LOS ANGELES – With Judith Regan’s authors still reeling from their publisher’s abrupt dismissal, the sparring between the headline-making Ms. Regan and her former employer, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, grew more intense, more personal and more specific today over allegations of anti-Semitism.
The News Corporation released what it described as notes from a heated telephone conversation on Friday between Ms. Regan and Mark Jackson, a top lawyer for HarperCollins, the company publishing division which included her imprint, ReganBooks – a conversation that News Corporation officials said was instrumental in her dismissal.
According to the notes, taken down by Mr. Jackson as the conversation unfolded, Ms. Regan protested that the publishing house had not supported her during last month’s firestorm over a confessional book by O.J. Simpson and related television program, which the News Corporation canceled in the wake of public protests and unease by some affiliate television stations.
“‘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.”
A lawyer for Ms. Regan, Bert Fields, denied that Ms. Regan had said there was a “Jewish cabal against her,” saying she used only the word “cabal” in the conversation, and it came in response to a question from Mr. Jackson. But he acknowledged that she had made some version of the first statement, drawing attention to the fact that her boss and others involved in the controversy over the aborted O.J. Simpson project were Jewish.
He denied, though, that this reflected any anti-Semitism. “There is nothing insulting to Jewish people in saying that Jews should particularly understand what it is to be victims of the big lie,” Mr. Fields said. “They were looking for an excuse to fire her, and they fired her and called it anti-Semitic. It ain’t anti-Semitic.”
Mr. Fields said he planned to file a lawsuit against HarperCollins for dismissing Ms. Regan in breach of her contract.
The publishing world has been reeling from the dismissal last Friday of Ms. Regan, the highly successful and often controversial head of ReganBooks. Ms. Friedman was known to have a strained relationship with Ms. Regan, who found some of Ms. Regan’s projects distasteful though lucrative, while Ms. Regan felt that her boss and others at the company ganged up on her.
Despite the success that Ms. Regan brought to the News Corporation’s publishing business since Mr. Murdoch established her imprint in 1994 – with such books as the best-selling “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” by Jenna Jameson – their relationship had soured in recent weeks as she became involved in the controversy over the Simpson book, titled “If I Did It,” and companion television special she had championed.
After some Fox affiliates declined to broadcast the special, the company pulled the project, which featured Mr. Simpson hypothesizing about how he would have murdered his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman