Moving on. Always moving on.

Famed editor Judith Regan decamped for Los Angeles years ago, but enjoyed keeping one foot in the city where her meteoric rise to fame happened. So she bought a sprawling 3,200-square-foot loft in Chinatown (or Soho, depending on whom you ask) back in 2005. But as she told a Daily Beast reporter in 2010, her affection faded after the apartment flooded. Twice. The water ruined almost all of her art and furniture: “My apartment is like all the men in my life—really good-looking and assholes."

Well, Ms. Regan and her apartment have finally broken up. The editor, radio show host, producer and woman-about-town sold the pied-à-terre at 129 Lafayette Street for $3.9 million, according to city records. We suppose the water damage was finally taken care of? Or maybe buyers 129 Hacienda LLC used it to get a discount of nearly $1 million on the apartment, which was most recently listed at $4.75 million with Warburg brokers Jacqueline Kurtz and James Foreman. Fortunately, if the apartment floods again the new owners, who list their address as Millbrook, N.Y., will have another place to stay.

Filled with light. And sometimes water.

And at least the water damage provided a good excuse for renovating the place—there's some "newly refinished white-on-white decor," according to the listing. If Ms. Regan is as good at picking building finishes as she was at picking best sellers, the place is probably stunning.

No regrets from Ms. Regan, we suppose, who was trying to rent the place even before she sold it, asking a steep $18,000 a month for the three-bedroom, 2.5-bath pad. Even if it does have 12-foot ceilings and "a true cook's kitchen [with] double Thermador ovens and a Viking 6 burner stove," that sounds kind of steep, especially considering that Ms. Regan paid $2.7 million for the apartment in 2005. After her many wild successes, she probably saw no harm in trying for another, but not everything can be another Regan Books.

kvelsey@observer.com

When asked if the News of the World phone hacking scandal might bleed into other parts of Rupert Murdoch’s empire, including its publishing wing, HarperCollins, he answered bluntly, “Yes, it will focus attention on all parts of the business, and people will perhaps turn on some lights in rooms that have been left dark previously and look more closely at what is profitable and what is not and what is proper behavior and what isn’t.”

He went on to hint that proper behavior was not always to be expected from HarperCollins: “They have been, and I’ve explained this to the heads of the company in London and New York, unusually shrill and punitive towards authors.”

Having issued his proclamation over the airwaves, Mr. Wylie resumed his usual, oraclelike silence, refusing to refer to specific instances of said shrillness or punishment (or to answer any questions from The Observer) and leaving New York publishing to venture any number of conjectures. A few days later, as if to confuse everyone further, Mr. Wylie issued a correction of sorts, telling the British industry publication The Bookseller that he “did not ‘call for an investigation’ into HarperCollins.” He went on: “In the context of current events, this misrepresentation of what I said is regrettable.” A spokeswoman from HarperCollins characterized this as “a retraction.”

At HarperCollins, at least, the prevailing mood was one of annoyance. “Mr. Wylie makes extravagant allegations to the BBC but fails to specify exactly what he is complaining about,” the company’s British spokesperson wrote in a statement republished in The Bookseller. The American spokeswoman offered only a “no comment.” Aside from a few high-profile moves—most notably Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, authors of the  mega-bestselling book Game Change, defecting to competitor Penguin Press for their follow-up­—Mr. Wylie has continued to do business with the company, prompting his commentary to be referred to as everything from an instance of “the pot calling the kettle black” to a “fishing expedition.” Among HarperCollins editors, there was an aggrieved feeling that he was “piling on” while unrelated businesses owned by News Corp. were down.

This is not to say that others in New York publishing were unwilling to take the opportunity to air grievances. “They’ve become draconian in their cancellation policies towards authors for manuscripts delivered even a week beyond their delivery date,” said one New York literary agent. (Unlike Mr. Wylie, none of the agents interviewed were so bold as to give their names and face future alienation from dealmaking with the formidable publisher.)

Other agents said that while such cancellations can feel unnecessarily, well, punitive, they are a publisher’s contractual right. But the company also recently redid its standard contract (known as a “boilerplate”) in a manner that several agents told The Observer was not “author-friendly.”

