Prince.<\/p>\n
The Saudi Prince was a friend of the Commissioner, who had previously freelanced in Saudi Arabia on security matters and was available when the Kingdom called.
\nRudy Giuliani’s Police Commissioner opened his briefcase. The gift for his Prince pal was a copy of the highly classified national security-defense plans forthe porous harbor of New York City, plans of which Kerick was justifiably proud. On the yacht that night in the harbor there were drinks and hilarity. The commissioner and the publisher eventually regained dry land. The next morning, Kerick had a hangover and Regan had a forgotten second copy of the classified plans for the defense of New York Harbor abandoned in the trunk of her car.
\nRoger Ailes, the Fox News chief, has a nose like a cheerleaders busted baton but can smell a problem a county away. When Reagan told him about the curious incident on the Saudi Princes yacht – Regan was then doing a talk show on Fox News -she said Ailes cautioned her not let this magnificent indiscretion on Kerick’s part become public knowledge. That would not only hurt Kerick, Ailes said, it could irreparably harm the future political career of Ailes old friend, then- Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was as closely joined to his Police Commissioner, and later business partner, Kerick as a fraternal twin.<\/p>\n
Ailes, a shrewd man and a former Nixon enabler, had handicapped his buddy Giuliani as a favorite to become the Republican Partys next presidential nominee. Her boss urged talk show hostess Regan to maintain TV silence about the curious incident on the yacht and other peek a boos of Guliani’s BFF Kerick, but the notoriously ball-busting media queen was uncharacteristically noncommittal. Ailes seemed nonplussed about the lack of any solemn vow of silence and subsequently Regan’s star status at Fox began to dim internally. The makeup artists available to all Fox commentators were no longer readily available to her. Studio gossips broadcast it about that Ailes did not consider her a team player. Ailes began a stealth campaign to portray Regan as a loopy Leona Helmsley-type to diminish any damage she might be able to do to Guliani by revealing Kerick’s importunities. Judith Regan had become a woman who knew too much.<\/p>\n
A Tangled Web. There are some interesting sinuous if not sinister relationships involved in this story: The innovative, profane-speak Regan \u201c she talks like a man, then- boyfriend Kerick told a magazine writer profiling Regan – had her own publishing imprint at, and was making tons of money for, the book publisher HarperCollins, which is owned by the hands-on media mogul Rupert Murdoch through his international News Corporation. Ailes is the evil genius behind the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfair and balanced hawkish Fox News Network, which is also owned by Murdoch, who usually sits on the right side of the table. The Murdoch-owned New York Post backed Mayor Giuliani, who returned the favor in spades by pressuring Time-Warner’s cable operation in New York City to find a broadcast slot for the then-in nativity Fox News, even unto offering to surrender one of the citys two public-interest channels to make room for Fox; this provoked a state Supreme Court judge to admonish the Giuliani administration for attempting to reward a friend with city property. Mayor Guliani did the honors at Ailes’s wedding.<\/p>\n
The Ailes-Guliani-Kerick triangle was in something of a waltz with history. Ailes was a political consultant on Guliani’s first, losing mayoral campaign in 1989 when Kerick was Rudys chauffeur. The termed-out Guliani, after an abortive attempt at ditching the city elections scheduled for November of 2001 so he could stay on as post 9\/11 Mayor for Life, formed Gulianni Partners and rewarded his loyal police commissioner Kerick with a partnership. The new firm lobbied for News Corporation in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
When Ailes began to use the Fox Network to promote Giuliani as the Republican presidential heir apparent, Fox News became so unbalanced in its coverage of America’s Mayor that capital cloakroom snoots began calling it the Rudy News Network. Murdoch with the prudence of a master capitalistic duly flirted with Hilary Clinton, but Fox was all-in for Gulianni as early as 2004.<\/p>\n
Giuliani was the Godfather of two of Kerick’s children, and was Godfather to Kerick is another sense. In his autobiography, The Lost Son, which was published by Regan Books, Giuliani’s former driver tells in an off-hand manner how the Mayor summoned him to Gracie Mansion to share a bottle of red and offered the former military policeman a high job in the citys Corrections Department; a Giuliani staffer came up and kissed him on the cheek in a Mafia-style welcome to the mayoral family and Kerick remarks that it dawned upon him he was becoming made.<\/p>\n
It is clear that any bad news about Kerick would be bad news about Giuliani. When the FBI began vetting Kerick for his nomination as head of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004 \u201c a nomination which the overbearing former mayor had urged upon the hapless sitting president \u201c Ailes again talked to Regan about Kerick. This time Regan was armed with a tape recorder. Ailes suggested that, should the FBI came calling, she would be well off keeping her fast-moving lip zipped about Kerick’s more, er, eccentric behavior. Ailes used both a stick and a carrot; with sugar plum visions dancing in his head of a Giuliani presidency, he described for the book publisher the perks and White House access that would be open to her if she remained a good girl. Don’t screw with Rudy,\u009d he told her.<\/p>\n
