Rupert Murdoch On Why He Fired Judith Regan

Posted on February 9, 2007

Rupert Murdoch has finally spoken out about why he fired publishing maven Judith Regan. He also talks about her two book disasters: O.J. Simpson's If I Did It and the proposed Mickey Mantle book.

The New York Daily News reports that Murdoch says he signed off on Regan's Simpson book deal as long as payment would go to the kids of Simpson. He is clearly greatly regretting this decision. He also says, "I said [to Regan], 'If it really reads like a confession, he gets no money. It's my fault. I should have been closer to it."

"It was a mistake," Murdoch said of the $1.1 million book-and-TV deal, from which Simpson was reportedly paid. But the Simpson fiasco was no reason to fire Regan, Murdoch said, because he had given the green light early on.
However, when her plans to publish the Mantle novel came to light, as Murdoch put it, "I thought, oh God, we don't want to go through this again. Just cancel that book."
In December, News Corp. said Regan was fired after she allegedly launched an anti-Semitic tirade at a company lawyer. Her lawyer has since threatened to sue News Corp. for libel and wrongful termination. He could not be reached yesterday. Murdoch said Regan, who was hired in 1994, turned out to be "not a team player, and that's putting it mildly. ... She wasn't for us."

It's surprising that Murdoch would make those comments publicly, given the fact that lawsuits are pending. But Murdoch has been shooting his mouth of quite a bit lately. He told the press that a second Borat movie was already in the pipeline, and that Sacha Baron Cohen had already signed a deal, which turned out not to be true. Fox owns the rights to a sequel, but hasn't cut a deal with Cohen yet.