“They have changed their asking for a broader scope of rights than they have before,” wrote one agent in an email to The Observer. “Like multimedia rights; or not allowing authors to make a graphic novel of their own novel even if HC has already turned down that idea.”

“First, and most importantly, the rights grab is insulting,” wrote another agent. “I mean, HarperCollins will essentially be able to hold the book (and ALL THE RIGHTS that go with it) hostage for eternity.”

“We don’t comment on contractual issues,” said a HarperCollins spokeswoman.

Others were quick to point out how Mr. Murdoch’s tactics in The News of the World scandal recalled those of HarperCollins scandals past—­the payments to people whose phones had been hacked evoked comparisons to Mr. Murdoch’s attempted payments to Nicole Brown’s family in the face of controversy about O.J. Simpson’s memoir, If I Did It. (The Browns declined payments and went on The Today Show; HarperCollins was shamed into canceling the book.) The exertion of corporate influence in the hacking scandal recalled the allegations by Judith Regan, publisher of an eponymous HarperCollins imprint who was fired in 2006, that Fox News executive Roger Ailes asked her to lie to federal officials when her once-lover, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, was being vetted for the Secretary of Homeland Security post (allegations that The New York Times verified earlier this year through court documents.) News Corp. paid Regan a $10.75 million settlement in the case.

Whether the recent News Corp. indiscretions will reignite interest in possible wrongdoing on this side of the Atlantic is unclear. Former federal prosecutor and Columbia law professor Daniel Richman suspected it may not, but added, “who knows what happens in this current feeding frenzy....It would be nice to think that all knowing lies made to those agents would be prosecuted.”

One small dose of justice was meted out this week to Mr. Murdoch, however. Back in 1998, Mr. Murdoch earned derision in Britain for canceling a memoir by Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, and was accused of doing so to protect his business interests in China. According to The Guardian, the editor of that book, Stuart Proffitt, has acquired an account of the hacking crisis for Penguin Press.

ewitt@observer.com

In an essay from late April, Pinter describes how (during his days in publishing) he attempted to acquire a book by professional wrestler Chris Jericho. His efforts almost failed for lack of men in the acquisitions meeting, he says--if one colleague's 15-year-old nephew hadn't been a wrestling fan, the book wouldn't have made it through. It was "the fault of a system in which in a room of 15-20 people, not one of them knew what I was talking about," he writes:

Nobody can deny the fact that most editorial meetings tend to be dominated by women. Saying the ratio is 75/25 is not overstating things.

Today, Salon's Laura Miller wonders why there would be so few men:

Could it be the low pay, low status and ridiculous hours? (Remember that book editors seldom get to read manuscripts in the office -- that's what weekends are for.) Apart from a handful of celebrated figures, it's the rare editor who gets paid more than a secondary school teacher in a middle-class district. The profession has come to look a lot like a skilled, pink-collar ghetto, albeit garnished with a thin dusting of reflected glamor.

We spoke with Free Press publisher Martha Levin, who said she'd read the recent article and mostly laughed it off. Yes, there are usually lots of women in editorial meetings, she said, but it was simplistic to describe the industry as a girls-club. It's the non-editorial groups (marketing, publicity) that are really "overwhelmingly female." And even that dynamic is changing with the growth of digital programs, which tend to attract more men.

Levin also doubted Pinter's account of how publishing's gender balance plays out in acquisitions. Books like Pinter's wrestler memoir? "Judith Regan was brilliant at buying those books," Levin said. The question of how editorial representation affects books is "a legitimate rap against publishing" when it comes to race and ethnicity--but not, she thinks, for gender.

Besides, it would be hard to look at the upper echelons of most publishing houses--the publishers, the editors-in-chief; the people with the final say--and see a shortage of male power. For better or worse, of course.

