Rudy’s Loyalty Problem

It was the mid-1990s, and I was trying to interview Judith Regan on the telephone about a media-industry story. We'd never met, but within a few minutes the publishing dominatrix was telling me graphic details about her sex life with her ex-husband. I've heard variations on the same theme from several friends: with Judith, it's always Too Much Information, abusive and profane, pouring out of her mouth in a confusing eruption of fib and fact.

The same applies to the sensational $100 million lawsuit Regan filed last week against her former employer, HarperCollins, and its parent company, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Regan alleges that she was "smeared" as an anti-Semite by her bosses and fired on a "pretext" after being urged by a News Corp. senior executive to lie to federal investigators about her past affair with Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief and nominee to be Homeland Security secretary who was indicted earlier this month. The point, Regan claims, was to protect Rudy Giuliani from embarrassment.

But even as News Corp. called the suit "preposterous" and Giuliani dismissed it on the campaign trail as a "gossip item," you could see a little fear in Hizzoner's eyes. Turncoats are dangerous, and Regan is a skillful and brazen enough media manipulator to keep this story humming for months.

The lawsuit feels thin. While it's true that no one in News Corp. management deemed Regan anti-Semitic until it was convenient for their efforts to scapegoat her, she offers little evidence for her allegations, and is unlikely to win without smoking-gun tapes, which have yet to materialize.

But Regan, whose career blew up last year amid the fiasco of News Corp.'s seeking to profit from O. J. Simpson's "confessions," is not your basic disgruntled employee. She generated hundreds of millions of dollars in News Corp. revenues (with best sellers from the likes of Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore and porn star Jenna Jameson). She had her own TV show, courtesy of Murdoch and Fox News Channel founder Roger Ailes. And long before trysting with Kerik in an apartment near Ground Zero that by some accounts was supposed to be reserved for exhausted recovery workers, she was an important player in the FoxRudy power axis, now aiming for the presidency.

Before Giuliani gets there, Americans might want to learn more about the New York demimonde he runs with. In recent years, New York's hothouse of sex and power has sometimes felt like a nuthouse, with the inmates in charge. It's astonishing how often you hear traumatized former staffers or bemused acquaintances of Rudy and Roger and Bernie and Judith use exactly the same words to describe them: he (or she) is crazy, as if the political, media, law-enforcement and publishing worlds were run by the denizens of the "Star Wars" bar.