The incident on the yacht occurred in the fall of 2001. Regan got to know the Police Commissioner while editing his book and embarked on an adulterous relationship with the married Kerick in the spring of that year. After the events of 9\/11 their trysts were at Kerick’s convenience at a city apartment in lower Manhattan that had been designated for the relaxation of exhausted workers during the massive cleanup at the site of the (formerly)World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
By the time of Ailes second conversation with Regan about protecting Giuliani, Kerick was by now her ex-paramour. She dumped him in 2002 — \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He was a bad lay and a bad drunk, a couple glasses of wine and his security guys had to take him home,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said the famously blunt Ms. Regan. The fact that the affair was over increased the urgency of Ailes entreaties to silence Regan as ex-girlfriends are commonly considered more inclined to candor than current lovers; Ailes has attempted to paint Regan as a loose canon and now was understandably concerned that she might actually become one. Some of his words on Regan’s tape could be construed by a fair witness as dancing dangerously on the edge of subordination of perjury.<\/p>\n
The post-nomination vetting of Rudys man was cut short when Kerick abruptly withdrew his nomination, copying a plea from Clinton-era nominee fiascos by blaming a nanny problem. The reality was that investigators were uncovering major financial irregularities, including mob connections, about Kerick present and past. Kerick was subsequently indicted on multiple fraud charges and awaits trial in federal court. (When asked last fall about media reports that, when America’s Mayor, Giuliani had received a memo warning about his Police Commissioner’s connections with a suspected mob business, the then- GOP frontrunner said he didn’t recall any such memo.)<\/p>\n
Giuliani’s presidential campaign imploded in January and ended this week, but the nefarious events described in this story took place when Rudy was a real Contender and the presumptive champ. They are instructive about what the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fair and balanced\u00e2\u20ac\u009d network will do to patty-cake a favored politician.<\/p>\n
Last November 13, Judith Regan sued HarperCollins and News Corporation et al for wrongful dismissal from her powerful publishing position in the aftermath of the aborted publication of the O.J. Simpson tell-all acquired by Regan. The lawsuit charged that a unnamed senior NewsCorp executive \u201c it was Ailes \u201chad solicited her to lie to federal investigators about Bernard Kerick to protect the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani, and that the News Corporation conglomerate had conspired to defame her. The lawsuit did not specify what Ms. Regan knew that would so embarrass Kerick and Giuliani (the yacht incident, perhaps?), said she had proof of her allegations, but did not reveal that she had tape recordings of Ailes.<\/p>\n
Ex-Publisher’s Suit Plays a Giuliani-Kerik Angle, was the headline on the New York Times front page story; Guliani tossed off the charges as Page 6 tabloid gossip.<\/p>\n
At the time of Regan’s lawsuit last November Giuliani was leading other GOP candidates in national polls and was almost universally considered to have a primo shot at grabbing the Republican gold ring. Once the lawsuit was filed things quickly turned ugly. A prominent West Coast attorney who is close to both Murdoch and Regan relayed to Ms. Regan messages from Ailes & Co. to the import that Ailes was mad, mad as hell and unnamed adversaries would have my blood on the sidewalk.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d She characteristically sent a message back that if they wanted her blood on the sidewalk, they’d have to lick it off.\u009d Regan nonetheless became so concerned about her safety and that of her children \u201c after their breakup Kerick had stalked her teenage daughter \u201c that in December she visited famed San Francisco private eye Jack Paladino to discuss protective measures. The Bay Area became Regan’s bull pen. In January she hired a new powerhouse attorney, the much-feared Joe Cochette, whose law firm is in Burlingame, to replace her original New York lawyers. Left Coast players were on the field in an east coast lawsuit.<\/p>\n
Last Friday Cochette settled the lawsuit out of court for a sum considerably north of the $6.5 million News Corporation was reported in media blogs to have originally put on the table. In a settlement statement News Corporation allowed that Ms. Regan did not say anything that was anti-Semitic,\u009d and stated flatly that Ms. Regan is not anti-Semitic.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This was an extradionary admission.: the main reason HarperCollins gave for terminating the fiery publisher in November of 2006 was that she had made anti-Semitic statements.. The anti-Semitic charges were manufactured and spread throughout the media by News Corporation executives in a brazen manner rarely seen since the repeated publications of the fraudulent Protocols of The Elders of Zion,
\nThis narrative of the Fox News coverup – how these outrageous allegations were faked up by prominent media executives who coordinated a campaign within Murdoch’s media empire to defame Judith Regan – come from a review of the underlying documents and transcripts cited in Regan’s pleadings, interviews with Ms. Regan before and immediately after she filed her lawsuit, and from contemporary conversations with Regan friends who had knowledge of these events as they occurred.