Provocative though it was, that question was not what had brought Bonnie Fuller, John Stossel, Adam Moss, Nick Denton, Sigourney Weaver, Ira Glass, Judith Regan, Wendy Williams, and a smattering of semi-bold names—some clutching notebooks, many clutching drinks—to this event. They were here at the invitation of The Atlantic, where Mr. Smith is president and James Bennet is editor-in-chief, to enjoy some chili and margaritas and listen to Andrew Sullivan and Michael Hirschorn address the question asked on the invite sent out by the magazine's P.R. team: "What is the Future of Media?"

No answer was supplied during the 30 minute discussion which had Messrs. Sullivan and Hirschorn sitting on a small stage overlooking a rapt—occasionally twittering (and Twittering)—crowd. Mr. Bennet, who moderated the discussion, informed everyone that the two men were once housemates in Washington DC: "The pertinent fact is that I've known Andrew so long, I knew him when he was straight," Mr. Hirschorn joked. (Apparently Mr. Sullivan had "an unreasonably hot girlfriend" at the time.)

Mr. Bennet started the discussion by asking Mr. Hirschorn about that day's New York Times Company quarterly earnings report. "It was pretty dismal," Mr. Bennet, a former Timesman, offered.

"We're in kind of in remarkable, uncharted waters," Mr. Hirschorn said. "There are scenarios in which The Times does not go out of business, but becomes a very different entity."

Mr. Hirschorn, no idle observer, had wondered In the January/February issue of the magazine if The Times could cease printing in May.

The magazine editor-turned-producer foresees "profound changes and they're gonna be unpleasant." Later, he told the crowd of media workers, "I think it might be that there will be a time in the wilderness where there will be a huge and wrenching, horrible fallout... I mean, it sounds like Road Warrior or something. I don't mean to sound like people are eating out of dog food cans. It's really not that bad!"

Apocalypse, soon: Well, that's one plausible future of media.

Mr. Sullivan, pulling on a bottle of beer, wasn't so much concerned with dying newspapers as he was with the promise of blogging, something he'd written about before.

The writer described what attracted him to blogging in the first place: "The thrill was, for me—this was when Clinton was President—you could go on at night and be mean about [a] Maureen Dowd column before anyone had read it... So she would never even get the pleasure of the, like, twenty minutes of praise." This was met with a big laugh from the audience.

Later, Mr. Sullivan told The Observer he posts 300 items a week to his blog, The Daily Dish, calling it "an obsessive compulsion."

The blog, which he started as an independent venture in 2000 according to his bio, was hosted for a period on Time magazine's Web site, before it was brought to TheAtlantic.com in January 2007.

"I'd do it for nothing!," Mr. Sullivan said. "I used to be incentivized for traffic, but we changed that. And I realized, damn, I gave it away."

Working for free: A very plausible future for media as well.

But while Dodd must face the voters two years before Lieberman (whose seat isn't up until 2012), it's the Democrat-turned-independent who probably has more to worry about, and to mull over.

Dodd's situation probably looks a lot worse than it actually is. The Quinnipiac poll gives him a negative job approval rating (41 percent approve/48 disapprove), marking yet another decline in his once-sterling numbers. Two months ago, he enjoyed a positive approval rating, 47 to 41 percent, and last July the spread was a healthy 17 points, 51 to 34 percent. At his all-time peak, back in early 2001, Dodd sported a 71/16 approval mark.

The culprit is obvious: the nagging saga of Dodd's mortgage dealings with Countrywide Financial, which were first reported last June. The suggestion was that Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, received a sweetheart deal reserved for "friends" of the company's chairman. But only this week, nearly eight months after the story broke, did Dodd provide the media with documentation to substantiate his claims of innocence.

The scandal's durability, especially in light of the housing market collapse that helped plunge the country into a recession, has made Dodd supremely vulnerable to political attacks. By a 54 to 24 percent margin, respondents told Quinnipiac pollsters that they weren't satisfied with Dodd's mortgage explanation (the poll was taken before he granted the media access to his records on Monday); 56 percent said they were less likely to vote for him because of it. And most damningly, 51 percent said they would "definitely" or "probably" not vote to re-elect Dodd next year.

And yet, there is good news for Dodd.

Even though questions still linger (and Dodd didn't help himself by only allowing reporters to inspect his financial records in his office on Monday - refusing to provide them with physical copies), the Connecticut Post concluded on Tuesday that "there are many indications" that his explanations will hold up.

