Still, in February 2006, according to the complaint, she and News Corp. director Tom Perkins, of Al Gore’s new firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, dined with Murdoch, who approved the idea of a Simpson book and suggested paying $1 million for it. Regan says Murdoch knew the book would be framed as a hypothetical confession. News Corp. officials have disputed that, but Murdoch has acknowledged approving the project.

A call from The Audit to Kleiner’s Menlo Park, California, office wasn’t returned.

Regan says she spoke frequently with Friedman, the Harper Collins CEO, who enthusiastically embraced the idea, even suggesting at a conference in Puerto Rico that the print run be increased.

Again, Friedman’s support for the project doesn’t appear to be in dispute. Regan cites a February 2007 Grigoriadis story in New York that said Friedman saw the project as a “gigantic mound of cash piled on her bottom line.”

Jackson, the in-house lawyer, negotiated the deal, according to Regan. Fox Broadcasting produced an accompanying televised O.J. interview. Regan says she wanted to wait, believing it to be in “bad taste” (I know, I know) to air it during the holidays, but a top Fox broadcast executive, Mike Darnell, told her: “The big guy (e.g. Murdoch) wants it now,” the complaint says.

So, this was not a rogue project.

The media storm broke with the leak of a clip from the Simpson interview, November 13, 2006.

Regan made an already bad situation worse three days later, when, during a Sirius radio show she hosted, she said she had decided to publish the Simpson book as a means of dealing with her own past abusive relationships, or something.

…because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, confess their sins,” etc. etc.

Yes, it’s stupid.

Okay, the nation is in uproar. Fox News personalities man the ramparts against the cultural degradation spewing from, um, News Corp.’s publishing arm. You’d need a doctorate from MediaBistro and would have to eat at Michael’s every day for the rest of your life to figure out the internal politics of all this, but Bill O’Reilly, Greta Van Susteren, et al. join what quickly blossoms into a category five doo-doo storm. Jim Pinkerton, a regular conservative panelist on Fox, lobs this:

Even among her fellow publishers at - at - Harper, she’s ‘slimy,’

Ick! Watch out for that flying crap, Jane Friedman!

At some point, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, among others, called Murdoch at his Australian ranch to talk it all over, according to a Business Week interview with Murdoch last February. Regan blames Ailes for orchestrating the media takedown. She may be nuts, but is that such a stretch? Here’s Bill O’Reilly saying as much, quoted by Regan from court papers in his own sex-harassment lawsuit:

I’ll make her pay so dearly that she’ll wish she never were born…If you cross Fox News Channel it’s not just me, it’s (Fox president) Roger Ailes who will go after you… Ailes operates behind the scenes, strategizes and makes things happen so that one day, bam!

Bam?

In any event, daggers are thrust into Regan from media columns all over le New York. On November 18, the Post publishes an interview with a Regan ex-boyfriend who alleges Regan profited from marijuana smuggling and says she lied about being abused by him. Nice!

Newsweek weighs in on December 4 with a story headlined “No More Free Rein for Regan.” It says:

… Regan only had to present a general concept of the Simpson book to HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman to get the budget approved for the project, according to one person close to Friedman who doesn’t want to be identified because he’s not authorized to speak to the company.

The Audit to Person-Close-to-Friedman: nice try.

In her suit, Regan accuses Friedman of planting the leak, but The Audit, without better evidence, refuses to believe it. (Among the weirder turns that Regan notes, Publisher’s Weekly named Friedman “Publishing Person of the Year” on Dec. 11, three weeks into this mess, citing her as a “visionary pragmatist,” [the best kind!] who, among other things, led her company “through the O.J. scandal.” Wow. And I thought academia was weird.)

This entire summary of media leaks is spelled out in Regan’s complaint. But what can I say? They ran.

There’s more, of course. My fellow hobbits may remember this ended with Regan screaming at Jackson, the in-house counsel, that a “Jewish cabal” was out to get her. I won’t parse the remarks, but it was nothing News Corp. executives hadn’t heard from her before. No one believes she was fired for being an anti-Semite.

The dismissal, appropriately, is leaked by “senior News Corp. executives,” to the Los Angeles Times on December 17:

’It was an accumulation of her behavior,’ said one of those executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the legal sensitivity of the issue.

In the interview with Business Week last February, Murdoch provides some kind of limited half-apology—“It’s my fault; I should have been closer to it”—that actually makes no sense. Why should he have been closer to it?

Murdoch also summarizes her career in way I find ungenerous—to say the least. “She was very good at Simon & Schuster. She had a great sort of pop feel and did some very good best sellers to start with and then went sort of downhill.”

As Regan notes, seven of her books hit the best-seller list after she was fired. Murdoch here could have shown more class.

So, how did the Journal do covering this suit, with the merger closing in weeks? It short-armed the story,
particularly when it comes to Regan’s affair with Kerik, the newly indicted former New York City police commissioner, and its impact on his friend, Rudy Giuliani, who is running for president of the United States of America.