\nIt is both an instructive story about journalism and illustrative of how big media players can out and out lie and fabricate information to further corporate and political objectives, and a bleak consideration of the state of gender politics in America.<\/p>\n
The Fall Girl. Judith Regan went to Vasser but didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t hang out with the rich girls. She worked her way through school. Her first real job was as a cub on the National Enquirer, where she soon punched her way up the supermarket tabloid ladder to star sob sister. Regan discovered she had a keen ability to listen to people, to emphasize with their stores, have them pour out the details of their shattered lives. She befriended the victims she wrote about, and many years later is still exchanging Christmas card greeting and letters with her front page characters.
\nShe worked for a time as a producer for Geraldo Rivera where she learned that she had the same connection to the rich and famous as she did for the poor and lost – they were all eager to confide, intimately, about their lives with her. She took her act to Simon and Schuster where she was hired as an acquisitions editor and became the queen of Tell Alls, comfortable in the company of rouge celebrities from furtive financier Bernie Cornfeld to arms dealer Adam Kashoggi. In the argot of Old Broadway, she was one smart cookie who figured out how to take the salt and pepper opposites of Russ Limbaugh and Howard Stern from free air to hard cover best-sellerdom. All was not Tell-All. Regan published many centrist bestsellers and novels including \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wicked\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by Gregory Maguire that became the hit Broadway musical.
\nRegan grew herself a third ear, perhaps the most fine-tuned ear for the popular appetite since Dickens. Critics said that she was undermining literature but she countered that readers were interested in people telling the warts-and-all truth. She ignored the critics and developed a take-no-prisoners public personality of disarming candor and at times alarming honesty. (She told an interviewer about walking past the open door of a HarperCollins executive and noticing the man doing himself beside his desk.) Regan has been described as the most successful book publisher in New York in slicks from Vanity Fair to U.S. News & World Report.
\nIn 1994, she fell under the acquisitive, beagle-eyed gaze of Rupert Murdoch who wooed and won her to his HarperCollins with the lure of her own publishing imprint, Regan Books, and her own interview show on his Fox News. Murdoch is a believer in synergy.
\nAt HarperCollins she reached more than a billion dollars in career book sales, and Regan Books contributed an amazing 25 per cent to the publisher\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bottom line. But nothing is perfect. There is only room for one female elephant in the room of one publishing house, and far more than a bobby pin fight, it was in the vernacular more of a cat fight, developed between Regan and HarperCollins corporate dominatrix Jane Friedman, another Murdoch favorite.
\nCEO Friedman was known in the book industry to be envious of the profits and publicity of Regan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s one-woman division. In a company whose interesting definition of synergism included wholly owned divisions competing against one another for projects and profits, Regan was easily the top competitor. Friedman engaged a publicist to ratchet up her own media profile and enlisted well-cultivated friends in publishing media to boost her image v. the more abrasive, higher profile Regan.
\nThe cat fight at HarperCollins was a case study of an institution divided against itself, while and the steel cage match of Friedman v. Regan gave new meaning to the term hostile working environment. Friedman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boyfriend, who worked as a consultant to News Corporation , tossed off to Vanity Fair that Regan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s success was attributable to her \u00e2\u20ac\u0153golden vagina\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c this is a Did-he-actually Say-That? Yes he did! Real quote. The company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s male drones, quick to do the bidding of their matriarch, routinely misplaced files to which Regan needed access and steered new employees Regan had trained to other divisions. The corporate politics were almost Vatican-level conspiratorial. Details of some Regan proposed projects were leaked to competing HarperCollins divisions to give them a leg up in negotiations bidding for the same book. Crocodiles are nicer to their families.