That doesn't mean Republicans won't hype the mortgage episode relentlessly in '10, but it would reduce the highly suspicious tone that state and national reporters have used in covering this story - a major reason why voters have been so skeptical. Barring any more developments, this should be enough to arrest Dodd's slide heading into '10. (Again, the key here is that his explanations do, in fact, hold up.)

More importantly, though, Dodd stands to benefit from a lack of credible competition. Connecticut remains a staunchly Democratic state, and there are no indications that he'll face any trouble securing his party's backing next year. His approval rating among Democrats is still 62/25 percent.

The state Republican bench is thin, although Governor Jodi Rell, nearly five years after replacing the disgraced John Rowland, remains untouchable, with an approval rating of 75/19 percent (67/26 among Democrats!). But is intent on seeking a second full gubernatorial term next year, and will not be challenging Dodd.

That will leave the G.O.P. hoping that to entice one of two aging former congressman, Chris Shays (defeated for re-election in 2008) or Rob Simmons (unseated in 2006), to challenge Dodd. Each would be credible, but not nearly as formidable as Rell. And without Shays or Simmons, the Republicans would be left to field an unknown and untested candidate. Victory by default - sort of the way an unpopular Bill Nelson won a second Senate term in Florida over Katherine Harris in 2006 - seems a viable route for Dodd next year.

Lieberman's situation is more complicated. His approval rating sits at 45/48 percent, which isn't too good - but also not automatically fatal. Moreover, since his term isn't up until 2012, he has a few years to improve it. But he has faces two formidable obstacles that Dodd doesn't.

First, Lieberman doesn't have a clear base of support - unlike Dodd, who can count on running with the support of the Democratic establishment and the party's loyal voters next year. Among Democrats, Lieberman's approval rating is a miserable 21/70 percent, and among independents, it's just 48/46 percent. Only with Republicans does he score well, 75/20 percent.

But Lieberman has made it clear he won't be switching to the G.O.P., and since aggressively campaigning for John McCain last summer, he's largely returned to the Democratic fold in the Senate, making peace with his party's leaders there and siding with them (and against McCain) in this week's stimulus drama. His support among Republicans, it seems, comes from their memories of 2006, 2007, and 2008, when Lieberman was at war with the Democratic Party. But in 2009, 2010 and 2011, as he realigns himself with Democrats, those numbers figure to return to earth.

This means that the formula that worked so well for Lieberman in his 2006 re-election bid - overwhelming Republican support plus a majority of independents - won't be available in '12.

An even bigger hurdle, perhaps, is that - again, unlike Dodd - Lieberman faces the prospect of challenge from a figure with Rell-like popularity. That would be Richard Blumenthal, the state's attorney general ("eternal general," he calls himself, since he's held the job for nearly 20 years).

Blumenthal, like A.G.s around the country, has skillfully used his office to rack up enviable media coverage and stratospheric poll numbers. His approval rating sits at 71/13 percent. He will turn 63 later this week and has made no secret of his interest in serving in the Senate someday. But the opportunity has never been there; since his election as A.G. in 1990, Blumenthal has been blocked by Dodd and Lieberman. Liberal activists first turned to him in 2006 when they sought a primary challenger to Lieberman, but the ever-cautious Blumenthal passed, paving the way for Ned Lamont's entry.

Looking ahead to '12, though, Blumenthal clearly sees opportunity. Last week, he declared that he would seek re-election as A.G. in '10 and strongly hinted that he would then pursue Lieberman's Senate seat in '12.

This would be a very tough race for Lieberman, and the first question is: would he run as a Democrat or an independent? Right now, it's inconceivable that he could defeat the mega-popular Blumenthal in a Democrats-only contest. But running as independent doesn't look promising, either. The Quinnipiac poll gave Blumenthal a 58-30 lead over Lieberman in a potential general election match-up. Worse, the survey didn't include a Republican candidate, who presumably would further erode Lieberman's numbers. (Quinnipiac didn't attempt a Lieberman-Blumenthal Democratic primary match-up.)

