Judith Regan's complaint

Roger Parloff:

I can’t literally say that I’ve never seen a complaint like the one Judith Regan’s lawyers filed on her behalf two days ago against News Corp. (NWS), HarperCollins Publishers, and HarperCollins’s president, Jane Friedman.

When I first got out of law school and was clerking for a federal judge in Texas, I did see a few comparable pleadings, though those were usually filed “pro se” — i.e., by the plaintiff himself, without the assistance of a lawyer. One, I remember, was a civil rights suit naming as defendants the President of the United States, all nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, the plaintiff’s ex-wife, and a local Pizza Hut.

Like that complaint, Regan’s reads like one of those humor pieces in The New Yorker, where it not-so-gradually dawns on the reader that the narrator is out of his gourd. Even though you’re hearing only one side of the story, that’s enough to make up your mind against the griper.

You’ll recall that Regan, who headed the ReganBooks imprint at HarperCollins, was fired in December 2006 for allegedly using anti-Semitic language in a telephone call with company lawyers, which Regan denied. The call occurred not long after the twin publicity fiascos surrounding Regan’s plans to publish O.J. Simpson’s quasi-confessional If I Did It book and, shortly thereafter, a first-person novel about Mickey Mantle in which the author assumed Mantle’s voice and described, inter alia, a tryst with teammate Joe DiMaggio’s wife, Marilyn Monroe.

Regan’s 70-page, 345-paragraph, 24-count complaint was filed in state court in Manhattan on Tuesday, and is available here. It mainly alleges defamation and breach of contract, but, almost in passing, it throws in a couple counts of sex discrimination, too. “Under Jane Friedman’s direction,” she alleges, “there is . . . a pattern within HarperCollins of firing high-level women in order to surround herself with men.” (She gives no examples besides herself.)

The complaint is signed by attorney Brian Kerr, of New York’s 175-lawyer Dreier firm, but it has an astoundingly unfiltered quality to it. Regan is also represented by famed Los Angeles entertainment lawyer Bert Fields, but the complaint doesn’t list him as counsel. (Through Regan’s spokesperson, both attorneys declined comment.)

Regan’s complaint boasts that she built a “publishing and media juggernaut,” whose recent publications have included, inter alia, “no fewer than three books related to the Scott Peterson case.” It quotes an article describing how Regan’s “early experience as a reporter for the National Enquirer was great training in the art of the popular,” and how her winter 2006 catalog featured a “cover illustration of Regan stretched across a pile of books,” prompting an “unprecedented” article in The New York Times. (The Times’s headline was, “She’s Not Just the Publisher, She’s the Cover Model, Too.”)

But what’s remarkable about the complaint is how far it ventures beyond merely disputing that she said anything anti-Semitic in that fateful phone call — a seemingly winnable, he-said-she-said squabble had her lawyers stopped her there.

Instead, they’ve allowed her to allege that News Corp. had actually been plotting her demise for at least five years before the Simpson debacle. “This smear campaign was necessary to advance News Corp.’s political agenda, which has long centered on protecting Rudy Giuliani’s presidential ambitions,” they write in paragraph 1 of the complaint. “Defendants knew they would be protecting Giuliani if they could preemptively discredit her,” the complaint continues.

Regan’s saying that News Corp. has been undermining her credibility for years because it feared she knew about unspecified skeletons in Giuliani’s closet that she had learned during her 2001 affair with then-Mayor Giuliani’s then-Police Chief Bernard Kerik and, further, that the company anticipated Regan might go public with if Giuliani ever ran for president.

The company also needed to discredit her, she theorizes, in case she were ever to reveal that two senior News Corp. executives had allegedly advised her to lie to investigators and conceal evidence from them when they began probing Kerik.

A spokeswoman for News Corp. has called the suit “preposterous,” and a spokesperson for HarperCollins and Friedman echoed that sentiment to me.

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There is much more where he explores the details of the allegations. It is quite amazing. If I were an arbitrator in this case my first question for Ms. Regan's attorneys would be why would News Corp invest so much money in an enterprise it wanted to fail? It makes no business sense.

The additional material appears to me to be a failed attempt to negotiated a settlement on the basis of embarrassing details, that New Corp found more bizarre than embarrassing. At any rate she has presented a case that is more likely to make a fact finder say "Say what?" instead of "Wow." Parloff does a good job of describing the case. His discussion makes entertaining reading. Perhaps there is a book in there somewhere.