\nThese girls can play rough. Although Regan was the star moneymaker at HarperCollins, her office was downgraded to water closet, leaking and all. A visiting writer from New York magazine was taken aback by the best-selling editor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s physical circumstances: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Water puddles in the office, mold, no A\/C for a month in the summer, and in the winter it was so boiling hot you couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 I was shocked, honestly, it was almost like they were mind-fucking her.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\nGiven the female combat zone that HarperCollins had become ( \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Portrait of a Company Marked by Rivalry,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the New York Times, 7.14.07), when the News Corporation decided to throw Regan to the wolves to feed the anti-O.J. Simpson howling public, the tactical decision was to adopt the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nuts and sluts\u00e2\u20ac\u009d strategy that Roger Ailes had perfected at Fox News when confronted with a troublesome woman employee. Bill O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Reilly, a prot\u00c3\u00a9ge of Mr. Ailes, bragged about Fox\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s smear-the-broad defense strategy while defending a sexual harassment lawsuit against himself: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategies and makes things happen so that one day, bam! The person gets what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s coming to them and never sees it coming.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Reilly just can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop talking. He went on: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If any woman breathed a word (about presumed inappropriate conduct) I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d make her pay so dearly that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll wish she was never born. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll rake her through the mud, bring up things in her life and make her life so miserable she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be destroyed\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 And who are they going to believe? They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d see her as some psycho. Someone unstable\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\nThe picture drawn of Regan by the News Corporation media was that of the overbearing, overachieving, strong willed woman who was also lusty and crazy and had clearly overstepped her bounds and was due a comeuppance. This was a comeuppance that much of the public and much of the press was receptive to. The testerone-driven Daily News especially relished such woman-gets-just-deserts stories, which evoke a deep strain in the American male psyche about women keeping their place in the natural order of things, which is for the man to be on top, and that outspoken women (witness the l9th century cartoons which portrayed early suffragettes as apes or cigar-smoking lesbians) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c were due a spanking.
\nThe national controversy over the O.J. Simpson book and Regan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s firing by HarperCollins fulfilled this subconscious expectation, a Circus Maximus-type spectator longing, to see a strong woman put down. That expectation is manifest in the culture from John Wayne for all practical purposes dragging Maureen O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Hara by her hair caveman-like in The Quiet Man, and more recently the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pile on\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of Hilary Clinton by her male opponents during a Democratic presidential debate. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead\u00e2\u20ac\u009d still plays in the iPod of the male psyche. These cultural fears go back through the centuries to Greek legends that carnal women possessed magical killing powers. In the culture of the 1950s the female pi\u00c3\u00b1ata to be smashed was the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDesigning Woman;\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from the 1990s it has been the Overachieving Woman. In some ways Regan, strutting more like a rooster than a hen, set herself up for such an attack. The Holly Hunter \u00e2\u20ac\u201cDanny DeVito film \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Living Out Loud\u00e2\u20ac\u009d was based in part on a stereotype of Regan as the hard charging female executive. She even played a cameo in the film in which she bitched out Danny DiVeto for sitting on his ass when he should be operating the elevator.
\nThe strategy against Regan did not go entirely unnoticed., just mostly. A few feminist bloggers wrote in outrage that Regan had been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153slut slammed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by Murdoch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gang..<\/p>\n
The O.J. Book \u00e2\u20ac\u201c What Went Down. Judith Regan, the Queen of the Tell-All, in 2005 published Jose Conesco\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s confession about steroid use, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jazzed,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in which he said steroids were in common use in major league baseball, touching off the controversy that roils the game today. The book was dedicated to Regan. The next year she acquired rights to probably the Tell-All of all time, O.J. Simpson telling all about the night his wife and her boyfriend were killed. The deal included a Fox News television interview with Simpson about the How and the Why of that bloody night in Los Angeles. Because a Los Angeles jury of his peers had acquitted Simpson of murder charges after a Hollywood trial which mesmerized the nation, under the rules of double jeopardy he could not be retried. even if he flat out screamed I Did It from the rooftops. The Simpson deal was approved by the patriarch Rupert Murdoch himself during dinner with Regan. Murdoch suggested a $1 million purchase price for the package. Regan asked the HarperCollins in-house lawyer to assure a way that Simpson could not personally profit form the deal,.
\nRegan herself did the interview with Simpson (her Fox show had earlier been cancelled by a suspicious Ailes, but this of course was an exception) in which the murderer confessed to her, in person, on film, the circumstances under which he killed his wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman. This was hot stuff. NewsCorp executives were doing hoops over the commercial prospects of the deal and Fox News producers were heralding the interview to be one of the highest rating specials in tv history. Jane Friedman set supersecret rules for the book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s distribution and talked enthusiastically about the pallets of hardcovers that would be devoured by a voracious reading public. It was the media deal of the new century.
\nThere was a worm in the high polished book sales mahogany. Fox was to broadcast the Simpson interview and Roger Ailes was bothering over his ratings; he wanted it aired during the fall Sweeps week. That meant that the book had to come out at the same time, which was ahead of time. Regan argued against a holiday release on the premise that the public would ill receive a murderer glorying in his misdeeds at Christmas; this could create public outrage, she argued, and, last argument, could hurt sales.
\nMurdoch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s corporate synergy and Ailes ratings needs prevailed over publishing common sense. The News Corporation hierarchy went for a Sweeps Week release. Friedman even increased the print run, which Regan argued against on the premise that if the public got pissed at a Christmas O.J. Simpson I-Did-It the book might not be in every stocking. (This added another footnote of irony to the ensuing debacle, as HarperCollins eventually shred the 400,000 books Friedman ordered printed.)
\nAll told, the O.J. book debacle was a classic example of studio interference and corporate incompetence. In mid-November Fox News Network jumped the gun with an exclusive news story about the interview and the book, and in the precision of the clich\u00c3\u00a9 all hell broke loose. There was an explosion of public resentment, susceptible to the analogy of a lynch mob, against a widely perceived exploitation by Fox and News Corporation of the O.J. Simpson story to make bloody money. The HarperCollins lawyer Regan asked to make sure O.J. got not a cent had drafted the deal like a loose shoelace, and rumors spread like a Southern California wild fire that Simpson would after all profit big time from the book. Even Bill O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Reilly said, Nixon-like, that this would Be Wrong. A bunker mentality descended like a low fog over the News Corporation Someone had to be blamed for this public relations disaster.
\nThey needed a Fall Guy.
\nIn a perfect fit in a perfect storm of public outrage, Ailes \u00e2\u20ac\u0153 nuts and sluts\u00e2\u20ac\u009d strategy for attacking troublesome women melded into a cultural willingness to accept a story told of a Woman Out of Control. The story became that it was all the fault of that awful Regan woman. She had acted alone, defying the parental controls of her bosses.
\nJudith Regan became the perfect Fall Girl.<\/p>\n
Hacks and Hackettes. Murdoch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s NewsCorp used the woman-due-her- comeuppance as cover. The HarperCollins spin machine put the word out, sotto voice from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153publishing sources,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that this disaster \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and what a disaster it was – could only be laid at the polished toes of Judith Regan, that willful, hard driving, foul-mouthed bitch, a Woman Out of Control. Internally, News Corporation execs promised Reagan protection against the gathering storm and asked her not to speak out publicly leave it to Beaver; but, more internally, they stabbed her in that golden whatsis that Friedman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s boyfriend had so pointedly remarked upon.
\nThe New York media specuated that Roger Ailes had directed the Blame the Woman strategy. (Murdoch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s role here is unclear because he has honorably, after the fact, allowed that the problem was hardly of Regan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s making alone and that there was collective responsibility for the company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s O.J. problem.) Murdoch yes or no, it was corporately decided that the proverbial riots in the streets would not subside without a blood sacrifice. All the News Corporation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hacks, hackettes and hatchet persons went into hyper drive to crucify Regan. HarperCollins utilized leaks and press releases as arrows from the quiver and quickly a bewildering array of stories began appearing in the trade press and the popular press about what a fucked-up person Judith Regan was. Murdoch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s New York Post resorted to stories that were libel per se, and Fox News\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 paid commentators and talking heads cluck-clucked over Regan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bad form. It was synergy at its malevolent best.