So what can Lieberman do? First, he needs to decide on a strategy. A large number of Democrats will simply never support him again. But if he were to abandon his independent posture and decisively re-align himself with the Democratic majority in Washington, he could slowly win back old friends and supporters over the next few years. He could also rack up I.O.U.'s from powerful Democrats who could turn around and help him in '12. Championing Barack Obama's agenda in the Senate and leading the charge for Dodd in '10 could improve Lieberman's '12 odds considerably.

The flip side, though, is that abandoning his independent status would ensure that a '12 primary would be Lieberman's make-or-break moment. Losing the primary and then running as an independent yet again would severely test the patience of voters; plus, Blumenthal likely won't be as polarizing as Lamont was.

The best bet for Lieberman may lie in shoring up his Democratic credentials and trying to intimidate Blumenthal - who has backed down from multiple opportunities to seek higher office in the past - from coming after him. (Of course, if Blumenthal were to pass, other Democrats - like Congressmen Jim Himes or Chris Murphy -- might take a shot.) Alternately, he could stick it out as an independent and hope that, somehow, Democrats nominate a Lamont-like candidate in '12 instead of Blumenthal.

The good news for Lieberman that his poll numbers were significantly better not that long ago; just last March, he was scoring a 52/35 percent approval rating. His role as a McCain surrogate hurt him badly in his home state, but memories can fade. If Democrats had no better options, it wouldn't be a stretch to envision Lieberman sliding back into their good graces and emerging as their nominee in '12. But they probably will have other options, leaving Lieberman in a difficult spot.

One person asked to hear more on what Mr. Baker had learned about George H. W. Bush’s connection to the Kennedy assassination. Another asked how Mr. Baker’s book might be used to teach young people about journalism.

Then someone brought up the million dollar question: Namely, how is Mr. Baker planning to convince the mainstream media that the startling discoveries he’d made about the Bush family—discoveries that Bloomsbury Press, Mr. Baker’s publisher, has advertised as revelatory and paradigm-shifting—were worth paying attention to?

“I don’t know!” Mr. Baker said at first. “I mean, my entire career I have done stories that people said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is just going to go everywhere!’ But the reality is the bigger the story, the [harder it is]—and I have many, many friends who work for major news organizations—several of them are here today—and they tell me it’s very difficult to get this stuff out there. Because it’s explosive, and it questions some of the underlying structural values of our country.”

He said corporate interests at mainstream media outlets like The New York Times, CBS and ABC—which are “still run on a bottom-line basis”—prevented reporters there from addressing sensational information of the sort he had uncovered during his research.

Some promising glimmers had already shone through, though, Mr. Baker said. Time magazine had reviewed the book, for one, and word was that The Washington Post was planning to also. “We’re getting things like Huffington Post and those types of places,” he said. “We’re hoping everybody will spread the word.”

Judith Regan, the former publisher who last year accused Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes of conspiring to defame her in order to advance the presidential ambitions of Rudy Giuliani, sat in the back of the room wearing a dark brown fur coat and a large golden necklace. Mr. Baker was going on her radio show the next day, she said. 

Pub Crawl asked Ms. Regan how, if you're sitting on some volatile piece of information that no one else has really documented before, do you convince people not to dismiss you as a lunatic?

“It’s impossible,” Ms. Regan said. “The forces of the corporate-owned media are so powerful that a voice like this is hard to be heard because all they do is marginalize you and demonize you and defame you. The truth is, these are the few people left who do real reporting. It’s very hard to find people who do real investigative reporting anymore, and it’s these lone guys who don’t have any ax to grind, they’re not serving any corporate agenda, they’re not serving anything but their own reporting. They’re very brave and they’re very courageous and they’re very uncelebrated, because the mainstream media will not listen to them. People who are responsible have to help him. They do.”

She added: “The other problem is the big corporations hire people to sit in little rooms in Brooklyn and blog and to interfere with people like Russ. I’m quite familiar with this process. If you’re one little person, it’s you against the world, it’s David and Goliath, and it’s hard.”

