"I remember her, in late 2001 and into 2002, getting pressure not to talk about it," said one of her former authors. "It’s hard to know with Judith, but I mean—she’s been consistent about that the whole time. I certainly wasn’t privy to any conversations, though. I just know what she told me."
Ms. Regan hasn’t tried to quash speculation that she’s sitting on some explosive material. Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, recounted to The Observer a lunch he had with Ms. Regan and several others during the summer of 2006. "She started talking about Kerik and about Giuliani," said Mr. Foer. "She said that the two of them talked as if she wasn’t in the room, because she was a girl. And that she couldn’t believe the types of things that they were saying. She implied that she had material on Giuliani. It wasn’t clear how she’d kept it. But she said she would spring it when the moment was right."
As Ms. Regan’s side tells it, News Corp executives seized on the outcry over the O.J. and Mantle books—and the fact of her strained relationship with Ms. Friedman—to try to discredit her. By locking in her image as a loose cannon, the Regan camp says, News Corp might lessen the impact of any future revelations about Mr. Giuliani.
"Judy’s relationship with Bernie Kerik put her in a position that made Murdoch and Roger Ailes very nervous because of their ties with Giuliani," said a source close to Ms. Regan. "The problems with Jane, that became the vehicle for them to try to deal with that issue as opposed to letting it bubble up on its own."
Many in Ms. Regan’s camp question the official reasons given for her firing. "There was nothing wrong with the O.J. book," said the source with knowledge of Ms. Regan’s thinking. "That was also spin. Ted Bundy also wrote a hypothetical confession! She wasn’t allowed to talk about any of this. She was gagged during the whole O.J. thing. Ted Bundy confessed to these two reporters and he did it as a hypothetical and it was a number one best-selling book in the 1980′s.
"Look at how they spun the complaint," the source continued. "There’s Giuliani in Iowa saying, ‘Oh, it’s just a gossip story.’ And what did the New York Post do? They made it a Page Six item. Do you actually believe that wasn’t coordinated? I can tell you absolutely, positively, they got on the same page and they decided how to spin it. They decided it would be dismissed as a gossip item."
Since her departure from HarperCollins, Ms. Regan’s life has taken a new turn. Lately, she was spotted belting out a rendition of "My Way" at BINY, the karaoke bar in SoHo; a recording of the song later ended up on Gawker. She also penned a piece for the December issue of Harper’s Bazaar, in which she compared her experience over the last year to that of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde—"bullets flying from every direction." And she’s working on an album now—standards, mostly, but also some original songs, that she’s recording with producer and composer Rod McBrien. "We’re just in the talking stage about going further, but I think we will go further," Mr. McBrien told The Observer. "We don’t have a deal with a major label—but we haven’t shopped for one yet. There’s a lot of things happening with her and we’re just kind of riding them out. We’re going to put this on the Internet so it’ll be available online—we’ve just got to get a good picture and a good album cover." In college, Ms. Regan was a member of the Vassar Madrigals, and she plays the violin and the viola.
Judith Regan remains convinced that jealousy played a major role in her downfall at HarperCollins. She continues to think of herself as "a child of the Sixties. I didn’t want to amass power and fortunes and all that, it just kind of unfolded."
"I do love to win, I love to be the best. I loved the actual doing of it. I never had a plan in my life."
"She’ll be vindicated," said the source with knowledge of her thinking. "The truth will come out."
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