\nNew York Post editor Col Allen, the colorful, Elaine\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s-dwelling Australian newsman famous for urinating in his office sink during editorial meetings, took out his Aussie axe to whack Ms. Regan by headlining an interview with an old boyfriend – a drug dealer and convicted felon who once threw Regan and her infant son from a moving car. The headline barked that Ms. Regan had \u00e2\u20ac\u0153beat me up.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The Post story made it sound that the much-arrested violent boyfriend was a victim of Regan. There was also a libelous allegation that Regan was somehow the profiteer behind his marijuana merchandising. The convivial Col then unleashed a female attack dog columnist who remarked about a Law and Order episode based on a Regan-like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153high-profile\u00e2\u20ac\u009d woman publisher who gets murdered: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a matter of eliminating everyone who could have wanted her dead. That of course means everyone who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ever worked for her, slept with her or, well, basically ever known her.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\nIt is said a lie goes around the world while truth is getting its boots on (pick your attributed author of this old saw, there are so many.) News Corporation needed a defining causus belli for firing Regan; their trump proved to be the face card of anti-Semitism, a card Murdoch\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s people played with a dismaying ferocity \u00e2\u20ac\u201c particularly dismaying in the rear view mirror of the conglomerate\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s apologetic statement last week that Regan had not said what they said she said and was in no way anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n
The mechanics of smear required the manufacturing of evidence, which of course involved a lawyer; in this case it was the lawyer who had tied up the O.J. deal with loose string, Mark Jackson, the in-house attorney for HarperCollins. Jackson swore to a telephone conversation during which he said Ms. Regan made anti-Semitic remarks. To further the case, HarperCollins did a media dump of his purported exacting notes of the conversation.<\/p>\n
There was then a problem: the Los Angeles Times subsequently interviewed a secretary who was on the line during the conversation who said that Ms. Regan had not made any anti-Semitic remarks, and that the phrase Jewish cabal\u009d – the gravamen of the anti-Semitism charges so aggressively pursued by Harper Collins against Ms. Regan – was uttered by Mr. Jackson himself, not Ms. Regan.<\/p>\n
Regan’s wholly imagined anti=Semitism\u201c which was cited by News Corporation executives as the tipping point that brought Murdoch to authorize Regan’s firing\u201c went like the lie of legend around the world. International Herald Tribune:\u00a0 Firing of Simpson book publisher is linked to anti-Semitic remarks.\u009d AP Asia: Publisher allegedly cited a\u00a0 ‘Jewish cabal.’ Winnipeg Free Press: “Publisher over the line, watchdog says.
\nWith Kamikaze relentlessness HarperCollins kept rolling grenades under Regan’s bed. Was Regan publishing a pornographic novel about Mickey Mantles\u009d sex life? The HarperCollins legal department had considered the novel not porn and sent it off to galleys for reviewers. Did Regan run around stuffing dollar bills into mezuzas like an anti-Semite out of Arsenic and Old Lace? Well, no.
\nGiven News Corporations settling statement that Regan said nothing anti-Semitic, their lawyer either a) auditioning for novelist, or b) had a severely challenged relationship with the truth. And what became of him? Mark Jackson was recently promoted to a high position in the legal seraphim of News Corporation\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s latest acquisition, The Wall Street Journal. Rupert Murdoch believes in synergy.
\nVindication ( Of A Sorts) `At the end of the day, the Ron Goldman family – who had pursued their son\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death at O.J. hands into civil court and won a wrongful death judgment against him that they had been unable to collect – declared that the Regan book was a real confession and in effect thanked Regan for doing what Los Angeles County Prosecutors office could not achieve.
\nVindicating Regan’s judgment to publish the O.J. tell-the-truth book, the Goldmans themselves published Regan’s withdrawn and shred Simpson book and it became a national best seller. The book provided, finally, some of the money that Simpson had been working overtime to avoid paying.<\/p>\n
Warren Hinckle is the editor of argonaut360. He is the recipient of the Tom Paine and H.L. Mencken awards and a longtime columnist for both the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. He is the former editor of Ramparts, Scanlan’s and Francis Copolla’s experimental City of San Francisco and the author of many books. He can be reached at editor@argonaut360.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rudys Pal Kerick Gave New York Harbor Defense Secrets to Arabs Fox Boss Roger Ailes Covered Up, Urged Publisher to Fib to FBI to Protect His Candidate Gulianis Reputation Bombshell Revelations As Judith Regan’s Lawsuit Against Rupert Murdoch Is Settled Former N.Y. Mayor Had Asked Bush to Nominate His – Disgraced Partner Kerick to Helm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=634"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.argonaut360.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}