Ms. Regan excused herself, explaining that she had to go home and read Mr. Baker’s book in advance of their interview the next day.

Dan Rather, meanwhile, whose controversial 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush’s military service record Mr. Baker’s book all but ratifies, was telling a group of people that even if Mr. Baker’s book got a bad review in The Washington Post, it was better than getting nothing.

“It’s a good book and he’s a nice guy,” Mr. Rather said, turning to Mr. Baker’s agent Andrew Stuart. “But it’s a proverbial third rail.”

Asked a moment later how a reporter like Mr. Baker should go about establishing his credibility among people who might dismiss him out of hand as no more reliable than a 9/11 truther, Mr. Rather said it was a difficult thing.

“Journalism is filled with a lot of decent-intending, wanting-to-do-the-right-thing people,” he said. “You just have to keep constantly asking a version of ‘please read the book.’... You know, fear runs rampant in journalism—I do not except myself in that criticism—and with a subject like this, the fear is if you touch it, you’re gonna get burned, and you may get burned to a crisp.”

The editor Peter Ginna, who acquired Mr. Baker’s book for Bloomsbury, said that what won him over were Mr. Baker’s extensive footnotes and rigorous sourcing.

“I didn’t just take it on faith,” he said. “When [Andrew] brought him to meet with prospective publishers, I spent a fair amount of time grilling him about what the sources were, what he could tell us how about he’d done the research and so forth. I worked at Oxford University Press for 10 years and published several Pulitzer Prize–winning historians, and I have not published any book that was more extensively documented and more impeccably footnoted than this one.”

Mr. Baker, for his part, during a post-reading interview, did not seem overly concerned with his reception.

“My response is, I’m the last guy in the world that anybody could label a conspiracy theorist,” he said. “You know, I have two decades of doing fact-filled stories that have never been contested. Knock on wood, no corrections or lawsuits. My stuff is pretty good! It’s pretty accurate.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Asked to comment, Ms. Regan said in an e-mail that Mr. Wolff's claim is "absurd."

"Wolff is either frighteningly uninformed about everything or simply wants to spin facts in favor of defaming me," Ms. Regan wrote. "One false claim is that I just received my settlement and therefore am 'now emerging.' I received a settlement early this year (as reported in the media at that time) along with a full retraction of [News Corp's] outrageous and false allegations." She added: "I host a radio show at Siriux and XM. If I were in hiding as he claims, would I be hosting a radio show?"

Mr. Wolff also said this morning that it was he who gave Ms. Regan the idea to enter publishing after the two of them graduated from Vassar together as friends in 1975.

"We were friends for years and years... I think I probably deserve some of the dubious credit of getting her into the book business," Mr. Wolff said. "She had had a child, her life was in disarray... My counsel was that she should go into the book business because she wouldn’t have to work that hard and could stay home and come up with a regular life and take care of her child. Then there was the question of, should she become an agent? I can’t quite remember the discussions around this but I was very much involved in that."

"Once again Wolff is wrong," Ms. Regan said. "I have had no contact with him for decades. Now he’s taking credit for getting me into the book business?"

Ms. Regan continued, "I worked 18 hours a day and raised a fine son who is kind, thoughtful of others, dedicated to his family, a world class athlete and has several degrees from MIT."

"I guess she wants in," Mr. Wolff said in an interview just now. He speculated that Ms. Regan was emboldened to return to public life because she has received her $10.75 million dollar settlement from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, whom she sued last November for wrongful termination and defamation.

"She got her settlement, she has this money," Mr. Wolff said. "I'm sure she was keeping quiet because she didn't want to rock the boat on that. Now she's got money in hand, and she's gotta get back in the game."

What Ms. Regan is up to is anyone's guess. Back in November, when she filed her wild lawsuit against News Corp., she resisted reporters asking her to elaborate on her allegations, and has since refused to comment on just about everything, including the unexpected firing of the woman who fired her, former HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman. More recently, she has declined to speak out about her legal wranglings with lawfirm Dreier LLP, except through her assistant.

In the fall, someone posted on her Facebook wall congratulating her on her new job—a message Ms. Regan responded to with something like "Who told you?"—but when Media Mob called her she declined to talk about it except to deny with a laugh the (implausible) rumor that it was at Fox News.

