Murdoch vs. Regan: Hollywood girds

Judith Regan's upcoming fight for her honor with Rupert Murdoch's empire inspires the NYT's Sharon Waxman to muse on Hollywood court battles of yore: think Bette Davis meets Joan Crawford or the Jeffrey Katzenberg showdown with Michael Eisner. This one, she writes, could be a doozy:

“Libel is a very, very high mountain of proof to climb, and you can get destroyed in the process,” said Pierce O’Donnell, a leading litigator who successfully sued Paramount in the 1980s for [Art] Buchwald, who contended that the studio had stolen his screenplay idea in its movie “Coming to America.”

Ms. Regan, whose lively personal life is already well-worn fodder for tabloid gossip, will find lawyers poring over every off-color remark she may have made, Mr. O’Donnell said. Former colleagues have already emerged to confirm that she was reprimanded in the past for making an anti-Semitic remark at work.

Mr. O’Donnell said: “She will open herself up to every scurrilous allegation. She will not enjoy one minute of this litigation. They’ll hire a bulldog, and it’ll be a bloodletting.”

Meanwhile HarperCollins, which owns ReganBooks, would probably face uncomfortable questions about why it tolerated Ms. Regan for so long if the company found her behavior so objectionable.

And executives would also have to submit to a detailed examination of their decision-making process in the Simpson project, a book titled “If I Did It” and a television interview conducted by Ms. Regan, which unleashed such a cascade of public outrage that both were canceled.

GalleyCat, meanwhile, says there may be life in the O.J. Simpson book yet.

Previously:
Defending Judith Regan
Regan's final phone call
Look who's coming to town