Judith Regan fired for anti-Semitic remarks?
The Times is reporting that Judith Regan, the HarperCollins imprint publisher, was fired in part for anti-Semitic remarks made on a heated phone call with a HarperCollins lawyer.
“‘Of all people, the Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie,’” Ms. Regan said, according to a transcript of Mr. Jackson’s notes provided by Gary Ginsberg, an executive vice president of the News Corporation.
According to the transcript, Ms. Regan went on to say that the literary agent Esther Newberg; HarperCollins’s executive editor, David Hirshey; HarperCollins’s president, Jane Friedman, and Mr. Jackson “constitute a Jewish cabal against her.”
I won’t defend a publisher like Regan. Her plan to have O.J. Simpson “confess” in a fictionalized tell-all made me ashamed to be part of the same species. But I also won’t defend HarperCollins and News Corp., its corporate owner. First of all, people who make a company gobs of money, however ill-gotten, don’t get fired for being anti-Semetic on an in-house phone call. They get fired, as Regan did, for publicly-visible bad judgment. Second, even if Regan said what she did in the context the HarperCollins lawyer describes, the two corporations come out looking terribly vindictive and hypocritical.
HarperCollins and News Corp. were in the clear, weren’t they? They had the public’s goodwill after at long last firing the shrewdly cynical Regan. Why then release notes of this phone call, particularly after tolerating and profiting from Regan for the past decade? It’s rubbing salt in a self-inflicted wound.
UPDATE: Could a potential lawsuit by the family of Ron Goldman—a lawsuit that could force News Corp. to reveal its decision-making in bringing the Simpson book to market—be the reason the corporation so very badly wants to distance itself from Judith Regan?