"Apparently she told [Daily News gossip George Rush, who reported Ms. Regan's fury this morning] that she is opening schools in Africa," Mr. Wolff said. "I don't know. A more preposterous idea I can hardly think of."

Speaking by phone from his home shortly after filing this Newser.com column mocking Ms. Regan, Mr. Wolff was interrupted by the sound of animals attacking each other.

"Cats and dogs fighting," he explained.

Ms. Regan has so far not responded to requests for comment.

Mort Zuckerman and charities run by Steven Spielberg and Elie Wiesel were among those ripped off by crooked investor Bernard Madoff. [NY Post]

During her split from John Mayer, reps for Jennifer Aniston were "scouting candidates" to play her boyfriend on the promotional tour for Marley & Me. [P6]

New School faculty are rebelling against university president Bob Kerrey. [Intelligencer]

Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber's second son was born on Saturday. [People]

Exclusive St. Barts hotels are soliciting customers for their usually impossible to get high-season rooms. [Intelligencer]

Nineteen-year-old model Daisy Lowe, who also previously dated Mark Ronson, has reunited with ex-boyfriend Will Cameron. [Page Six Magazine, last item]

According to an e-mail we received this morning from Ms. Regan's assistant, a number of things require clarification. "The Dreier lawsuit has no merit," the e-mail read. "Marc Dreier claimed Regan cheated him. It was Dreier who was attempting to cheat Regan and apparently, many others."

Also: "News Corp once made false claims about Regan. They lost. Marc Dreier will lose too."

Elsewhere in the email, Ms. Regan's assistant addressed Media Mob's characterization of the settlement, which we said allowed both parties to walk away without admitting any guilt.

"News Corp did not walk away without retracting their false and defamatory comments regarding their totally fabricated anti-semitic comment claim," the e-mail read in reference to claims out of News Corp that Ms. Regan was fired for making anti-Semitic remarks to a company lawyer. The notion that it was these remarks that led to the termination was generally treated with skepticism in the publishing community, where the consensus was (and remains) that News Corp. needed Ms. Regan out because of the brutal controversy sparked by If I Did It, the kinda-sorta O.J. Simpson confession that she signed up to publish at HarperCollins.

Ms. Regan—OK, Ms. Regan's assistant—is right to note in her e-mail that the statement News Corp. made following the settlement in January conceded that Ms. Regan "did not say anything that was anti-Semitic in nature, and further believe that Ms. Regan is not anti-Semitic." The statement also said, however, that the parties had reached their settlement "with no admission of liability by any party."

The other thing Ms. Regan wants known is that contrary to the Bloomberg report—which carried Dreier's allegation that they "learned through [Ms. Regan's] new lawyers on Dec. 14 that the firm had been terminated"—she "did not secretly fire" Brian Kerr, the lawyer who prepared her suit against News Corp, but "fired the Dreier law firm FOR CAUSE." (Emphasis theirs.)

Figuring out exactly who those new lawyers were—her relatively longtime associate Bert Fields or Bay Area lawyer Joe Cotchett, whom she hired after firing Dreier—is a bit tricky. According to the Bloomberg report, it was Mr. Fields, not Mr. Cotchett, who represented Ms. Regan in the settlement with News Corp., but it's unclear whether that's based on anything other than the fact that Dreier, in their suit against Ms. Regan, listed Mr. Fields—and not Mr. Cotchett—as the co-defendent.

According to the e-mail from Ms. Regan's office, the case against Mr. Fields "was dismissed" because Dreier's "facts were wrong," which may suggest that Dreier just fingered the wrong man when they filed their suit, having assumed, perhaps, based on Mr. Fields' association with Ms. Regan, that he was the one to go after. Exactly what Mr. Fields' working relationship is with Ms. Regan is hard to pin down, though: Back in November 2007, right after she first went after News Corp., the Los Angeles-based entertainment lawyer told The Observer that he was staying on as her legal counsel even though Dreier had prepared the suit and was representing Ms. Regan in court.