Tiassa
11-16-07, 07:39 PM
With all this horesh@t, there must be a pony in there somewhere.
Okay, believe it or not, this has to do with Giuliani.
To start: Judith Regan, the woman who tried to bring us O.J. Simpson's If I Did It, is suing her HarperCollins (among others) for wrongful termination. I think. Um ... oh, defamation and breach of contract, and maybe sexual harassment. Apparently, she was fired in the wake of alleged anti-semitic comments made during a telephone call.
Question: How the hell does Rudy Giuliani fit into all of this?
The answer comes from Fortune's Roger Parloff. My apologies to Mr. Parloff if I have his employer wrong; it's hard to tell from that page.
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.
The defendants’ first attempt to discredit Regan occurred in 2001, she alleges. (The timeline is puzzling, since Kerik did not first come under suspicion for criminal wrongdoing until 2004, and, as a consequence, it wasn’t publicly known until then that he might pose any problems for Giuliani, assuming Giuliani ever did announce for president, as he finally did this year. Kerik pled guilty to two state misdemeanor charges in 2006, and was charged in a 16-count federal indictment last week. He has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges.)
(Legal Pad (http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/11/15/judith-regans-bizarre-complaint-against-news-corp/))
Did you follow all that? Neither did I. Two things worth noting, though. First, the phrase "golden vagina" actually comes up in this dispute. Secondly, and more importantly, as Parloff puts it:
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.
(ibid)
Here's the scary thing. This is the 2008 presidential cycle. While it seems clear that Regan or her attorneys have gone utterly bonkers, that's no guarantee that we won't hear more about this if Hizzoner gets the nomination. To the other, if there's an element of truth to be found, the details could be jaw-dropping.
My point? None, really. It's just that if this actually does come up later in the cycle, I don't want to be left scrambling around for a link.
In the meantime, there is a certain morbid entertainment value.
• • •
A Note for Countezero
In one of our prior disputes, we discussed (argued) about Rupert Murdoch's potential for interfering in HarperCollins' publishing decisions. The larger context of the Regan story includes just that allegation, that Murdoch was directly involved in the Simpson debacle. I felt it important, despite Regan's dubious claim to credibility, to acknowledge that point.
Okay, believe it or not, this has to do with Giuliani.
To start: Judith Regan, the woman who tried to bring us O.J. Simpson's If I Did It, is suing her HarperCollins (among others) for wrongful termination. I think. Um ... oh, defamation and breach of contract, and maybe sexual harassment. Apparently, she was fired in the wake of alleged anti-semitic comments made during a telephone call.
Question: How the hell does Rudy Giuliani fit into all of this?
The answer comes from Fortune's Roger Parloff. My apologies to Mr. Parloff if I have his employer wrong; it's hard to tell from that page.
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.
The defendants’ first attempt to discredit Regan occurred in 2001, she alleges. (The timeline is puzzling, since Kerik did not first come under suspicion for criminal wrongdoing until 2004, and, as a consequence, it wasn’t publicly known until then that he might pose any problems for Giuliani, assuming Giuliani ever did announce for president, as he finally did this year. Kerik pled guilty to two state misdemeanor charges in 2006, and was charged in a 16-count federal indictment last week. He has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges.)
(Legal Pad (http://legalpad.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2007/11/15/judith-regans-bizarre-complaint-against-news-corp/))
Did you follow all that? Neither did I. Two things worth noting, though. First, the phrase "golden vagina" actually comes up in this dispute. Secondly, and more importantly, as Parloff puts it:
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.
(ibid)
Here's the scary thing. This is the 2008 presidential cycle. While it seems clear that Regan or her attorneys have gone utterly bonkers, that's no guarantee that we won't hear more about this if Hizzoner gets the nomination. To the other, if there's an element of truth to be found, the details could be jaw-dropping.
My point? None, really. It's just that if this actually does come up later in the cycle, I don't want to be left scrambling around for a link.
In the meantime, there is a certain morbid entertainment value.
• • •
A Note for Countezero
In one of our prior disputes, we discussed (argued) about Rupert Murdoch's potential for interfering in HarperCollins' publishing decisions. The larger context of the Regan story includes just that allegation, that Murdoch was directly involved in the Simpson debacle. I felt it important, despite Regan's dubious claim to credibility, to acknowledge that point.